/lit/ - Literature

>>12426610
absolutely. i was just thinking about this on my way here today, after i saw some clip of George RR Martin being asked about racism and sexism in his books, by some Woke Justice lunatic who added, 'and by the way, I'm a professor.' it is becoming - for a number of reasons - increasingly difficult to tell the difference between the mentally ill and the sane in university situations. Deleuze gives you some of the reasons why this is so, as did Freud, Nietzsche, and many others. what Deleuze understood is that the truth of positivity, of affirmation, is essentially schizophrenic. it's just a form of creativity irreducible to common sense, or reasons. the downside of this is that once we let that djinn out of the bottle, it is extremely hard to put it back in again.

i should write a book called Identity Trouble. gender shit only seems like a way of normalizing *personality disorders* under the guise of Marxism. you can have 74 genders, or 3000. how about multiple personalities? Kefka has these. but he could give a flying fuck about gender binaries, he's got fucking problems of entirely different order, like distinguishing himself from architecture, or tigers, or angels straight out of Bernini. this is what i hate about Woke Justice: it's just bog-standard normativity by another name, and trying to capture what is not only un-captureable, it actually subtly repurposes desire as *fear.* fear you can control; all you need is the Rule. Kefka is both a commentary and a criticism of Deleuzian stuff, in many ways. his very monstrousness shows up the brilliance of Deleuze's own work. Deleuze would have understood Kefka very well. and fortunately, we can read him, rather than becoming Doomsday Clowns ourselves. the Doomsday Clown is the Last Man's deliverance, but therein lies the rub.

the worst thing we can do today is presume to have the final answers on schizophrenia, or psychopathy. shifting the goalposts from Nietzsche's problems with Christianity, to Heidegger's problems with ontotheology, to Judith Butler's problems with patriarchy makes things fucking stupider, rather than more complex. it weaponizes our desire to get out of one box by offering a cozier version of it. in FF6, every one of those characters is suffering from loneliness, from depression, from nihilism, from some form of disaffection. that is the beauty of it. the only guy who really seems to have sorted out his own problems...*is the antagonist,* the guy who says, *i can laugh at all of it.* this is, plainly, the wrong way to go.

the *party* - the momentary gang of lost wanderers - is the actual exploration of the landscape, both geographical and philosophical. they don't all join the Returners and Fix The World. there is no fixing it. it is how it is. but it is precisely in being able to accept that that they are able to accept a lot of other things. and it is this that, in some sense, makes them recognizably human beings, rather than just symptoms by another name.