/lit/ - Literature

>>12584127
for Lacan, Oedipus solved the riddle of the sphinx not by answering its question, but by telling it what it was: a sphinx, a hysteric searching for a master. this much accomplished, the game is up completely and entirely: the Sphinx knows that this is true, that the riddles are riddles, and that the answer is an answer. Kefka offers something both more complex and less: a rigged game, a perfect circle, a question for which there is no answer, and to which the only possible answer is: this question lacks an answer. none of this can ever prevent him from carrying off the world and himself into disaster. he does this and the rest of the party merely survives it, they escape from the crumbling tower and into the day.

i am not, i think, a Traditionalist either; i like the Traditionalists, and of course the Reign of Quantity, the great leveling expressed by Guenon, Heidegger, Spengler, Junger, or however many others - of course this is terrible! of course it is bad! but who is to blame for this? this is where Girard has the edge over quite a lot of other thinkers: you want the return of the sacred, but you cannot get it without a holy violence, without a restitution. we have never really gotten over the thrill of spilling sacred blood, of founding the sacred in violence, in destruction, in warfare. we probably never will. the passions can all be unleashed, spectacularly, and the passions reveal both their grandeur and their total blindness.

i prefer the ruin, i think. i prefer the scrapyard and the desolation. in a true desolation, Heideggerian Being reveals its other, sadder, even traumatic face: the collapse, and in which Hegel's god remains distant alone, perhaps to be sought again, or perhaps simply to be encountered as another lost and fellow wanderer, another companion in misery. this much i think i prefer.

a ruin goes on forever. a ruin is highly democratic; a ruin excludes and marginalizes *politics.* a ruin says: let the ruin be, let it stand in its ruination. something happened there; if it was some Lovecraftian entity, called forth into the world by capital, it entered and it *fucking died,* because it was a confused and impotent non-entity that manifested as madness and chaos desperate for recognition where there could be none, where it had summoned everything into itself in a grotesque horror of untimely birth. and now a clean-up begins, as if the earth was itself a sort of elephant graveyard for the divine.

(cont'd)

>>12050862
>Interesting pic, I would counter with this one - the character means martial, but contains the logograms for ending violence - ahimsa, a prohibition of initiatory violence, a duty for retaliatory violence. The duty of an ahimsa is to stop wars by any means. It is more noble to end violence than it is to let the world be, regardless of what is happening. Different perspectives on life.
hardly a counter. i support this. i think there's room in the project for both of us.

>But you allow them to go on, you condone them by doing nothing.
i don't condone them by doing nothing, i look for *better ways to respond.* which means suppressing my natural inclination to reflexively shoot from the hip. this has taken me a long time. i've basically turbo-nuked my own life by *bad responses* to things many, many times. i'm just trying something new now.

>The problem is when your in-group is your religion and the quality of individuals is ignored.
yes. which is why i am 149% on board with YH: Cosmotechnics, for him, is not postcolonial critique and it is not idpol. a moral metaphysics is not postmodernity. it is what i always thought postmodernity was *supposed* to be. it's become idpol, and for that Cosmotech is the rejoinder.

>BttE? That's one of Girard's books, yes?
'tis. Battling to the End.

>So do nothing when someone attacks innocents? Do nothing as violence is done? Seems absurd to me.
this is complicated, but basically, you have to look after your own patch as best you can. and *self-defense* - for everyone - is a good look. ideally it would not mean guns. my ideal is ofc Pig Sty Village from KFH. the Taoists tend to think small rather than big.

>My goal is to reduce demand rather than seeking to increase supply, and I think you agree - you wish to do it through teaching people restraint. I think that method is futile, because even if you reduce every person to subsistence level consumption of their own free will, as long as the population increases, so too will consumption, without bound - at some point you have to address the question of population (which I claim unavoidably is a political question), because each additional person increases the strain on every other one, and forces all of the others to work harder to "get theirs."

it's why Patchwork is the way. things have to get *busted up* and *fragmented* - aaaaaaaaaaalll the way down to the point where there can be balanced and sustainable holism. that strain you are describing, all the rest - your whole post, really - i have no problems with any of this, i really don't. it's *scale* and *process* that are the issues, and these really cannot be discussed in the grand sense. that too was the idea behind postmodernity, but postmodernity has fused with neoliberal capital to create the Leviathan we all know and love, the Bloody Neo-Marxist Nihilism of JBP et al.

After Meltdown means *small.* bust it up, fragment, Exit, Withdraw, and work from there (>>12032848).

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