/lit/ - Literature

>>12987242
it is known

>>11130622
>>11130743

>RG: Levinas did not write an apology of war. He says that it is an experience that we cannot get away from. Of course, heroism may be another path, but it is unpredictable. No one can talk about it until it has happened. Heroic models, understood as models that can be imitated, are now null. This is why totalitarian regimes have always tried to construct them. The latest, and most difficult to understand, is indeed the terrorist model. We are now beyond tests of strength, beyond the point at which you rightly hope that we will pause to make the distinctions we have made. War is absolutely not justifiable: it is not something that we necessarily have to undergo. Its intensification, in contrast, reveals that a truth is in the process of emerging.

>BC: Are you suggesting that the heroic approach can be nothing but a plan to dominate?

>RG: That’s right. The heroic approach appears with the failure of Revelation in the background. It presupposes imitation of the other, a desire to appropriate the other’s strength and to dominate him. The confrontation necessarily results in an escalation because the other appropriates the desire for appropriation. Intelligent imitation, which is self-conscious, is something else entirely. Think about the conversion of Saint Paul. He keeps repeating, “Stop imitating one another and making war; imitate Christ, who will link you with the Father.” Christ restores the distance with the sacred, whereas reciprocity brings us closer to one another to produce the corrupt sacred, which is violence. In primitive societies, violence is one with the god’s proximity. Gods no longer appear today because violence no longer has an outlet; it is deprived of scapegoats (those divinized victims) and is bound to escalate. Hölderlin was the only one at the time of Hegel and Clausewitz to have understood the danger of proximity among humans. Indeed, the Greeks had a name for the god who mixed with men, the god of reciprocity, of mimetic doubles and contagious madness: Dionysus. That is the name the Greeks gave to the fear they felt when the god was too close.

there is one standout exception to the general rule of monkey madness: sun wukong. by his own volition and hubris, he winds up making a bet with the buddha that he cannot escape from, and in this way becomes enlightened and later a great bodhisattva. he is an intriguing exception to much of this, as is ernst junger. in the absence of the buddha, we can perhaps argue that there is christ. in the absence of christ there is the superman and the virtually irresistable aesthetics of war.

it's a tough call. but once you see universal mimetic Chimphammer 40K it doesn't get readily unseen.