/lit/ - Literature

>>12058969
>i guess this is irrelevant but can i ask roughly how old you are and how long you've been on the Wild Ride?
kek, i've always dreaded these questions. details about the life of girardfag are sketchy and shall ever remain so. put it this way: i'm slightly above the median age for the melanesian tap-dancing forum, and yet clearly not so far above it so as to not have a whale of a time memeing it up here. i was formerly a wee red fish that lived in a grotto and i now identify as a disco ball. beyond this the rest is shrouded in a deep mystery, and may it ever be so.

as for the Wild Ride, which is my muse, basically, as long as i've been conscious in an adult sense. i started posting on /lit/ in 2016, and i had had an express interest in continental philosophy for maybe 3-4 years prior to that. i've always been very much into books, but the Philosophy Explosion kicked off a few years prior to that, mostly by finally getting to know Heidegger, then Land, and then RG the Don, for whom i take my namefag handle. i expect that i will probably be on the Wild Ride for a long time yet to come.

>moreover, is Mackay really a good place to start or does it assume prior knowlege?
>how the fuck do you begin
for /acc stuff Mackay is pretty good. for phil stuff, i started with the Stoics, then Nietzsche & JB. after them Heidegger. before them i read a lot of history. i'm quite fond of three books in particular:

>The Passion of the Western Mind/Tarnas
>From Dawn to Decadence/Barzun
>Heidegger's Encounter with Modernity/Zimmerman

and maybe Carse's Finite and Infinite Games also. for an absolute beginner, you can do worse than those. then afterwards just read what you like and what you are into.

>how the fuck do you begin. im like 10 sentences in and i have like 25 tabs up, every tab i open opens more tabs like a cyberhydra, t his huge web of information that i cant get through
it is not called the Wild Ride for nothing. it's Black Hole Surfing. you read House of Leaves? it's House of Leaves. the wrong way to approach it is like Molyneux, constantly pivoting to look good for the cameras. this does not work! it does not work. the right way is to "Enjoy," in its most Lacanian sense possible.

>like when you said "politics of recognition" i googled that to find some essay with 8000+ cites that didnt definite recognition only to find a massive page on it with various definitions. or the Other, or something
yup. McLuhan called it Gutenberg Galaxy for good reason. Virilio also - it's not an Information Superhighway, it's a fucking Information Bomb. again, House of Leaves. a light touch is kind of required, altho - paradoxically - it's hard to have a light touch on the 20C, which was absolute hell about eight ways from Sunday. the best advice is to *just read what you like.* the philosophy has to *scratch where it itches* or there is no point. you need the butterflies in your stomach to tell you what the right answers are, imho. there is no other way.

gonna have to retire my erstwhile little red fish avatar as well.