/lit/ - Literature

Stop thinking

>Intelligence means choosing-between (inter-legere). It is not entirely free in so far as it is caught in a between, which depends on the system in operation. Intelligence has no access to outside, because it makes a choice between options in a system. Therefore, intelligence does not really exercise free choice: it can only select among the offerings the system affords. Intelligence follows the logic of a system. It is system-immanent. A given system defines a given intelligence. Accordingly, intelligence has no access to what is wholly Other. It inhabits a horizontal plane. In contrast, the idiot has contact with the vertical dimension inasmuch as he takes leave of the prevailing system – that is, abandons intelligence.

>>12444277
the Death of God is one thing; what makes the Age of Confusion what it is is that the go-to substitutes - Marx and Nietzsche - are also failing today. and they all fail because of the nature of the market.

that Capitalism Always Wins was the brutal truth of several generations of continental theorists, who wound up beating their heads against the wall over this for decades. activists today will make a big deal over Racism as power/privilege, but this is a turn in the screw: it's capitalism that lies underneath it. the recent division of the world into Good Wokeness and Bad Whiteness only shows that by 2019 Capital may have finally engineered itself a trap that it itself cannot escape from. as corporations pursue Woke Capital, they find themselves of necessity beholden to an illusion that is deleterious to their own product. by throwing its hat into the ring - a ring formerly occupied by theorists - Gillette has now alienated an enormous part of its consumer base, by going directly to the core: buy our razors and smash the patriarchy. the contemporary furor over Whiteness is exactly the same dis-ease that critics were feeling about capital in the 1980s and 1990s, when they were trying to rescue some fragment of authentic Marx (or authentic Freud, or authentic Nietzsche) from being completely colonized by irony. today, what was once the domain of irony - the playful joke that sold you the product, as a substitute for the genuine angst you were feeling about the world, and which only set you up for a lifetime of increasing dependency on substitutes and jokes - has become the domain of unironic politics, and therein lies the tragicomic nature of the whole thing. irony has become wed to sincerity, in its continual drive to keep its ownership of reality, which was always thoroughly materialistic. the Market would take care of your happiness, and for the rest, you were on your own.

the twist in the plot is that today *nobody can feel happy* anymore, because of the nature of guilt. this is what makes racism the absolute chasm that it is: it is a judgment on history, a judgment on time. *everything encounters everything else at the level of the market,* everybody's money is tangled up with everyone else's. and if some of my money is dirty, then some of yours is too. the same holds for the moral sentiments.

it's why Han likens all of this to an auto-immune deficiency. collapsing all the borders and distinctions, and plunging full-bore into the world of immanence and the affects makes everyone *highly susceptible to viruses.* that virus today is *guilt.* hence the virtue-signaling: nobody is ever really clean, nobody is ever really innocent. but the guilt cannot be wholly exonerated, and certainly cannot be exonerated by a fucking advertising campaign.

>>11924104
>who is this girardfag?
me

>>11922865
why tho? if you like the continentals - hegel, heidegger, lacan, all of them - hey, you get another one. it's not like he's wrong to write a book about Burnout. burnout is for real. facebook is silly and rots brains. neoliberalism is a mess. what's the problem? and if you don't like continentals, that's fine too, he's basically spent fifty years trying to hide from everyone in Germany anyways, but he left a paper trail of teeny little essays and now we found him.

anyways, i didn't create the thread but i still support han-shilling. and besides, he's very photogenic.

What do you think of him?

byung chul han