/lit/ - Literature

>>12213485
Uncle Nick's dictum, that capital is a computer that processes desire, is pretty fascinating stuff. but of course what makes Desire Desire is obviously not a simple question. one of the things i have realized is that by basically honing in on this i have more or less made precisely the case for paying attention to the Buddhists: that is, desire is precisely what causes you suffering, and so on. it's kind of funny.

and so the Tao is a good way of gently seceding from the craziness of postmodernity - after all, nothing is more nihilistic than the Way, and no one is really more nihilistic than Laozi. and one way or another you find yourself at the Buddha's feet - the basic lesson of the Journey to the West. Wukong winds up in the Buddha's palm precisely because he thinks he can Desire his way out of everything, and in some sense, he can...but he also inadvertently winds up being a patron saint of the martial arts.

and yet behind the Buddhists lie the Hindus, and the world's oldest religion. Yoga itself is an entirely different way of thinking through Desire and immanence. one of the things that has come to my mind recently is Nietzsche's argument: 'we do not yet know what a body can do.' the more i read about India, the more this claim seems silly to me. the Hindus, it seems, would kind of gently smile at this idea: 'really? we do not yet know what a body can do? in fact i think we do know what a body can do, and we have a couple of thousand years of encyclopedic yoga catalogue to prove it. and over in China they have a few ideas as well. ask Ip Man if he knows what a body can do. my guess is that he will say he probably does. or at least he knows what a body *can't* do, which is why he will break your collarbones if he has to...'

so i have mad love for Uncle Nick inasmuch as he wants to re-Kantianize the history of capital, so that we stop going insane with our socialist-protestant desires...and yet i don't share his loathing for all things on the left, because to me socialist-protestant desires seem like cries of existential despair that i also share. i think they are fundamentally rooted more in religion than anything, and the politics of the sacred are what tends to be produced, but these lead to wheels of scapegoating and doom. but trying to get beyond scapegoating and doom are what mysticism does. it is kind of insane to say that 'God is Dead' when India exists. but all of this inclines me to look more sympathetically at Christianity also...

'tis a very complicated world.