/lit/ - Literature

>>12486007
it's my pleasure. no need to thank me tho, as you can see it sometimes takes me a couple of thousand words' worth of shitpost to say anything interesting! i am a fairly crude and resource-heavy processor like that. but i'm glad you enjoyed.

>>12486303
Graham's Disputers of the Tao is often suggested, but it's a little dry. Chang Chung-Yuan has a couple of good books on the subject. Eva Wong is cozy. the Mitchell translation of the TTC, and his second book are worth checking out. World Wisdom has a good book on it as well. with illustrations! and everybody loves the story of the dextrous butcher.

https://straightbamboo.com/the-chef-cuts-the-ox/

this is, of course, assuming that you've read the TTC and Zhuangzi themselves, which are pretty much all you really need. those books are designed for beginners - which are pretty much what make them the works of genius that they are.

>>12486306
>While none of these statements are definitively "wrong", they are ultimately meaningless in relation to one another in that all they do is rearrange subject, object and predicate terms to say slightly different (but still incredibly banal and repetitive) things. Zizek doesn't want to be a wise man, he fully embraces the fact that all people (including himself and all other reportedly "wise" men) are disgusting idiots, and that wisdom is really no different than t-shirt slogans.
100% this. much better than my hot take.

>You're absolutely right to suggest that neoliberalism secretly desires psychoanalysis, however, in fact I wouldn't even call it a secret. The best way of maintaining neoliberal consensus is by incorporating all intellectual enquiries into its praxis, such that even critical projects that are radically opposed to its dominion are nevertheless triangulated within a grid of permissible behaviours and ideologies. Revolution is pacified and impotent, protest becomes a leisurely pastime and celebration of community rather than a engagement in real activism.
that's the thing. my sense is that analysis in the end can even come to take the role of a kind of Schopenhauerian contemplation, because Revolution taps into those dimensions of the psyche that often conclude - not unwarranted! - that Burn Them All is the kind of change you can *really* believe in!

and this is where things get complex, where we find ourselves vanishing into Pharmacopolis. we ask our own questions, and fix our own problems, but never perfectly, especially if what we really want to do is get outside of ourselves. it leads to paranoia - essentially, the fear of breaking rules that we ourselves have invented in order to please the Big Other, but the Big Other never was...and all the way along, we are initiating the next bunch into a system that becomes only more Byzantine, until it really does become impossible to distinguish the pleasure from the pain. or is that the site of the epistemological break? maybe both?

One does not simply "into" confucius. best intro to 古典中國哲學 rite here m8