/lit/ - Literature

>>12375353
part of the genius of Christianity is that *you are not allowed to play the role of the victim.* here again Land recognizes the inherent danger of Protestantism: once you get a personal god, you are off to the races. this is not to say that the Catholics weren't capable of all kinds of witch-hunting and witch-burning of their own; certainly they were. Augustine and Calvin are no strangers to state power, and Giordano Bruno is burned at the stake for asking the wrong questions. Copernicus is justifiably afraid of publishing his work, Galileo less so. by the time Nietzsche could proclaim that God was Dead it was only in a world which no longer really cared all that much anyways.

how did we get to postmodernity? through the deconstructions not only of Christianity, but *of Marx* as well. we lose the capacity for economic analysis of our material conditions, and we also lose the capacity for analysis of our *existential* conditions. maybe this is a part of our own growing cognitive abilities; after all, autonomy means the freedom to construct beliefs, and a liberal society necessarily grants to its citizens the maximal degree of freedom for doing so. but patently we are overwhelmed with this freedom today, or simply enslaved to happiness, as if somehow capital itself provides an index of happiness.

we all get sucked into the Other in precisely the ways that, i think, a hermetic tradition would warn you against. it's natural, of course, even understandable; Han calls it the auto-immune deficiency produced by a neoliberal culture. liberate all the affects, dissolve all boundaries and distinctions, and you become very susceptible to viruses (or memes). this irony *is* the default mode of knowing things in a postmodern world, but postmodernity isn't really as skeptical about metanarratives as it would like to believe: just ask Peterson. it turns out that there *is* in fact a new metanarrative, and one that demands absolute fidelity to itself; call it the Cathedral, the Gated Institutional Narrative, whatever. it is the *ontology of apparent differences,* under which lies a deathless Same. the Everyman is not your friend, because the Everyman is in a perilous situation: not knowing what he is doing, but being prohibited from admitting this. or, when he does, he is immediately welcome into a cult of mental illness and perpetual offense, which needs to be permanently cared for and looked after, much as Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor would have suspected.

continental philosophers are often fond of talking about the need to overturn Plato; i'm a little skeptical about this myself. i think it is perhaps those who constantly need to overturn Plato who might be more deserving of an overturning themselves. all that constant revolution does is keep people permanently off-balance, lonely, wandering, desperate and confused; they become atomized, and atomization is a great precursor to mass politics.

(cont'd)