/lit/ - Literature

>>10981825
a few more quotes:

>As such, Capitalism is inseparable from Gnosticism—only there is a subtle inversion with respect to the body and the soul, an inversion that is worthy of Foucault. For it is capitalist evil that moves through history like Hegel’s Absolute Geist and imprisons the goodness of the material order; the body is captive to the soul in the production (understood both in terms of economic process and theatrical staging) of commodity values.
And like Hegel’s Geist, the magic of the money fetish (Marx’s language) lies in its power to vanish, “leaving no trace behind”. It erases its own presence by becoming “visible and dazzling to our eyes” like Jean-Luc Marion’s idol that can only reflect the desire and retroject the values projected onto it. Money has not only the “appearance of value,” like other commodities; it is “the form of appearance of the value of commodities”. It participates in a Platonic metaphysics in which its abstraction is consummated by its disappearance.
The power of capitalism, in other words, lies in the omnipresence of an absence that circulates in and through desire and is constitutive of desire—an absence that is at once demonized and adored. What the power of capitalism effects is a trade in bad faith, winning allegiance, through seduction, to the incantatory credo of credit.

>Commodification produces a spectogram or hologram of religion, a bloodless and disembodied “religious cast of mind”: a fantasy of religion, which, like an atmosphere, demands only that we breathe it in. We cannot say the real is enchanted, for there is no place locatable
outside this enchantment. Marx continually depicts the immanent laws of this world in religious metaphors such that his own representations mirror the mirroring activity of all commodity fetishism. He cannot find a place for an alternative social world, materially grounded, because his own writing circulates within and fosters the production of the orders of simulation and simulacrum, the theatre of spectacle. What is produced by this simulation is not simply the religion of commodification, the pop-transcendence of capitalism, but the commodification of religion—the metamorphosis or transubstantiation (Marx’s two favorite words for describing what takes place through commodity-exchange) of those socially and culturally embedded practices of faith into a misty realm. His critique of capitalism, which is simultaneously a critique of religion, is only made possible by taking up a position that mirrors from within the body of religious discourses, turning it into a bourgeois commodity. The communist can announce himself only in and as a capitalist; the atheist can only announce himself in and as one initiated into the mysteries of religion. The immanent circulations of desire only fold back upon themselves in an eternal reoccurrence of the same. This is the order of simulacrum.

>we are entering a profoundly post-secular age.