How to Share Ideas
Beware of the naked man who offers you his shirt!
Love is giving something you don't have to someone who doesn't want it (Jacques Lacan)
Half a year isn't really a period of time that should be celebrated. But then again: it's strange how a project can take on its own momentum. The original plan of Ex nihilo wasn't much more than a personal re-socialization attempt, having the conviction that I should return to the world after taking a sabbatical for a few years of absorption in a major writing project.
And because I’d established a trusting working relationship with Hopkins Stanley, this thought suddenly hung in the air: Why not a blog? A platform to address the questions of a present rudely awakening from its slumber by the war. And why not do it bilingually so it’d transcend the limitations of space and time, right from the start? And because its obvious the Internet also transcends the written word (with graphics, sound, and moving images), something came into play that could be seen as medial – not as collateral damage – but rather as collateral fortune: informed by the fact everyone, having been trained by Zoom and its ilk, is now immersed in a form of medial cosmopolitanism. This made writing to various intellectuals easy (the ones whose work we'd previously only consumed by reading) to arrange a conversation. What happened next was very much what I’d hoped for. These conversations were a wonderful enrichment – in particular, they touched intellectual heights that defy any superficial observation. And within the blink of an eye, we found ourselves in these stimulating conversations about Carl Schmitt and his relationship to electricity, about the connection between de-growth and the sale of indulgences, and the pedo-armies of the 4Chan community – in short, discussing and debating questions so far removed from mainstream conversations that they don't appear in (or are obscured by) our media-driven world. We saw it was precisely these seemingly disparate territories suddenly allowing for breakthroughs in thought – the discovery of connections where the media only assumed narrowed-down subject matters. In this sense, the weekly conversations since last December were our biggest surprise – they are where the blog (which bears my name) socialized itself and became a shared affair. Personally, the outings seem like a kind of ideal television program – a look at the world, where you’re not dealing with fantasies of any kind, but with what is: the Field of the Real. And for that, we'd like to express our sincere thanks to all those involved.
It was precisely along this path that Hopkins and I set out on with Ex nihilo – the same path which we’ll continue its evolution over the next few months. Some conversations are already in the can, others are scheduled, and as before, some will be purely acoustic podcasts, others will be videos – in any case, our goal is shedding new light on those particular, hitherto relatively underdeveloped portions and details of the world. The ratio of German and English conversations will become more balanced than before – and since the statistics show our audience now comes from more than twenty countries, we plan to start transcribing the German conversations into English.
And this is where you, dear readers, listeners, and viewers, come in. Because from your letters, we can definitely tell you appreciate this form of conversation we've established on our platform. One reason may be how the attention economy’s logic has dragged our general discourse into a downward spiral – with the consequences of people’s outrage about everything imaginable while simultaneously losing sight of the big picture. This picture, springing from nothingness – or more precisely: from human imagination – will continue to occupy us in the following days. And because our conversations don't become mired or obscured by daily politics, Ex nihilo also represents something like a thesaurus – an album we'll still be able to leaf through and continue finding insight in the coming years.
In any case, we’re happy that you like it and find some utility in our Ex nihilo (even if we can't escape the Burckhardtian leitmotiv, the Spirit of the Machine). And if you find something you'd like to recommend to your friends and acquaintances, all you have to do is press this little button that says:
