/lit/ - Literature

>>12426556
Landian capital - as teleoplexy - turns Marx into a self-referential cybernetic feedback loop. true, Hegel gets here first. Hegel is the first great cybernetic thinker, and an idea posting its own recurrence eventually winds up on God’s doorstep. Nietzsche came to similar conclusions, with the Eternal Recurrence: it is in many ways the same thing, theorized from two different perspectives - in the case of Hegel, it is God moving over the face of the waters, as history; with Nietzsche, the explosive recurrrence of Dionysus. Deleuze steps out of the system altogether, and dials it back to Spinoza: the great Cosmic moment, one event without beginning or end.

Land is neither a Hegelian, nor a Nietzschean, nor a Spinozist. in many ways, he’s like techno-Calvin, and he is obsessively fixated on the question of *defection,* that is to say, of *lies.* being able to write fictions, to prefer one story instead of another, is a serious question for him. to me, Kefka anticipates a lot of this. Kefka’s conclusion is not all that surprising: what should i sacrifice to? these are things that tormented Heidegger also, in thinking through the consequences of Nietzsche’s ideas: if everything can be sacrificed to Art, what then is Art itself beholden to? when he realized the answer was, *absolutely nothing,* he realized that Nietzsche really represented something epochal in Western metaphysics.

Kefka wins, in the end, because he is *beyond redemption.* but that is a feature, and not a bug, in a world of differences. he is a symbol of the unbearable reality: that an Infinite jest is an abomination. immediately follows the hysterical question: *so what else, then?* what else, beyond laughter? what else, beyond cynicism? what else? in the Doomsday Clown is a sphinx for which there is no cure. Wukong was fortunate to have the Buddha; if we are looking to Nietzsche for a similar redemption, this is what we have to tangle with. the endgame of postmodernity, or of speculative capital, strike me as being disasters inseparable from the truth of our condition: this desolation is our own.

but that's exactly what has to be confronted. wishing away the World of Ruin is tantamount to repeating it. the World of Balance is gone; postmodernity is trapped in the past. you can see why, if desolation is all there is. but the desolation is no accident. the desolation is part of the story. neither the politics nor the critique will save.

this is all a lot of madness, even more disjointed than usual. it tells me that i'm still not satisfied with this understanding, but that's fine. the meaning of FF6 is no less inexhaustible than Shakespeare, to my mind. i struggle to articulate a lot of it but it actually reminds me that the iceberg goes much deeper yet.