/lit/ - Literature

>>14533834
>yikes
ok pseud

Explain Sloterdijk to me (or I'll fucking kill you or w/e)

>>12652063
you can't really go wrong with Sloterdijk, he's never written a bad book. personal favorites:

>Spheres
>You Have To Change Your Life
>Critique of Cynical Reason

Philosophical Temperaments is good, Art of Philosophy, all of it. really tho if you can slug through CCR you'll see why he's a star. he likes Deleuze, Zizek fears him, Baudrillard gives him a shout-out in Intelligence of Evil iirc. he's a pro, just read whatever by him. great authors are like that, they're like chefs: whatever they make is going to be fucking good.

>>12157820

>>11121398
theory should not be arcane or the privileged grazing fields of a cultural elite. i am for the democratization of theory in that sense. the problem may indeed be that the system is as bloated and worldly as the church once was.

anyways. here's that quote:

>A renewed knowledge of Marx does not have the purpose of defiantly disseminating once again a compromised classic of social criticism in a time removed from critique. Rather, reconstructing the Marxist inspirations means entering into the ghostly history of concepts which - as a force that has become a state, a spirit that has become technique, and as all-intertwining money - are sucking at the life of individuals more than ever before.

>Without a doubt, Marx’s future theoretical fame will be linked to his achievements as the conjurer of dead labor. The core of his critique of political economy is necromancy: as the hero who descends to the realm of the dead to contend with the shadows of values, Marx remains uncannily relevant also for the present. The undead - which walks among humans as the value of money and which, as a laughing communicator, strips the living of time and souls- rules today almost without any pretexts over the advanced societies. Work, communication, art and love belong here entirely to the endgame of money. These form the substance of contemporary media and experiential time. And because money requires time for its utilization, so-called great history is also continuing in some eerie way; it is a game that is always played for extra time.

>Yet such history is no longer the conversation of the living with the dead about the goodness of the world, but the ever more thorough perversion of the living by the economized spectre. The money soul peers ever more undisguised out of the human subjectivity of our time: a society of bought buyers and of prostituted prostitutes is making a place for itself in globalized market conditions. Classical liberal laissez-faire is becoming explicit as the postmodern sucking and letting oneself be sucked. Telecommunication is increasingly difficult to separate from tele-vampirism. Tele-viewers and tele-suckers draw from a liquefied world which hardly still knows what a resistant or autonomous life might be. Is not possible that a time is coming when those who do not wish to speak of vampirism should also be silent about philosophy? If that is the case, it would most definitely be the time of Marx’s second chance.

i am not a marxist, and neither is sloterdijk. it's good to understand the theory but not to have the theory make decisions for us. i have mixed feelings about hegel, although who knows? maybe he anticipated everything in the end. could very well be.

burnout is for real and its causes are not mysterious. nor are the consequences. we only have culture to look at for these things, but excess criticalism corrodes its object, like schliemann plundering troy. we need a kind of ecological sensibility about this.