/lit/ - Literature

this was my acceleration reading list, there's more links in the OP of those threads to peruse.

>>/lit/thread/S11823861#p11835482

>>11882346
again, double-shame for this one. i know it wasn't the sun king who was executed.

>>11882326
fundamentally the issue is about language and its capacity of *bending reality to our will.* this is an issue that haunted heidegger because he thought nietzsche had completed metaphysics in getting to this point.

so here we are, near a century since B&T, and confronted with this double whammy: on the one hand, a technological system so powerful that it can create illusions and simulations not only indistinguishable from reality, but which actually create reality itself. and this is twinned to a second question, which is the culture of postmodernity, which has within it no internal checks or balances on how far the artistic impulse can go or ought to go. deleuze, who takes nietzsche in a different direction, obviously argues that any such attempt to check this process is only so much oedipal nostalgia. but these are two philosophers who are both talking about life after a linguistic (or semiotic) turn. and with land ofc you get a guy saying, not only is capital not even remotely what you think it is, the horizons of it massively exceed human desires. so go on, please talking, the machines love the raw intel...

heidegger is complicated because his own version of Revolt Against the Modern World became in the end wrapped up once and forever with the history of german nazism. but this to me is a shame, because heidegger's theory of language - his philosophy in general - only becomes more and more prescient with each year, as we continue to explore these increasingly bizarre and extreme forms of cultural life divorced from anything like reality. and you can see, when you watch the news, that people turn in the end back ever more fiercely *towards* master-signifiers, in order to bind reality again and give it a core or central principle. but in the end it's all just so much rage and bewilderment and confusion. for me at least heidegger helped me to understand some of these things, and at least to pay a little bit closer attention to my own constant needs to force reality to conform to language and vice versa. i've become, i hope, a slightly better listener since then.
>sometimes

nietzsche is a true rock star and one of the great ethical teachers of humanity since the greeks. but his conclusions unsettled heidegger and they unsettle me also.

>>11882427
aestheticizing violence in a tomb hides the essential violence necessary for mythopoetic political legitimation. political-religious metanarratives usually mean somebody's face had to get smashed in at some point, which is a ugly and brutal truth about state politics. the core of political unity is that violence, but the violence is unbearable. but scapegoating creates communal unity, which is good for organizing people in states of crisis. the enemy, however, can never be exterminated fully or completely. and so a monument is erected in place which tells the glorious part of the story.

>>11206959
>and that's why the Law was the Law, they still retained a memory of the Enemy's face, but the Law became so effective it lost its lustre simultaneously with our being able to drown out Chaos at the gates. and now Chaos is coming back, or: Chaos has appropriated the Law to itself as the runaway anti-telos of the machine.

i like this too, btw, a lot. that's the thing about Chaos - it's *vivifying.* the Law runs in spirals in this way. but this was deleuze's point in D&R: the Law does not exist because the Same does not exist. everything is copies without originals, and novelty comes through mutation. Chaos is only really frightening if we associate it with disorder, and crowned anarchy is indeed terrifying, but tyranny is arguably worse. tyranny is what calls you by your name and demands the sacrifices. the brutality of the 1:1 signifier and much else, this terrible and terribly destructive intimation that two things cannot be in the same place at the same time.

which is true...unless no two things are alike. and this in a truly metaphysical sense, and in which case, let a thousand flowers bloom and a hundred schools of thought contend.
>try and forget who it was that actually said this tho

schmitt's friend/enemy distinction, the katechon, things like this are pretty near to the atomic core of 20C politics, which are the most destructive and horrifying kind of politics the world has ever seen. so horrifying in fact are they that coming up on a century later we are still dealing with the ghosts and fallout of this. and that may well be for a long time to come.

Chaos is kind of a good scene. it's even a girardian thing: violence only happens between (and over) the Same. you can understand why so many guys want to Destroy Plato (which is kind of corny, imho, but still). there is some truth in it. this was deleuze's attitude as well, i think: get rid of Similarity and you can hit the reset button on a whole lot of other things. true, this opens the floodgates to loosey-goosey postmodernity, but...there's a lot more to it than that. irony is kind of like oedipus, in a way. it preserves the Same while courting the Different. but the Different and the multiple may basically be all there is. the fact that situations ungrounded in this way become fertile fields for ambitious despots isn't necessarily a criticism of multiplicity itself. despots always need the consent of the people, in the end. and people love sacrifice and storytelling...