/lit/ - Literature

>>12622739
i'd be happy to share the rest of the story, part of my own feeling for this game and the philosophy at work in it. excerpts from Deleuze's book on Leibniz:

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>For some time now the idea of an infinite universe has been hypothesized, a universe that has lost all centre as well as any figure that could be attributed to it; but the essence of the Baroque is that it is given unity, through a projection that emanates from a summit as a point of view. For some lime the world has been understood on a theatrical basis, as a dream, an illusion - as Harlequin's costume, as Leibniz would say.

>But the essence of the Baroque entails neither falling into nor emerging from illusion but rather realizing something in illusion itself, or of tying it to a spiritual presence that endows its spaces and fragments with a collective unity. The prince of Hamburg, and all of Kleist's characters, are not so much Romantic as they are Baroque heroes. Prey to the giddiness of minute perceptions, they endlessly reach presence in illusion, in vanishment, in swooning, or by converting illusion into presence: Penthesilea-Theresa?

>The Baroque artists know well that hallucination does not feign presence, but that presence is hallucinatory.

>>12085473
you are my favorite poster, Aminom.

it took me a long time to figure this out, but irony is in a kind of a psychic sense what modernity is in a cultural one. it's a thresher, or a gravity well, of some kind. that everything can have an ironic double is fascinating, and Baudrillard committed himself to the Desert of the Real as permanent nomad there. he never really returned, and neither did Nietzsche before him. Derrida founded a Ghost Kingdom in that realm, and Peterson in turn has decided to take the elevator Down now that it's turn. his elevator goes a lot further down than Harris' does.

FF6 is *that text* for me. not only because of Kefka himself, but because of what the developers intimated about how it is you go about producing a Doomsday Clown in the first place (purest, maximal Gestell, the transformation of Espers into Magicite), but to have Kefka become aware of this process in turn, and deliver up the void in his own being as World of Ruin, and to *succeed in this.* that is why it intersects so well with Deleuze/The Fold, because that is the endgame and horizon of deconstructive logic. it contains in itself both a fantasy, *and* a science-fiction, *and* a post-apoc story, all in one. the secret hero of every Star Wars film is the Death Star, which is Gestell + Death Wish. in 40K it becomes the Emprah, and all that follows from him, his awesome Undead Will.

but the developers of FF6 were on to something much more interesting, because they recognized what this portended. it's there in Annihilation also, peak BwO as genuine existential threat, the place where no void is. even the Tao has a pair of mutually opposed voids, each in one containing the secret of the other, and this is there in Hegel also, and in other places. Process and Reality gives you an alternative to the annihilating law of I AM, which is what is perfectly illustrated by Kefka, in a story even worse than Dostoevsky's, in some sense. the total command - even if it is a complete openness - binds and enslaves utterly. it paralyzes, because it admits of no question and no mystery.

McCarthy's Judge Holden is the purest form of literary evil ever represented, imho, and Kefka is not on his level. that's fine. the Judge is the Judge of all irony, and all sincerity. Kefka has more for me to work with because his is a commentary on the fundamental danger of a slippage between all signs themselves, the last laugh being both apocalyptic and humorless, and given in a world of Ruin. DFW understood this also, the impossibility of founding a new culture on a pure irony. it leads only to meltdown, and to Meltdown.

it is 100% as you say:

>In FF6 in the final face-off against Kefka the party members describe their reasons for being there: their personal investments into those who they love and the world around them. They have faced hell manifested as apocalypse, and posses radical sincerity, which is contrasted by Kefka's indifferent, ironic nihilism.

(cont'd)

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>For some time now the idea of an infinite universe has been hypothesized, a universe that has lost all centre as well as any figure that could be attributed to it; but the essence of the Baroque is that it is given unity, through a projection that emanates from a summit as a point of view. For some lime the world has been understood on a theatrical basis, as a dream, an illusion - as Harlequin's costume, as Leibniz would say.

>But the essence of the Baroque entails neither falling into nor emerging from illusion but rather realizing something in illusion itself, or of tying it to a spiritual presence that endows its spaces and fragments with a collective unity. The prince of Hamburg, and all of Kleist's characters, are not so much Romantic as they are Baroque heroes. Prey to the giddiness of minute perceptions, they endlessly reach presence in illusion, in vanishment, in swooning, or by converting illusion into presence: Penthesilea-Theresa?

>The Baroque artists know well that hallucination does not feign presence, but that presence is hallucinatory.