Verbatim quote · from the corpus

“(Has any philosophy or human science tried to get to the bottom of this line of questioning, which reduces any other line if inquiry to near irrelevance—which I say at the risk of arousing resentment, because nothing can be/seem more unfair than having one’s central concerns minimized.) When is resentment energizing and when paralyzing? Our recourse must be to learn to identify traces of resentment in the marks it leaves on language. Here’s the hypothesis I’d like to work out—the linguistic form of resentment is the comparison. To compare things is to reduce them to common measure and eliminate their uniqueness as signs and things—it is to encourage others to find more “points” of comparison in order to further reduce them. This line of thinking has some debts to Nietzsche and to Evola’s “reign of quantity.” But it’s an originary, not merely modern, phenomenon, and therefore shares terrain with a kind of homage to the center. If we strive to reduce things to a common measure it is because of our mimetic realization that we have been reduced to a common measure with all sharing our space and its objects of desire and its center, and so we try to take over the equalization to which we have been subjected and control it.”

— Adam Katz, Originary Hypothesis as Mobius Strip · Oct 24, 2021 · Bouvard Substack