/lit/ - Literature

>>12375286
Negarestani matters today because he proposes a project for philosophy which is right next door to Land's, except that for him the reasons to consciously expand the nature of human intelligence aren't as conservative as Land's. in a philosophical sense, Uncle Nick is one of a very few genuine non-Hegelian Right Marxist who also recognizes the dangers (more importantly, the *attractions* of fascism). Smash Fascism is today the rallying cry of an entire new generation of totalitarian leftists, whose brand of socialism is - as it often has been - ultimately indistinguishable from neoliberalism. hence the continual leftward swim of Cthulhu (or why the endemic corruption that follows tends to produce beings like Trump or Bolsonaro when people become fed up with the stratification that follows).

imho, it is the decoupling of existential philosophy from socialism which is necessary. Communism is simply *too religiously appealing* to be trusted. and yet this is what puts us in the bind: we want a kind of humanist inhuanism, or inhumanist humanism, and that is exactly the is-ought problem which socialism purportedly solves. your existential woes are solved by your affection for the Great Crowd - possibly your material woes also - and *their* existential woes are solved by the theoretical construction of a future society of prosperity, which - so it is believed - will take place *as soon as we are all thinking the same way.* but this is not in fact how thinking works.

prying apart the unspoken doctrines within postmodernity - which we might perhaps call 'capitalist socialism,' or simply neoliberalism - is going to be a tough project, but i think it is a necessary one. philosophy will not save you - but again, this is a good thing, imho. the task of philosophy is *necessarily* inhuman, because that is what it means to think. but this isn't something to be fled from, or warded away in the name of some Greater Good. philosophy - at least in Negarestani's view - is *expressly devoted* to the elimination of cognitive slavery through intelligence, which is to say, Reason.

now we know, very well, that Reason isn't always reasonable. but this is where we come to the other pincer of what might be done, which is to try and crawl Shawshank-style out of the prison of Enlightened Suspicion - the kind of Original Sin that has somehow been produced via postmodernity, and which to my mind is essentially just the awareness that *irony and satire is not a substitute for the sacred.* modern leftism does not allow itself to be satirized, but it has entirely satirized away the existential, and *we fucking need the existential.* there are no *substitutes* for the existential...not even, i might dare to suggest, in war, or the heroic face-smashing of the state-sanctioned scapegoat. we are all clowns now and we know it. none of us really has the Real. and simply blindly going along with the rage of the most victimized - wasn't this exactly Hitler's ploy as well?