/lit/ - Literature

>>13000476
i have said this before that i am not here to bash on the West. i think Hitler and Stalin - to name only two - did *tremendous harm* to the reputation of the West, and left a wound on it that is probably a permanent scar. and this really sucks ass. Nietzsche was almost certainly right also in his critique of morality. certainly Gibbon would have agreed with him (although of course Gibbon has a higher regard for Rome than Nietzsche does, who prefers the Greeks massively...but w/ev, this is a digression).

my point is this, i guess. we are kind of stuck today in a place between that which we call the affirmative and that which we call the reactive, and we have agreed - mostly - that the affirmative, the deepest meaning of which is the *tragic* is probably superior. i agree that it is. but we live today in times which are difficult to qualify by these measures without finding ourselves almost inevitably drifting towards the extremes, and the funny thing about the extremes is how much in the end they come to resemble each other. and as they resemble each other the endgame for that is, in the end, that thing which we in the West have proven ourselves to be so horrifyingly good at, time and again: the catastrophic, world-destroying, world-redeeming, Scapegoat Jubilee. the awesome sacrifice which we struggle even to put into words.

and Zizek for one has at least said that if he is an atheist, it is only through Christianity. he has all kinds of interesting takes on the Fall (and he would, being a Hegelian...now if only Hegel's Lutheranism hadn't been so, well, dialectical and historically crusading). i also would have greatly preferred that instead of having a debate - because what in the fuck is the point of debate? - that he and Peterson had just stuck to talking about what they actually did find collectively interesting, that being the meaning of Christianity...oh well. maybe next time.
>or not
because those things are the West too. and there is some kind of remarkable correspondence between the Crucifixion and the guillotine they both surely could have productively commented on. certainly Hegel had some perspective on this, no doubt Jung could have said some cool shit too. but how do you *stop* that loop? or, if it *can't* be stopped, then wat do? how to live under conditions of *non-Nietzschean, non-dialectical* eternal recurrence? i feel as though the Buddhists have some insight on this.