/lit/ - Literature

>>12441808
>>12441801
>reminder that Kafka is peak cybernetics
you'll find no argument from me on that one. Kafka was ungodly brilliant.

even D&G (Kafka fans also) never let go of Marx. for Deleuze Marx always ranks behind Spinoza, Bergson and Nietzsche; the Marxist influence on his work comes mainly through Guattari. Landian right-Marxism is as paradoxical, and powerful, a process as Foucault's invention of Left Nietzscheanism. and we can probably say that they drive each other also, in a sense; Land would not exist if Foucault was not essentially a hegemon in his own right. it's just that it seems *anybody* can be a hegemon for the left; hegemony for them is everything, and nothing at all exists before or after there is one. hence paradoxes of race: everything is White Supremacy, but any attempt to break that bind results in Cultural Appropriation. all that remains of deconstruction today is the infinite self-perpetuation of the very binaries Derrida et al sought out to undermine. but mostly, it proceeds from reading everything through the lens of critical theory, which Kafka - like Dostoevsky, or Melville - stubbornly resists. and D&G were fans of both of Kafka and Melville, iirc. it is objectively impossible to find a flaw in Kafka, you can praise him to the rafters.

it is leaving behind Marx that is really hard, because he *isn't wrong.* he is no more wrong than Nietzsche or Freud, the other great masters. i do think the Exit from Kefka's crumbling tower - metaphorically speaking - leads through Heidegger, but in my own experience that was what led me to Land, and you can see how that has gone. only recently Land has started to make nice with Heidegger again, tho in his own particular way. and the whole idea of shilling hard for Cosmotech is to find something in life other than Nick Land's Wild Ride.

there are a few things. Whitehead is one, and the Tao, or the Buddha. but if you still want politics - or are just terminally masochistic - Unironic Christianity seems to me a serious contender. because if Marx is Dead, Christianity can ruin my whole day just as much as Fanged Noumena. Christianity is a fucking horrible religion, because it is predicated on loving this fucking nightmare unconditionally, no excuses: no cynicism, no hate, no utopia, no vengeance, no reciprocity, no getbacks, and no escape. now there's an apocalyptic sensibility for you. what lunatic would sign up for that? who worships a crucified god? and yet it also seems like such a sane thing to do, sometimes. Christianity has had a special relationship with politics since its inception, and its politics were never its own. it looks foolish on crusade - for religious war, fascism has what you need; and for War Is Peace, communism. or any form of totalitarianism. Christianity disappoints and is disappointed, perhaps like Confucius, always sighing for the lost Way.

(cont'd)

Hegel is working out, on the metaphysical level, the theory of evolution before Darwin. is this not something? a couple of decades later, Nietzsche gives us a pretty interesting perspective on the psychology of evolution. and smack-dab in the middle of it is Marx, who is threading the needle between Hegel's metaphysical idealism and Nietzsche's very different idealism.

we take evolution for granted today, but i don't think it was always so. Leibnizian optimism is a pretty good argument for Baroque statism. and Landian acceleration is a well-deserved nudge in the ribs about the nature of evolution *in capitalism* - that is to say, capital means nothing if it does not mean machines, and machines mean nothing (from the ultra-libertarian perspective) if not algorithms, artificial intelligence, and ultimately Bitcoin as bootloader for the future. trustless economics and Kantian transcendental philosophy threads the needle between Hegel and Marx in a way that very few others are seeing, but this is why Uncle Nick is who he is.

now the question of *evolution in metaphysics* was a very different one for these madlads, as it would have been for both Whitehead and Spinoza. evolution is a tricky concept, because it involves asking ourselves about the nature of *progress.* obviously today the political movements that identify themselves a progressive have a powerfully conservative core at their centre, but the same is true for the other side: r/acc is socially conservative, but - at least according to the view from Neo-China - capitalism and no other thing is what is actually advancing the cause of the future. it's often hard to tell whether Land is in some secret way still committed to leftism or not; it really doesn't matter, because all of the interesting questions only become possibilities once we stop trying to shoehorn them into political left/right divides
>says the guy who is fucking constantly shoehorning things into left/right divides
>well yes inner self i know i fucking do this but there is no other way to do this sometimes

more recently Uncle Nick seems to be championing Social Darwinism pretty hard; when you read the rest of his stuff you can understand why this is so. my sense is that D&G would probably have been much more ambivalent about the whole thing, and it's part of what makes their own philosophy counter-intuitive: they were Marxists, but they weren't Hegelian Marxists, and they weren't Freudo-Marxists either. they were Spinozan Marxists, and Deleuze's rhizome is nearer to cosmological anarchism than anything. which is, in conditions of inescapable authoritarianism from both extremes, not exactly a bad look.

Negarestani matters too, esp if you like the idea of Landian darkness w/o going full r/acc.

>>12218264
ty anon

>>12218270
>You cannot have Marx's economics because they fail so what's left?
i can have Marx's economics and i do. so did these madlads, devotees to the end. what i think is probably necessary is to recognize parallel processes: where Marxist theory fails is when we start trying to apply the labor theory of value to symbolic exchanges, or those in the cases of pure financial speculation on itself, which is what brings is to the exciting world of postmodernity (colloquially known as the Wild Ride). that things are transformed by a value-generating process is not far removed from Marx, it's just that - as Baudrillard for one showed - it becomes an increasingly tortuous exercise when applied to the psychic or figurative domains, and moreso once you start automating trades via algorithms over the internet, or with cryptocurrencies, and so on.

Uncle Nick is who he is because he has basically sacrified himself on a thousand altars trying to puzzle out these dilemmas, and they remain thoroughly puzzling. he's unique for having tested the waters at both ends of the spectrum, ultra-left and then ultra-right, and now settling perhaps into his Final Form, as Sino-Kantian futurist. but Marx is the OG of all of these things and a venerable old warhorse of critique. let it not be forgotten that Deleuze's last book was to be entitled The Grandeur of Marx. clearly there was still more in that bucket for him as well.

when it comes to theory of capital today i roll hard with Uncle Nick, and if he thinks that Mises is the way to go i will do the reading there. seems worth mentioning also that if there is anyone alive who actually has found a constructive and interesting workaround for Marx it is Land himself, who has had to go to the ends of creation and back to do so. Marx cannot be dismissed, and it is to Land's enduring fame that a sensible Right Marxist critical project may also be compatible with a Kantianian updated for the 21C. but this i think is how things go: you advance the plot not by proving anyone wrong, but by proving large numbers of people right

also i cannot tell if this entire post was composed of spicy meme metalanguage or not. i think it is. better go ahead and press post anyways