The Neo-Primitive & Anti-Depression (Immediacy & Interpretation Part 3)

Is it surprising that a pill offers the possibility of Anti-Depression in the same way a war does?

1. Rationality & Its Discontents

2. Belief & Its Rationality

3. The Anti-Depression Sinthome & The Neo-Primitive

Rationality & Its Discontents

The rational mind comes against conceptual ballards which plunge it into a depression. Rationality is not the pure euphoric feeling, this everybody knows to a certain extent, & the depictions of the rational are often without affect in popular culture, which in my view severely underestimates the negative affect of rationality. Although there is a thrill & engagement that goes with figuring out & solving problems, rationality meets its own limit when it comes up against the phenomenologial limit of its negative experience of itself. The exprience of the rational has the illusion of a material being, as the subject grapples with truth it loses a sense or significance of its own grappling.

The phenomenological failures & experience rationality along with its insistance on a certain domain of inquiry & a limit to the topics it engages with hints at the pathway for rationality to overcome itself through various means. A belief system emerges which has a truth & a force which it carries via myth, but the essential moment is not the force when discussing immediacy & interpretation, it is the phenomenological quickness & immediacy of it.

Belief & Its Rationality

The rationality of a belief which is not empirically verified or thought over via rationality in order to produce a rational phenomenological effect is in its immediacy. To follow-a-belief the rationality lies not in the belief itself, but immediately with the force of that belief. Despite consciousness’ non-reflection on the belief or the unsoundness of the belief itself, the free-associative validation of immediate belief carries with it the force of itself.

The Absolute Hyperstate, which is to say a determinate, True force of all articulations by humanity, is a rationality which encompasses myth. The rationality of force & power meet the phenomenological demand for immediate flow in the ability for humans to overcome the phenomenological depression of rationality via the immediacy of belief.

The Anti-Depression Sinthome & The Neo-Primitive

We can not help but to create a antithetical concept to rationality, which is to say something which takes truth & belief by terms of feeling. We go into immediacy & we interpret insofar as there is an effect which reduces a phenomenological affect of our existence.

We can look at depression as the Lacanian Sinthome of humanity. Art, love, science, war, all circle the affect rather than the effect of themselves (not to speak of affective effects). Is it surprising that a pill offers the possibility of Anti-Depression in the same way a war does? The sinthome is not something which can be fully removed from our psychology. There is this idea that we must somehow not be in pain, that we must somehow not be sad.

The antithesis is that we “accept our feelings,” but if we were to truely accept our feelings we would not need the trick of rationality to describe the good feeling as a bad feeling. Maybe this truck can reduce the bad feeling, but none-the-less the force of the Idea which is Anti-Depression organizes our actions around it.

Via Rationality’s mediation of pleasure it comes up eventually against its own limit. Anti-Depression takes the form of pleasure seeking as well as pleasure critiquing, as discussed in the last part of this theories. Rationality creates critical structures which mediate pleasure, & thus it mediates not just happiness, but a method of Anti-Depression.

The immediate beliefs & interpretive rational methods all engage with their incomplete Idea, which is the Idea of Anti-Depression. The belief in belief itself is already a difficult trick for the rational mind to pull, since it is a Believing Subjectivity that the Rational Mind instinctively rejects as primitive. It is through the following of the primitive however that gives a clue to the possibility of following beliefs.

All throughout culture, spectres of Neo-Primitive beliefs emerge which seem to be totally divorced from any sort of rational engagement with ethics, morals, & science. The rational mind instictively uses this as a clue to be Non-Primitive, or even Hypertechnological. This is due to a belief which is a disgust in the non-rational, non-intelligent, the sort that would lead Hegel to describe the unthinking stars as “sky leprecy.”

Could we not follow the beliefs of the stars? It is marked with rationality & non-belief. The Instinctual rejection of Astrology by the rational mind is an instinctual non-belief in Neo-Primitivism. Neo-Primitivism is not however, the belief in astrology itself, but if one was to study it, it is the ability to “follow a belief” enough to not simply reject it due to its non-rational or non-scientific character. This is in fact necessary in order to grapple with the depressive affects of rationality itself.

The rational mind rationally engages with the irrational, & the Neo-Primitives emerge. One can think scientifically as well as put down science & follow instinctual or immediate belief. Spectres of Neo-Primitivism is everywhere. You have your cave-life. It is the cave experience & the cave beliefs which the depressive affect of rationality still has the tendency to haunt.

The Neo-Primitive emerges as an antithesis to the hypertechnological-rational. The spectres of possibility of technology meet primitivization in the form of immediate beliefs about what it may do. It may or may not be rationally informed, but the importance is that rationality & belief equally pull the subject into the form of The Neo-Primitive.

Will the intelligent Neo-Primitive die by Rationality, will the superstitious Neo-Primitive die by Ignorance? Will there emerge a Neo-Primitive who understands the dialectical nature of Rationality & Belief, who somehow addresses the Eternal Sinthome of Anti-Depression successfully? This is still to be seen.