/lit/ - Literature

I'm going to spam this Sloterdijk quote - again, and for the last time - and then something else.

>Without a doubt, Marx’s future theoretical fame will be linked to his achievements as the conjurer of dead labor. The core of his critique of political economy is necromancy: as the hero who descends to the realm of the dead to contend with the shadows of values, Marx remains uncannily relevant also for the present. The undead—which walks among humans as the value of money and which, as a laughing communicator, strips the living of time and souls—rules today almost without any pretexts over the advanced societies. Work, communication, art, and love belong here entirely to the endgame of money. These form the substance of contemporary media and experiential time. And because money requires time for its utilization, so-called great history is also continuing in some eerie way; it is a game that is always played for extra time. Yet such history is no longer the conversation of the living with the dead about the goodness of the world, but the ever more thorough pervasion of the living by the economized specter. The money soul peers ever more undisguised out of the human subjectivity of our time: a society of bought buyers and of prostituted prostitutes is making a place for itself in globalized market conditions. Classic liberal laissez-faire is becoming explicit as the postmodern sucking and letting oneself be sucked. Telecommunication is increasingly difficult to distinguish from tele-vampirism. Tele-viewers and tele-suckers draw from a liquefied world which hardly still knows what a resistant or autonomous life might be. Is it not possible that a time is coming when those who do not wish to speak of vampirism should also be silent about philosophy?

To me Baudrillard transitions into Land pretty well, and from Land into the new Outer Dark of speculative realism and so on. Marxism and existentialism seem to get wrapped up together out there in this rather poetic way as how the last of the old-school revolutionaries take their leave. Beyond them is the new school of cybernetics and so on, which makes these grand aristocratic gestures seem, perhaps, somewhat passé.

But how the monster of Capital is characterized, together with what some of these thinkers identify or privilege as being nevertheless, in spite of all of this, beautiful enough to hang in for, is interesting to me. There isn't really a right or proper way to confront the imminent possibility of being wiped out by industrialization. But there are options on the table: doubling down on Mao, fatal/aristocratic games of seduction and death, social justice warriorship, posthumanity and transhumanity, Bitcoin worship...

I don't know. The figure of the true revolutionary seems no longer to be tenable in the age of the meme, the virtue signal, and so on. But when even cynicism and refusal feeds the beast...

I think this is what I found interesting about Land's return to Kant.

How about some Sloterdijk up in this piece?

>Without a doubt, Marx’s future theoretical fame will be linked to his achievements as the conjurer of dead labor. The core of his critique of political economy is necromancy: as the hero who descends to the realm of the dead to contend with the shadows of values, Marx remains uncannily relevant also for the present. The undead—which walks among humans as the value of money and which, as a laughing communicator, strips the living of time and souls—rules today almost without any pretexts over the advanced societies. Work, communication, art, and love belong here entirely to the endgame of money. These form the substance of contemporary media and experiential time. And because money requires time for its utilization, so-called great history is also continuing in some eerie way; it is a game that is always played for extra time. Yet such history is no longer the conversation of the living with the dead about the goodness of the world, but the ever more thorough pervasion of the living by the economized specter. The money soul peers ever more undisguised out of the human subjectivity of our time: a society of bought buyers and of prosti- tuted prostitutes is making a place for itself in globalized market conditions. Classic liberal laissez-faire is becoming explicit as the postmodern sucking and letting oneself be sucked. Telecommunication is increasingly difficult to distinguish from tele-vampirism. Tele-viewers and tele-suckers draw from a liquefied world which hardly still knows what a resistant or autonomous life might be. Is it not possible that a time is coming when those who do not wish to speak of vampirism should also be silent about philosophy?

Man has a way with words.