/lit/ - Literature

>>11562098
so first of all, thanks for the interesting conversation. even talking about derrida kind of feels like a spade being stuck in a part of my own psychic garden that unearths some weird and unsightly tubers growing there. sometimes that's a good thing, sometimes not. i like to feel like i have my metaphysical ducks in a row w/r/t a lot of continental stuff but, aaaagh, derrida just irks the shit out of me. i really don't know why, but i'm sure it has to do with my own wonky and strange adventure through a lot of these texts. i could sense *then,* when i was having these conversations, and before i had done much of the reading myself, that something was deeply and profoundly rotten in the state of denmark with deconstruction. now it's 2018 and everything i suspected would be the case has happened. i don't mean to give the impression of having some prophetic gift or anything, just that everything that deconstruction seemed to want to 'paper over' now to my mind seems to be unfolding itself well and truly into the world - as landian horror, as Trump, as NeverTrump, as all of the rest of it. and i'm *still* at a fucking loss as to know what to do or think about it except stare in fascinated horror and lament and name-drop french and german guys nobody cares about.

i also have to say, i'm finding i like jbp a lot more too these days. christianity was one thing i never thought i would take an interest in but here we are. i feel like a lot of things i was looking for in continental philosophy i'm finding turned out actually were in the domain of theology. still not sure where i stand on jung, but who knows. for helping you figure out what's wrong wiht the matrix (or that there is one), continental theory can't be beat. but for living in it as something other than a paranoid basket case? maybe a different track is required.

i really like your analysis, by the way, of the meaning of the disappearance of communism from the historical landscape. you're right that that really represents a landmark moment in the story of these ideas we are talking about. it's possible that deconstruction - again, if we look at it in its best sense, as the deactivation of that invisible core of ideology that galvanizes so much human evil and error - after that point had completed a large part of its historical mission. even ken wilber recognized the phenomenon of 'boomeritis.' learning to cope after the End of History without just plunging into full-blown capitalism is still i think the place we are now. it's fascinating stuff. and, mainly, i think we're doing it all fucking wrong. the paradigms have shifted in about six different ways since 1990 but we are still captured, i think, by a permanent case of boomer nostalgia (itself profoundly nostalgic) and that fantasy is just not sustainable politically, economically, culturally, environmentally, or in any other number of ways. but still we do it.