/lit/ - Literature

>>12441983
had Nietzsche written Man is Dead we would have had a very different world. but he didn't, of course, because for him Man as such had not yet been born; he was awaiting the Ubermensch, and so are we. nor can we know what Nietzsche would have thought of the twentieth century, but it doesn't really matter: he knew it belonged to him anyways. and he was right.

without God, without Marx, and - uniquely - without *women,* we find ourselves in something of a cul-de-sac. Capital still satisfies, as it always does. it is *always* going to be fun to think about machines, and code, and software, and the hermeneutics of writing. just discovering automation in general, all of the possibilities for turning the world into Factorio. this is the way into Deleuze, who arguably has the best interpretation of the unconscious yet: becoming-machinic, connecting with flows and intensities, and riding the affects. Deleuze is pretty irresistable like that.

but it is a kind of a death sentence for political sensibilities. sometimes the sense i have now when i read Land's own magnum opus - which is brilliant - is that in the end even Capital itself is not guaranteed to own the future completely. a Ballardian or Baudrillardian perspective might be just as accurate, a world bloated and exhausted, like a computer continually re-optimizing and getting increasingly worse with every update, until even launching your explorer causes it to overheat. it takes so much processing power just to run startup that in the end you just throw the damn thing out the window and go back to paper and candlelight.

like the Grand Inquisitor, Nietzsche's Ubermensch sets the bar too high. as much as the GI might have been angry with Christ for sacrificing himself for people not worthy of it, the Ubermensch is a chimera: anybody who really claims to be it, isn't, and yet it remains, like a lingering shadow. patently, all of us would love to be saved. it's just that anyone capable of doing so would have to grapple with our own self-loathing: you can't love me more than i hate myself, because even if you could i know i would betray you. that is the paradox of absolution: nobody can possibly redeem Gollum.

but who's to say that this is even a desiring-economy anymore, a libidinal economy? it seems much more like a *phobic* economy, and one in which corporations lecture captive audiences as moral authorities. strange, but true. this is why i was fascinated with Metal Gear earlier: Eli breaks the rules, as he must, but the Boss doesn't really punish him all that hard for it. the Boss knows he doesn't have the moral authority to do that. it doesn't mean Eli can't hate him for it, he can, and he does. nor does he attempt to sell Eli on any romantic myths about what they are doing on Mother Base, like the ones that intoxicate Miller to give his speeches. he knows Eli has the same anger and disaffection that he does, and that most of his plans will end in disaster also.

(cont'd)