/lit/ - Literature

>>11984382
for sheer Prose Awesomeness it is very hard to dislike Spengler, for instance. i may even go back and re-read him now, now that i'm thinking about it. maybe what i would like to see is something on this scale to just cover the twentieth century, or the Cosmotech circuit from Hegel to Land.

but it's like asking for a miracle, basically. in order to write like Spengler you basically have to have Heraclitus in your soul, and in your sub-soul, all the way through. maybe a two-hundred year stretch covering Europe and the Americas &c isn't even enough. but, you know, something called The Saga of Prometheus written by some absolute legend nobody had ever heard of, who gives the world of theory a soul-splitting fugue on creation in its most alchemical sense, The Story Of Technology with all of the grandiosity and thundering one-liners that Spengler could do. Gibbon is arguably the greatest writer of all time for this kind of thing, he's got the scale and the sweep of it like no other. but Spengler can throw lightning from the mountain top in his own way.

Mumford has the scale of it, but he's also writing from the US a little later on; Spengler was born among the crucible of worlds, and you feel it when you read him. and there are no shortage of incredibly sensitive, erudite, brilliant writers also in the continental mode who can drop bombs on your moms too. Baudrillard is always good for this, Nietzsche always, some others. not many tho. there are a lot of theorists with insight, but they don't always have the feeling for the scale of the thing.

Uncle Nick had it, tho:

>With Kant death finds its theoretical formulation and utilitarian frame as a quasi-objectivity correlative to capital, and noumenon is its name. The effective flotation of this term in philosophy coincided with the emergence of a social order built upon a profound rationalization of excess, or rigorous circumspection of voluptuous lethality. Once enlightenment rationalism beings its dominion ever fewer corpses are left hanging around in public places with each passing year, ever fewer skulls are used as paperweights, and ever fewer paupers perish undisturbed on the streets. Even the graveyards are rationalized and tidied up. It is not surprising, therefore, with with Kant thanatology undergoes the most massive reconstruction in its history. The clerical vultures are purged, or marginalized. Death is no longer to be culturally circulated, injecting a transcendent reference into production, and ensuring superterrestrial interests their rights. Instead death is privatized, withdrawn into interiority, to flicker at the edge of the contract as a narcissistic anxiety without public accreditation. Compared to the immortal soul of capital the death of the individual becomes an empirical triviality, a mere re-allocation of stock.

that mos def does it for me. i feel myself Persuaded. but moments like those are rare. but they are worth it when they happen.