/lit/ - Literature

>>12010026
"it may not be a perfect system, but it's the only one we've got."

the same goes, in a way, for the Egyptians. they had peaceful order for a long time, and then those mysterious, troublemaking Sea Peoples - who *were* those guys, anyways? meh, it's probably just the wind - came and started fucking everything up. turned out they were the Greeks and they were no meme. it's not like it's easy to make a case for the Spanish conquistadores either, but they certainly changed the plot in South America.

the wheel of sacrifice, the wheel of martyrdom. these were things Nietzsche was keyed in on, but to my mind Girard has it all in spades today. the original mechanism of dying for God and killing for God - even a sublimated, political deity - is *the* political phenomenon par excellence, and that is why the state exerts a control over violence which is also decided on collectively through the laws and through deliberation. the meaning of the state is not war or conquest. but the state also can solve your existential crises. fuck, maybe even *religion* can't do that, because religion, you know, in an age of capitalism...and, you know, technology...

if only there was some word we could use to talk about

>the unification between the cosmic order and the moral order through technical activities (although the term cosmic order is itself tautological since the Greek word kosmos means order)

or

>a conceptual tool with which to overcome the conventional opposition between technics and nature, and to understand the task of philosophy as that of seeking and affirming the organic unity of the two

or

>reapproach[ing] the question of modernity by reinventing the self and technology at the same time, giving priority to the moral and the ethical.

i'm sure there is one, i just can't think of it atm.