/lit/ - Literature

>>12451720
to continue this: part of what makes Evil what it is is that it is often the site of an experiment, a place of chaos. this is why we are so fascinated by it, why someone like Judge Holden or Anton Chigurh absolutely mesmerizes us: we are absolutely captivated by the sense of a truth or a domain of reality massively in excess of our own. the Outside, the Darkness, is always a space of affirmation - this is one of the powerful lessons that continental theory can teach you. things in the darkness *like* things, they are all desires, and those desires indicate something like the truth. such is the affirmative power of those realms that Deleuze goes to, and Land also, in his way. Cthulhu would not be what he is if he hated himself. the squid-headed god is frequently *muscular,* and libidinal pleasure is for realsies. dark stuff.

it has taken me a while, however, to realize that not everything which is affirmative is necessarily good. there is as much affirmation in the desire to *resist* evil also. even the grinning Dragonlords of Dragon Quest - hardly a Deleuzian text - seem to indicate the same things. the Darkness may be a lot of things, but one thing that it doesn't lack for us Fun, or a zest for life. and these things are, no doubt, what grounds the Freudo-Marxist critique, and perhaps today is what makes the charge of racism or misogyny so powerful: underneath your cynicism you love it, don't you. you love this world that i hate. and also what makes it all so horribly recursive - that is, that replacing one form of moralism with another. enter the doomed game of rock-scissors-paper that is politics and its discontents.

Evil is fruitful, even self-generating. it doesn't hate the world so much that it cannot find some utility in it, and the ultimate utility is pleasure itself. it *feels good* to experiment, to be the BwO. Deleuze was wholly beyond good and evil like that. Baudrillard also, who recognized that the Good was just as hegemonic as that which it purportedly opposed, and that the trap for the Good was an inability to separate itself from its own constructs and fictions, particularly those that, the more they presented themselves as critique, the more they indicated a fidelity to transcendental ideas more real than they could imagine. it isn't that Woke Justice is a caricature of actual justice - rather, it may be the *essence of justice itself.* and that is exactly why people seem to prefer states of calamity, emergency, and crisis - even ones that oppress them. they want to be oppressed. they don't know what to do with freedom.

but the gaze of the hero, too, can be affirmative; it's just not the affirmation of chaos. the tightening of the brows, or the look of stoic resolve parallels the smirk of the dragon. the dragon knows something about Life that the hero also knows, no question. the problem for the theorists, i think, lies mostly in having fallen too much in love with affirmation.