Clement of Alexandria - Against the Heathen (Kairos?)

 'Well, now, let us say in addition, what inhuman demons, and hostile to the human race, your gods were, not only delighting in the insanity of men, but gloating over human slaughter, - now in the armed contests for superiority in the stadia, and now in the numberless contests for renown in the wars providing for themselves the means of pleasure, they they might be able abundantly to satiate themselves with the murder of human beings...' -Ch. 3

Agamben - Parousia (today)

 ''Parousia: 'the unveiling of this mystery coincides with the manifestation of the inoperativity of the law and with the essential illegitimacy of every power in messianic time. (And by all appearances this is what is happening today under our noses, when the powers of state act openly outside the law. In this sense the anomos [outlaw] does not represent anything but the unveiling of the lawlessness that today defines every constituted power within which State and terrorism form a single system.)' 

 -Giorgio Agamben, Mystery of Evil, pp.33-34, trns. by A. Kotsko; 2017

Carl Schmitt - Criticism of the Rules Based Order and its 'Values'

 "The validity of values is based on settings.  Who is it now who sets the values here?  In Max Weber we find the clearest and to that extent the most honest answers to this question.  According to him it is the human individual, who in full, pure subjective freedom of decisions sets values.  In this way it avoids the absolute value freedom of scientific positivism and sets its free, that is: subjective worldview against scientific positivism.  The purely subjective freedom of value-setting, however, leads to an eternal battle of values and of worldviews, a war of all against all, an eternal bellum omnium contra omnes, in comparison to which the old bellum omnium contra omnes and even the murderous natural condition of the state philosophy of Thomas Hobbes are veritable idylls.  The old gods step out of their graves and battle their old battle further, but disenchanted and - as we must add today - with new means of battle, which are no longer weapons but execrable means of annihilation and procedures of extermination, gruesome products of value-free science and of the industry and technology that they serve.  What for some is the devil, here for some becomes God.  "And thus it proceeds through all orders of life...and namely for all time."  With such gripping expressions of Max Weber one could fill many pages.  It is always values that stoke the battle and keep enmity awake.  That the old gods have become disenchanted and become merely valid values makes the battle ghostly and the fighters dubiously self-righteous.  That is the nightmarish impression that Max Weber's depictions leaves in its wake..."

 

Carl Schmitt, The Tyranny of Values, pp. 29-30; Telos Press, NY, 2018.

Borges takes a jab at the Dewey Decimal system

 from 'John Wilkins' Analytical Language:

 

"...The Bibliographical Institute of Brussels also exercises chaos:  it has parceled the universe into a 1,000 subdivisions, of which number 262 corresponds to the Pope, number 282 to the Roman Catholic Church, number 263 to the Lord's Day, number 268 to Sunday Schools, number 298 to Mormonism, and number 294 to Brahmanism, Buddhism, Shintoism, and Taoism.  Nor does it disdain the employment of heterogeneous subdivisions, for example, number 179: "Cruelty to animals.  Protection of animals.  Dueling and suicide from a moral point of view.  Various vices and defects.  Various virtues and qualities...there is no classification of the universe that is not arbitrary and speculative."

 

 

Benjamin on the Novel vs Storytelling- Information - the novel-information as debased

 From the storyteller:  [this was written in the 1930s, amazing] Every morning, news reaches us, from around the globe.  And yet we lack remarkable stories.  This is due to the fact that no incidents any longer reach us not already permeated with explanations.  In other words: almost nothing occurs to the story's benefit anymore; instead, it all serves information.  In fact, at least half of the heart of storytelling consists in keeping one's tale free of explanations..."

Heidegger - Current Geopolitics?

 "The still hidden truth of Being is withheld from metaphysical humanity.  The laboring animal is left to the giddy whirl of its products so that it may tear itself to pieces and annihilate itself in empty nothingness..."

-Overcoming Metaphysics - 1954