/lit/ - Literature

>>12639018
we're not sailing the ship anymore. you get this in Gatsby: America was the last frontier, and when you get to the end of it, that's that. maybe now things go vertical for a while and you get Ayn Rand fantasies. go further than that and you start getting Nick Land fantasies. fine. and within Hegel are awesome forces that go dark and deep, and which the Lacanian in me says need your very close attention and recognition, because otherwise they will return again and again to haunt you. as Jung says, more poetically: until you make the unconscious conscious it will direct your life and you will call it fate. that's a hell of a line.

i think Land is the major philosopher that he is because he's basically identified precisely the true face of postmodernity, which is death disguised as pleasure, with machine intelligence behind it. it is precisely because we are so desperate for happiness (Zizek) that we fail to find it, and yet our failures are all victories to that cybernetic tomb we are crafting for ourselves. the story of Nick Land and the Wild Ride has been told a hundred times by me and there is no point in repeating it further here.

what i'm wondering about is just whether or not there is yet some tiny kernel of the 18C there within him that might come out and be considered in a different light, even before he became the world's greatest forensic autopsy-analyst of Marxism. the cities today seem to suck people together into incredible vortexes and whirlwinds of debt and obligation, and like Freud, Land has posited one very simple and foundational rule as to why that is. once seen, not unseen.

but this is why there is something about the Enligthenment which suggests that we might look at Romanticism as now being trapped within itself, such that everything that was once emancipatory about it becomes dark and alien and horrible. we are *not fucking prepared* to cope with the death of Marx in this way, and the absolute state of academia today tells us that the gatekeepers of the system aren't either. but it still has to be done...