/lit/ - Literature

>>12780466
i'm not fighting with Foucault, i've read quite a lot of his work and i think he presents a paradox. the irony is that he presents as devastating a critique of neoliberalism as anyone else - it really is all soft power, coercion and disciplinics, and fascism by comparison is positively outdated. i'm not bitching about Foucault and your wew lad would be warranted if that were the case. but Foucault also gives you everything else which follows from him: as Moldbug would say, it's the Cathedral. Byung-Chul Han knows that there's something wrong with this, as does Land, Sloterdijk, and lots of others.

if people were marching around holding up copies of Being and Time and clobbering each other on social media for not being authentic enough it would be just as noxious. perhaps there is some alternate reality in which that is the case, but we live in this one, for better or for worse. and generally it is a better one, i think, although i'm not optimistic about the future precisely because i don't see any way to prevent the escalation of the dumbest and most cynical interpretations possible of his work. again, i'm not interested in just teeing off on social justice or whatever, but the rules of the game have changed. and if i'm going to take my cues from any continental theorist today (which is not as good as taking them from Greeks) it's going to be Land, no less thorny a writer and arguably even harder to defend.

basically i'm fucked no matter what. i think we all are, and that a world of escalating craziness ends in disaster for everyone. i would like to think there remains a way of extricating ourselves from a finger-trap of epic proportions but in order to do so there has to be some kind of move past Foucault stuff, in a sense. it doesn't necessarily imply going full-bore /acc either, a better plan would be something in the middle. obviously.

>>12780583
read The Accursed Share. it's quite brilliant. GB is also a major influence on both Baudrillard and Land, two guys who matter today.

or you can read these:
https://www.socialmatter.net/2018/03/22/principle-loss-reactionarys-introduction-georges-bataille/
https://www.socialmatter.net/2019/02/08/the-psychological-structure-of-antifascism/
https://www.socialmatter.net/2018/11/09/trump-and-the-sacred/

look carefully and you'll spot the Girard references in there too. Bataille was brilliant, as was Foucault. brilliant ideas have a power to shape reality to almost unimaginable degrees. the best we can do sometimes is just fucking survive amidst the waves guys like these can produce.

>>11991281
Stop Fucking Each Other and "the world is itself libidinal" are by no means mutually exclusive. but i'm really glad you brought this up, because it lends into a major philosophical line of thought in this whole thing, namely, *immanence.*

Based Han has said quite a lot about this, as has Sloterdijk (who is still lacking an appropriate meme-name, like Uncle Nick and Aunt Sadie and so on, given how much he comes up). the basic thing is that we are living today, in a Consumer/Spectacle/et al sense in a state of constant stimulation. the true golden goose of Capital is the *human libido* - desire, attention, the psyche, the soul, all of it. it is *in part* the sex drive, but not completely. there are an infinite number of colors on the spectrum of what we can call seduction, arousal, and so on. and this is exactly why we have descended into becoming a society of moral hypochondriacs: sexuality is everywhere, and everything, it is the fundamental baseline requirement of an enormous degree of consumer ideology, whether in advertisement, cinema, fashion, vidya, or wherever else - and yet it also profoundly destabilizing. the entire world of gender and performance, the ungodly transition from 2nd-wave to 3rd-wave feminism, the replacement of Marxist or Hegelian ideas relating to class consciousness by the politics of recognition, and increasingly in their most militant forms of intersectional feminism, are all related in the end to the nature of sexuality itself, which is necessarily transgressive in ways that will always elude complete political explication or control, though they will spawn no end of inquisitors and rage zombies.

Sex Sells. this is a fact. and it is also why so many of these conversations are becoming impossibly to have in either academia or the public sphere. as i indicated above, i think one of the things that is necessary is a profound sense of an encounter with *Bataille,* because the Accursed Share is not only a crucially important text for Uncle Nick, it is also stone-cold brilliant in every sense of the word. and yet it must be born in mind also that we are not in Kansas anymore. this isn't the world of the 1930s in Europe, this is 2018 on Planet Meme. Bataille is an absolute fucking legend of continental philosophy, and any attempts to BTFO him are spectacularly misguided. Land couldn't do it, he tried and he produced The Thirst for Annihilation instead. which isn't his best book, but it's definitely a major one in the story of the Wild Ride and what we are talking about here.

and yet - is this really so much to ask? - how about *not* doubling down on apocalyptic desire? Bataille, like Nietzsche, is profoundly brilliant in terms of critique of ideology. he has few if any superiors in that regard. and yet the vortex of postmodernity is not one that will be escaped from by looking for more Bataille, imho. Bataille is good for solving problems that we do not have anymore. we need something else.