/lit/ - Literature

>>9703856
>In the heart of every law is an exception to the law that is found in the giver of the law. The capability of suspending it is paradoxically what gives the law its power.
Yeah. That's it. It's why Taoist political thought is so diabolically clever (for the West, anywyas) and is arguably one of the endgame bosses for Tiqqun to fight with:

>Han Fei's Prince, he who holds the Position, is Prince solely because of his impersonality, because of his absence of qualities, because of his invisibility, his inactivity; he is only Prince to the extent that he is absorbed in the Tao, into the Way, into the flow of things. He is not a Prince in the sense of a person, he is a Principle, a pure void, that occupies the Position and dwells in non-acting. For a "legalist" Empire, the State should be completely immanent to civil society: "Keeping the state safe is like having food when hungry and clothes when cold, not by will but by nature," explains Han Fei The function of the sovereign is here to articulate the apparatuses that will make him unnecessary, that will allow cybernetic self-regulation. If, in some respects, the teachings of Han Fei evoke certain formulations from liberal thought, it refuses their false naivete: the teachings present themselves as a theory of absolute domination. Han Fei exhorts the Prince to abide by the Way of Lao Tzu: "Heaven and Earth are ruthless; they treat the myriad creatures as straw dogs. The sage is ruthless; he treats the people as straw dogs."

Chinese Legalist thought resolves paradoxes of sovereignty that drive capital and accumulation, but only - for Tiqqun, anyways - at the price of producing a far worse system, Empire-as-Neo-Taoism. Taoism works and Empire works, both explained in terms of each other. Being who they are, they respond with Communism + anarchism. Many butterflies riled up in this way. And what if the Empire is good? What if it can be made good?
>b/c surely the history of Vatican involvement in European affairs worked out so well and did not become in the inextricably worldly and end in blood-soaked wars of religion that produced the modern State apparatus that only reproduced itself in its powers of atrocity time and again, om shantih shantih

Like so many other things if you take what is itself an anarchic philosophy - the Tao, or Deleuze - and you turn that into the unknowing philosophy of the State (Han Fei, and arguably, Nick Land, or something like him) you get nightmares. But hey, at least they're new nightmares...

>Martial arts are really rad. Unarmed combat is in many ways the ideal mode of violence on an individual level, because to master it requires discipline. The teacher-student relationship is also emphasized, because you cannot learn martial arts just by self-cultivation. Additionally there is ample room to de-escalate, which is necessary in order to leave room for a loser that does not end with death.
Kung-fu is just always such a good look. Such a good look.

You want to read Han Fei OP.

http://www2.hawaii.edu/~freeman/courses/phil301/13.%20Han%20Feizi.pdf