/lit/ - Literature

>>10982395
>>10982453

one final point in this regard. i think i read it on mark fisher, but it could be somewhere else. basically:

when we talk about going beyond good and evil, we really only mean talking about going beyond good.

evil is a much harder concept to wrestle with. for bataille evil is an absolutely necessary concept in literary theory. it's probably a *horrible* concept to introduce into political theory. a guy like carl schmitt - or hobbes - has to basically proceed from the idea of civilization being anarchic or manichaean at the bottom in order to think how he thinks and explain the need for the absolute sovereignty of the state.

baudrillard talks about the concept of evil in his later work as well, although it's in a very different sense, since he's actually saying that Evil is this necessary, even revivifying process that prevents Good from being hegemonic. i like his stuff a great deal and think that he is a very astute commentator on the concept of terrorism. for me, though, terrorism is an end-boss concept in philosophy because it comes out of despair, crisis, tragedy.

but here again was girard's point on this. religion, as he understood it, was what effected a shift in human consciousness *away* from the aesthetics, and the politics, of tragedy. that was the point. and it wasn't a neat and orderly logical progression, but a complete paradigm shift.

if people today still believe in the radical emancipatory potential of ideological warfare, they are eventually going to have to ask about how their platforms in any way are distinguishable from terrorism. and i would submit that that is always going to be a difficult challenge. this doesn't mean to say it would amount to a refutation: after all, this is what crisis politics means and does. there's no time for talk now, we have to act!

and so on. this is how things slide into anarchy. but it's also why i think it's good to pour one out for a dude like vasili arkhipov.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasili_Arkhipov#Aftermath

of course, during the height of the cold war, the americans were high-fiving each other: we just had a game of chicken, and the other guy blinked, blah blah. this is obviously the official narrative - fuck you, we stood you down, big dicks swinging. but there's more to the story than that.

anyways. that was quite a rant. i don't know if that answered your question or cleared anything up. again, just sort of trying to clarify where i'm at on some things.