Name: Surplus-Enjoyment
ISBN: 9781350409392

Surplus-Enjoyment

"Slavoj Žižek takes on the Hegelian notion of "verkehrte Welt" (the world turned upside down) and considers it the perfect concept for our current predicament. An example of this kind of topsy-turvydom is when you have precise, carefully laid plans and it implodes at the last minute leaving everyone running around in chaos. It encapsulates the basic reversal in a Hegelian dialectical process in which even the best-laid plans turn into their opposite -- a dream of freedom into terror, morality into hypocrisy, excessive wealth into poverty for the majority. And is the Covid epidemic not the latest case of such a reversal - all our knowledge of and domination over nature made us helpless victims of life at its most stupid, a simple replicating mechanism of a virus? So how do we use philosophy to combat the chaos of an upside down world, one gone wrong and turned into its opposite? The reaction of most philosophers would be that reason and the laws of nature shall prevail and the world will come into balance again. But what if unexpected reversals is what the world amounts to and there is no reason or balance or equilibrium? Do we need to accept the fact that nature follows its own path, including cosmic catastrophes, with total indifference towards human history? Slavoj Žižek posits a philosophy of reversals which disrupts the execution of even the best projects.

What Hacker News says

zingababbaOct 2023

Some recent ones I've really enjoyed: The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind - Julian Jaynes; And: Phenomenology of the End - Franco Berardi; The True Believer - Eric Hoffer; I See Satan Fall Like Lightning - Rene Girard; Surplus Enjoyment - Slavoy Zizek; Dionysus, Christ, and the Death of God - Giuseppe Fornari

Phenomenology of the End in particular blew my mind.

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bsnnkvNov 2022

Thanks for leaving such a thoughtful comment! I'll do my best to reply to specific parts:

> With first-class paragraphs, how do you position yourself in relation to Obsidian and Roam?

I don't use or see the utility of tools like this personally; they are in my mind a great example of Žižek's take on Lacanian "surplus enjoyment".

I imagine some people will nevertheless want to take things they save to Notado and export them to Obsidian, Roam, Notion etc., and I have built out incremental export APIs for people who have this particular use case.

> Looking at that example, is it possible to add comments to the quotes?

No, this is an anti-feature in my opinion for the same reason I mentioned above. People who want this would be better served using Notado as a unified content ingestion engine (comments, article highlights, kindle highlights etc.) and redirecting to the tool of their choice; anything from org-mode to Roam.

Commenting on content is such a difficult thing to get right and so many people have their own deeply ingrained ways and expectations around this that I believe it's best to delegate to the end user.

> I am looking for a timeless service where I can share a bookmark with others and have them add their comments, preferably openly with ActivityPub

I generally like having these conversations in real-time as much as possible, but I think there is a great idea somewhere in here. Let me chew on this for a bit.

> It would be nice to discover people with the same interests and their links about the same topic.

This is what Notado Feeds are intended for; I would love for it to catch on by people including links to their Feeds home in their bios on Mastodon, Twitter, Github etc. (this is what I do!)

I'm also looking at creating a hub to improve the discoverability of user-curated topic feeds, searching by tags, showing the most popular feeds by number of RSS hits etc.

> Do you have plans to extend kulli.sh to include Twitter and other social networks

Twitter was never really on the cards because it's such a developer-hostile platform to work and integrate with, and given its ongoing implosion this is even less likely to happen. I'm interested in somehow trying to include Mastodon (or specific Mastodon instances maybe?) in the future, but that's about all that's on my radar for the immediate future.

> The difficulty of ranking a huge amount of comments seems to be accessible with the history of good comments from notado.app.

This is a really cool idea; I would love to be able to even highlight or filter comments on a link from users whose comments I have previously saved on my Notado account on Kullish!

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