/lit/ - Literature

>>11248906
Yeah pretty much.

>>11248879
for an anime eva's always punching above its weight class

>This embrace [of Instrumentality] is however far from a soothing or comforting oneness, is a traumatic shock. This resistance, this trauma takes place at two levels. The ego, as the defender of the I, its spin doctor resists this potential loss, this dissolution on the basis of its own existence.

>Yet at the same time, this return to the form prior to the subject is traumatic, because according to Lacan, that oneness and wholeness that the subject eternally seeks to recover never existed in the first place. It is only retroactively fantasized. This is where the Lacanian definition of ideology emerges. Ideology is the narration of solidarity around this loss. It is the naming of an other who is responsible for this loss.

>As the scene shows, human instrumentality is far from harmonious, but instead we see what Hegel refers to as “the night of the world.” A world of partiality, of pure existence, with no essence and not even the fantasy of essence.

>The agent accept the void within themselves and the void without, the fact that there is no Big Other, no ultimate guarantor of meaning, and therefore somehow requilts the social, radically changes what is thought to be possible. Making the once impossible, everyday, ordinary.

>During both of their terms in the madness of human instrumentality, Asuka had called Shinji pathetic, a coward and he had attacked her, almost choking her. After discovering both him and Asuka alone in this brave new world, the Lacanian mantra of love is illustrated all too well, “I love you, but there is something in you more than you, a tiny piece of the real, which is why I must mutilate you.”

>>11159463
>but in the end don't we all want *recognition?* ultimately?

certainly, ultimately death will cut the circle for all of us, but that is the agonizing paradox at the heart of it all: if i want to completely cut my dependency on the Other for my selfhood, i have to throw that selfhood to the fuckin' dogs. i always loved this bit from plotinus: the hero in the act is never reflexively thinking himself as brave, heroic, etc. he just does it, and history calls him such after the fact. if i want the predicates of sexy, successful, captivating, i have to fundamentally relinquish my desire to be these things - which, by extension of course, is the relinquishment of the very gratification and fulfillment that i'm striving for in the first place. "don't be a thirsty nigga" - we get what we want when we don't want it.

the striving-after is its own hindrance, and this speaks magnitudes to that hegelian tension between being and the self-othering that it is: whatever determinate space i occupy, i will always displace by my occupying it, like a rock in a glass of water. i literally can't get out of this fuckin' metaphysical chinese finger-trap without a radical cut of the circle, and by extension the very totality of concerns that precipitated the act in the first place. very ugly (also liberating?) catch-22.

>the question then, is why does this cause so much despair?

because fundamentally, the lacanian and Hegelian insight are one: only when you've given up and accepted the futility of repressing/obfuscating/deflating the problem, can you do something about it. isn't hegel's system fundamentally "the first step is admitting the problem [the first step is admitting consciousness is necessarily imbricated in the absolute negativity that it is, and any attempt to cut this circle necessarily reinforces it]": the philosophy

>it's why we *settle* for capitalism

yeah we settle for it because we identify with the limitation and not that which posits it. it doesn't have to be so abstract: people kill themselves over social media, okay, you're just as ugly, unloveable, mediocre, etc. as the world at large is telling you you are, fine, but what is it that's saying it? and again, the great hegelian insight here: to be able to condemn your deficiencies from a bird's eye view like this betrays an integrality of self/knowledge that /precisely refutes it/. again, limits and that which posits them. and this is pretty much what buddhism is a systematization of (and descartes too, but it's very diluted with him), that what detaches from its facticity is distinguished from this facticity by the very reality of the act.

and this is what people are afraid of, that consciousness is not its content because the content is arbitrary flow, and what we are is the no-thing that holds it, void, the eckhartian desert, the divine darkness of the godhead