/lit/ - Literature

>>9316584
But of course, the Chinese were massacred in their time by the Japanese during the war (and they did a number on the Koreans too). And this is all stuff JP talks about, the dangers of modernist political experimentation...which might also be called revolutionary gnostic warfare.

It's possible that a lot of this goes back to Hegel, originally, seeing the World Spirit made incarnate as a man on horseback in 1806. The French and the Germans have both been obsessed with Napoleon ever since, the guy they could both agree on. One of the interesting things about romanticism is how (I forget where I read this) that romanticism for the French goes in this direction towards the noble savage of Rousseau (and you can see this referenced, I think, in Baudrillard, Bataille, others) while for the Germans it implies a fantasy of order and a return to kingship, sovereignty, and so on. And in that friction a great deal of thought emerges.

A guy like Deleuze loathes Hegel, and perhaps this is how one can understand why...Deleuze's nomad begins the journey by *departing* from power, by leaving it, by avoiding the inevitable temptation towards despotism. It's actually kind of a wonderful thought to have percolate in your head, to think that power is something that, as desirable as it is, ultimately requires these terrible reasons, manufactures all this repression and projection...the most liberating thing is in a sense to get out from this awful space of power, of being The Subject Supposed To Know - which is, if you ask me, the place where the tortured modern consumer is most of the time, fretting about happiness and given this impossible mission of keeping up with the Joneses.

It was Deleuze who actually got me into reading the Chinese, originally, because he was the guy who 'sploded Lacan to pieces (or maybe just carried on his work in a really novel new way). But I don't really have the temperament to be a true nomad or BwO, I think. I'd prefer to be a riverboat captain or mysterious lighthouse keeper somewhere instead. Far away from all this madness (with wi-fi, however, for shitposting on /lit/, of course).