/lit/ - Literature

>>12445798
i used to rag on Christianity pretty fucking hard, but of late i find it to be a far more interesting practice than before. you can get away with a lot of shit under the banner of socialism, but once you get to Deleuze, Land et al, psychotherapeutic capitalism, the idea of wielding the polis as cure begins to look a lot more complicated.

Lacanian psychoanalysis always struck me as a perfect simulacrum of Stalinism: that is, it was the kind of totalitarianism it was safe to practice, and it came frontloaded with a world of literary and philosophical references also. Zizek is still doing this now. the brutal, grotesque or obscene jokes are what he is always unpacking, and a lot of them have to do with the comedies of sexuality, romance, accidents of time and fate. Lacan himself could not really solve his own problem, of the Borromean knot, in the end - and it was a sensibility not unlike Hofstadter's strange loops. then Deleuze came along, with a whole set of other references - Spinoza instead of Hegel and Freud, and versions of Marx and Nietzsche that went far beyond anything in Kojeve. it was the unconscious updated for the age of the *network* and not only the machine. a major sea-change.

but the network too is co-opted by the Matrix and Matrix-like structures. the real kicker is when we ask ourselves if this is not in any way a perversion, but in fact precisely how the system is intended to operate. one issue that Land would have to struggle with is that Capital may well and truly prefer Silicon Valley Protestantism to anything like his own cyberpunk sensibilities. he is right to say that capitalist positivism is indeed the face of nihilism, but i am certain what grinds his gears is the sheer insipidity of the whole thing. it grinds mine also.

but that is what makes *me* want to pause and reflect: if insipidity is what galls me, maybe the state and Marxist theory isn't ultimately going to produce that, no matter how arcane i want to frame it, or how many twists in the plot there may be. maybe there are things that we cannot know about the human condition in the preferred (read: modernist) ways we have of looking for it. but that is the thing: if that were so, it would mean that the last 200 years were just a fucking catastrophe all around. it is that very catastrophe which is so unconscionable, because if none of this shit means anything, it makes it very hard to go forward - especially if you have the sense that, one way or the other, you will be rubbing elbows for the rest of your life with people you cannot possibly hope to explain yourself to. there is nothing to explain.

>Christianity is the single largest vessel of human evolution yet to grace recorded history, at least until the last 75 years or so. This is not your pastors Christianity.
it has its fucking charms, that is for sure.