/lit/ - Literature

I'm only about twenty pages in, but as Zimmerman goes through the political turmoil and industrialization of German society during the 19th century, I can't feel anything else but helplessness.
I myself work at a plastic factory, the dullest, most mind-numbingly boring work environment I've ever been in.
I can't but symphatise with the conservative Germans fighting against the enroaching grasp of Capital and feel mostly scorn towards the preachers of enlightenment, later socialists and social democrats.
But as I read more of the reactionary views (I do not consider reactionary as an insult nor a compliment), the feelings of sympathy transform into utter apathy.
Their wishes for authoritarianism and beliefs in perverted social Darwinism make me ill. The superficiality of blind faith in the nation and its 'Volk', its cosmic spirit, seem dishonest and artificial.
Nothing will change the alienation that modern technology and production impose on the worker, no mere change in who owns the means of production themselves will change the impact that modern production in itself kills the spirit of a being.
Help me.
I know it's only going to get worse from here.
I don't want to become like Uncle Ted.

>>13053566

>>12866009
there are three books i usually shill for helping me out when i was a total and utter noob in philosophy. one of them is this one, specifically for understanding Heidegger and his milieu, because i think it is massively important to understand Heidegger, which means understanding Germany in the 1920s and 30s. so this is one of the books i recommend.

the second is Richard Tarnas' Passion of the Western Mind, which is a really good run-through of the entire history of philosophy. and the third is Barzun's From Dawn to Decadence. all three are pretty accessible and don't require a lot of previous philosophical knowledge.

as for Heidegger specifically, once you finally understand what he is trying to say - his language is quite dense - the rest of it is a cakewalk (and a fucking tremendously illuminating one at that). his essays in the Basic Writings are all good, particularly the stuff on art and the Greek Temple. to me he absolutely nailed Life After Nietzsche, and then i think Lacan and Derrida will make a lot more sense also. sadly, so will Land, perhaps, later on, because he basically plunges directly into Heidegger's nightmare...but my own penchant for fixating on Land is a very personal and idiosyncratic one, and there are lots of other things to do besides him. there's Deleuze too, after all...

so to answer your question, yes, i did, but with this guide. and i had also read Nietzsche, that's important, and Baudrillard also. and the Stoics, Plato too...sounds like we had fairly similar trajectories. but anyways i'm sure you can do it, especially if you want to! if you hate a philosopher it's hard to enjoy reading them, but...well, Heidegger was exactly the guy i was looking for at that time and so that made it easier. there's tons of other secondary and source material you can find on him also, i just found this one to be good and accessible.

>>11947679
>Basically: can I dive in with an understanding of tech in Heidegger?

not that guy (i'm OP) but i'd say yes. if you are looking for a reasonably good introduction to heidegger's ideas, this isn't a terrible book to start with. and pic rel is the book that helped me understand heidegger. and after this i found B&T much easier to understand. but i read vol I of Stiegler's Technics and Time before reading heidegger himself, and i didn't find it too hard. if anything, i was floored by Stiegler, and then i was doubly-floored by Heidegger when i read him.

>Also, I keep hearing of the "political" angle of this movement, especially with Land. What, in summary, are his politics? He seems to have earned the ire of the tumblr crowd and with this "NRx" movement but how exactly is he "right" or "reactionary"?

land is a unique specimen. Young Nick doubled-down so hard on Marx (and D&G) that he sent himself through a wormhole of his own devising, which came to be known as acceleration, and which he is more or less the founder. this happened during his CCRU days (and there are others besides him - sadie plant, mark fisher, reza negarestani, all the spec-realism guys), but the book to read for Young Nick is Fanged Noumena.

Old Nick, of the Dark Enlightenment essay, Xenosystems, and Teleoplexy, is more on the right, but not alt-right. he's a complex guy, but he would really only call himself a reactionary against a strain of extreme leftism. he will still think of himself as being, i think, a kind of a classical liberal, albeit in about the most unorthodox way imaginable. and he really, really likes Singapore.

he was - in a way not unlike Baudrillard - so committed to Marxism that he did a kind of through-the-looking-glass moment and wound up reversing his own political polarities over the course of his career. Land is more interested in D&G than Nietzsche, but it's been said that JB's work was a long lament for modernity. perhaps you could say that land's work is a lament for *postmodernity,* because for him postmodernity is inseparable from capital, and for land it's *culture* that gets in the way. it's not that capitalism is a problem for people, it's that for him *people are a problem for capitalism.* so he has reversed the emancipating potential of the Hegelian spirit and replaced it with the transformative (though profoundly an-anthropocentric) powers of capitalism instead. it's not an easy combination, but that's who he is.

hope that makes sense. i've been kind of obsessed with land for a number of years now, b/c i really do think he's one of the most interesting philosophers alive. but he's undoubtedly a very fringe guy (though perhaps becoming less so, these days) with some very unusual ideas. i like him because he seemed to key in on some things that i think were overlooked by postmodern theory when it just went all-in on language, but for land the key factors were more than cultural, they were also technological.

>>11681385
awesome, i haven't read this one either. and i'll chip in a heidegger book of my own.

>>11681385
>I'm suspicious of Bourdieu.
why?