/lit/ - Literature

>>9779842
i'd like to share another thought, just to see if it's interesting. it has to do with memes & originality.

so on the one hand we have *metaphysics* and on the other we have *society.* now in polite society this one rule holds: I is an Other. in a primitive society (or among the very crude) this has not yet manifested.

but here's where things get interesting. note how much Society
>yes, with a capital letter, because reasons
has this preoccupation with originality. how much heartbreak is there over the failure of a revolution? that was supposed to be it, the Big Alternative to Liberalism - which is admittedly boring - and you can still see it everywhere in the west, where the ghost of the revolution is now intended to continue indefinitely as the fanatical desire for Total Equality. >but i don't want to just talk about boring /pol/ stuff

what i'm interested in is if, if the cultural situation well and truly has become a kind of Empire that this requires us to consider these ideas of *originality* and *copying* in kind of new ways. *guilt* for instance is a *very subtle form of seduction.* it's not even a willing form, it's realizing that were you to look closely at it you might draw a conclusion you don't want to draw: that if I is an Other, then perhaps the problem is that *that I am not worthy of that Other* or *that Other is not worthy of me.* either way this is a Real Problem for ironic postmodernity. which is to say, the real. only the ironic passes for the real today. serious aesthetic *discontent* with things monkeys up the works.
>we know how to be French, and we know how to be German, but we still don't *really* know how to be Greek.
>or japanese

this kind of stuff is why i get so tangled up, because mimetics & aesthetics *really skews with my sense of Self and Other and Society.*

i didn't even talk about my issues w/plagiarism or intellectual property. it's basic: we're still living with the fallout of not having an alternative to Empire - that is, revolution - and which forces normies to confront the fact that *the fake is all we have now.*
>and has to become the Real again

there is a stoic ref in deleuze: 'become worthy of that which happens to you.' different from how baudrillard stoicizes: become fatal, indifferent. that's wrong, i think. you can't really be indifferent and mean it. you can only be worthy or unworthy *of your own sentiments*, and these admit no excuses. not in this time, when we have all of these books.
>or you can just read badiou and go full maopill

so perhaps it is the case that people are on the one hand *required to set an example* and yet, on the other, knowing that any example worth setting is the one that can't be followed.

if the history of civilization doesn't turn out to be the history of aesthetics in the end i'll eat my hat. and you're right, true beauty *is* horrifying to confirmed memers. beautiful things, besides being beautiful, can also remind you of how horrible you are.

>tfw you wonder if the history of aesthetics is the history of civilization