/lit/ - Literature

>>8688592
You're not the only one who was attracted to primitivism, btw. This was one of the major books I read along the way.

>>8660246
I'm interested in this question also. Long post incoming.

There is always a relationship between authority and violence. Laws - even unwritten laws - in the end have to be backed up by something. Force is the gold in every political gold standard.

I think a lot of this actually comes from Hegel. In Hegel, the master-slave relationship is necessarily one of violence and physical courage: if the master had not defeated the slave and appropriated him, body and soul, the slave would not be who he is. He lost the fight.

Violence is inscribed on authority in both its outward political forms and arguably its interior dimension as well. What Marxists usually fail to understand about themselves is that class struggle is another form of ressentiment. The revolution is necessarily violent, and the fact that it can be justified on the grounds of being directed against Evil Capitalists is yet another scapegoat.

What I would say is the problem today is that people have created the cult of the victim. Because violence is always a possibility, violence is therefore inherently bad. It's not. It is simply a part of mimesis.

Back before I started reading Girard I found this guy interesting. He's not popular today anymore because actual Marxism morphed into cultural Marxism, and Marxists like Baudrillard turned into Nietzscheans to look for an answer. In the end he concluded that everything - even violence - was simulacral, which was an interesting but I think confused response. Derrida couldn't explain meme violence, but Baudrillard couldn't explain terrorism, either.