/lit/ - Literature

better robespierre/revolution image here.

and out of this came napoleon. first the execution of the sun king, and then the execution of robespierre, and then taking the show on the road. wheels of craziness and reasons. bonaparte, being the military savant that he was, set the tone for everything that hitler would do later on: when in doubt, show people the golden eagle and they will march to the end of creation and back for it. perhaps alexander before him.

the same power of nostalgia and aesthetics got trump elected as well, i think. but in his case that wasn't so much vigilant and insomniac rationality on his part, but the moral vigilance being forced on the american people by the opposing side, which engendered this incredible victory for the least qualified man in the history of american politics over quite possibly the most qualified one, or at least one the american people had been groomed for for a decade. the same 'vigilant and insomniac rationality' of left moral puritanism is what produced the blowback of trump, as much as napoleon himself was produced out of the revolution, and hitler out of the calamitous ruin of of the first world war.

>>11882289
it was what he said about the nature of language, of the difference between the ontic and the ontological, of language as being disclosure and unconcealment instead of the production of certainty. Being and Time just finally cracked my thick skull. true, some things had sort of happened around that time that primed me, in a way, for a massive Ego Realignment, but in the aftermath of that what heidegger was saying really clarified the nature of a lot of things i was struggling with: namely, the hysterical nature of talking itself, the need to produce speech, produce meaning, talk, and talk, and talk...and, mainly, about nothing. or rather, not about nothing, but in the way that humans talk about things infinitely when they can't grasp the ultimate meaning of them, so they have to keep going and going...it's his connection to existential psychotherapy i really like, for this reason. and his compatibility with eastern and nondual thought, which i am also very fond of.

language doesn't pattern onto reality, but this isn't - contra a more cynical kind of postmodernism - a recipe for infinite playfulness. that happens, and is necessary (read korzybski, or barthes, or any number of others) - but when the bloom comes off the rose of irony, heidegger is your man. the piety of thought is another phrase by him i like.

in general, he's just good for reminding you that forcing the limits of language is the wrong way to go. humans just may not be wired like that. technology is a product of thinking, but we don't have to be relentlessly driven by the metaphysics of production. we do, and we are, and the result is technocapital, among other things. but it's not the whole of the human experience, which is ultimately profoundly mysterious and radically temporal.