/lit/ - Literature

>>12632978
>A masquerade?
essentially yes, and a terrible masquerade, because it is a masquerade inseparable from the real (again, a thesis i could actually get behind, if it wasn't predicated on identity politics that are to my mind completely antiquarian).

Butler is smarter than me. she is a highly refined being and an absolute champion of both the best and worst aspects of academia today; i have the same irrational and crude grudges there that i once had against Derrida (and which are unbecoming of a philosopher, or even a degenerate fuckface pseud, like me). this is what i think: the best possible argument for Landian Social Darwinist hell-capital is that it is only defensible if understood as a question of intelligence, and fundamentally *everybody can be educated.* everyone can be *indoctrinated* (or seduced) also, but i would work a little Confucius in there as well: no matter how much of a fucking monkey you are, You Can Be Taught. take this a few steps further and i reveal myself as being something like a highly compromised techno-neo-Augustinian with terrible nightmares.

people can learn things. anyone can learn to do things (and i would quote the Journey of the West here too to make moral points and quietly indoctrinate to my own way of thinking by allegory, if necessary). the worst thing you can do to people is rip their guts out and plunge them into a state of complete despair, which is where many of us presently are. and this is an extraordinarily difficult rabbit-hole to get out of, made only worse by extended readings of Land to solve one's current problems (Marx is dead, wat do?) with even larger ones (Marx lives, wat do?).

Land stuff revealed at least one crucial piece of kryptonite (i will include here the typo 'cryptonite,' for your enjoyment also): language does not so much matter and you cannot deconstruct the dollar dollar bill, y'all. enter the Reactionary; where postmodern non-Ego was, there NRx shall be. and much else. but again, i am a boring centrist at the bottom, and i want people to get along and lose their minds thinking other things instead...it's Kefka Palazzo who says more about the endgame for postmodernity than any other fictional character i can think of, and that is why i am hoping to open up a different pathway...because the Doomsday Clown knows everything there is to know about the slippage from the imaginary to the symbolic and the real...

gotta go, more on this later.

>>12622109
Edgar is indeed a ladies' man. this is part of his personality. and for him this does not spark joy. you are also overlooking the fact that he rigs the coin toss with his brother so that his brother can do what he actually wants to do, which is be free...like all of the characters in the game, each is struggling with nihilism in their own way.

>From his unearned privilege, his sexual rapacity, to his proficiency with “Tools” (hello, Freud), he is the perfect embodiment of toxic male fantasy. He even thinks about RAPING a little girl! On screen! This game is not even hiding it!
i'm starting to understand this now. clearly i am being a killjoy here and pouring cold war on your hysterical need to uncover a conspiracy in the heart of the game.

the game is about war and nihilism, not phallogocentrism. it's about the War of Magi and the repetition of history, the impossibility of reducing Espers to magicite, the dangers of experimental science, and lots of other stuff. you are just reaching like a mofo to turn a lovely banquet into a shitty microwave dinner. the Espers can never be fully integrated into the World of Balance, and attempts to do so are what produce the World of Ruin. we might, instead of immanentizing the eschaton, rather understand that it would be better to let each other be...