/lit/ - Literature

>>23360917
It's either the real, the symbolic, or the imaginary.

>>12695214
>structures/practices/whatever are more important than what's written on banners or told in speeches.
i agree, partly. there's certainly some kind of interesting feedback loop here tho: the speeches eventually become the practices and structures, and the practices and structures tend to bring out the speeches. some of them are quite creative and even philosophically interesting, for the horror; Land retweeted a guy the other day saying that for the radical left the concept of free speech is already moribund, everything is a question of platforming. you can't say or do anything until somebody gives you a platform; it's deconstruction Derrida-style applied to the ear. the affinity the Left has for media technology is a part of this also, i think, to the point where it's actually kind of hard to tell who is in charge, or how much the terminology and tools of social media itself emerge from the political undercurrents of Left discourse. and to some degree this is a human phenomenon itself, and reflective of various social and economic striation also...

what fascinates me is the religious impulse behind it all, which makes sense to me. the institutionalization of far left discourse in academia strikes me as being more technological (and economic) than purely cultural, but these things form Borromean knots (or, less charitably, death spirals of madness). it's a very interesting form of communism, partly inspired by grievance politics, but partly driven by a need to come to some new understanding or relation with the technologies on which conversation takes place, which are also driving the economies also...and i find there's a little of Opus Magnum in all of this.

>Ideologically/idealistically, every Communist (and later every Soviet citizen) was a self-conscious actor with a strong political position who interacted with like-minded individuals, and only had to be corrected by them in case of mistakes (the very materialistic, rational ideal). How it was stretched and twisted by real people, and how the basics of Soviet society were formed is quite a different story.
that does sound familiar!

>>12695351
>We basically have Racial Maoism, or something Gender Maoism.
this. and Mao is arguably the great Marxist Protestant of the world today; he re-sacralizes work. race and gender are the two forces which can be ameliorated into capital to deprive them of their revolutionary power, but it's one of those things that make for strange bedfellows. the same thing as above: who's running the show? or look at Twitter, which cannot seem to figure out the paradox: if social media is a basic human right, then how do you ban it when people express politically contrary views? all this stuff.

i feel like this is also the right place to put in the CCP's contribution to hip-hop as well. bless the fragrance or something.
http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2019-03/03/c_137864806.htm?from=singlemessage&isappinstalled=0

(cont'd)

Thread for general discussion of contemporary continental philosophy. Seems as though there are quite a few fans here. Hoping for some good dialogue and dialectic!

What is continental philosophy?

>Continental philosophy is a set of 19th- and 20th-century philosophical traditions from mainland Europe. This sense of the term originated among English-speaking philosophers in the second half of the 20th century, who used it to refer to a range of thinkers and traditions outside the analytic movement. Continental philosophy includes the following movements: German idealism, phenomenology, existentialism (and its antecedents, such as the thought of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche), hermeneutics, structuralism, post-structuralism, deconstruction, French feminism, psychoanalytic theory, and the critical theory of the Frankfurt School and related branches of Western Marxism.

You desire to LIVE "according to Nature"? Oh, you noble Stoics, what fraud of words! Imagine to yourselves a being like Nature, boundlessly extravagant, boundlessly indifferent, without purpose or consideration, without pity or justice, at once fruitful and barren and uncertain: imagine to yourselves INDIFFERENCE as a power--how COULD you live in accordance with such indifference? To live--is not that just endeavoring to be otherwise than this Nature? Is not living valuing, preferring, being unjust, being limited, endeavouring to be different? And granted that your imperative, "living according to Nature," means actually the same as "living according to life"--how could you do DIFFERENTLY? Why should you make a principle out of what you yourselves are, and must be? In reality, however, it is quite otherwise with you: while you pretend to read with rapture the canon of your law in Nature, you want something quite the contrary, you extraordinary stage-players and self-deluders! In your pride you wish to dictate your morals and ideals to Nature, to Nature herself, and to incorporate them therein; you insist that it shall be Nature "according to the Stoa," and would like everything to be made after your own image, as a vast, eternal glorification and generalism of Stoicism! With all your love for truth, you have forced yourselves so long, so persistently, and with such hypnotic rigidity to see Nature FALSELY, that is to say, Stoically, that you are no longer able to see it otherwise-- and to crown all, some unfathomable superciliousness gives you the Bedlamite hope that BECAUSE you are able to tyrannize over yourselves--Stoicism is self-tyranny--Nature will also allow herself to be tyrannized over: is not the Stoic a PART of Nature? . . . But this is an old and everlasting story: what happened in old times with the Stoics still happens today, as soon as ever a philosophy begins to believe in itself. It always creates the world in its own image; it cannot do otherwise; philosophy is this tyrannical impulse itself, the most spiritual Will to Power, the will to "creation of the world," the will to the causa prima.