/lit/ - Literature

>>11339258
it's actually a quotation from Parallax View. Reproduced in full:

>Perhaps, however, we should risk a different approach, and read Plato’s parable as a myth in Lévi-Straussian sense, so that we have to look for its meaning not through direct interpretation but, rather, by locating it in a series of variations: that is, by comparing it with other variations on the same story. The elementary frame of so-called “postmodernism” can in fact be conceived as a network of three modes of inversion of Plato’s allegory. First,there is the inversion of the meaning of the central source of light (sun): what if this center is a kind of Black Sun, a terrifying monstrous Evil Thing, and for this reason impossible to sustain? Second, what if (along the lines of Peter Sloterdijk’s Spheres) we invert the meaning of the cave: it is cold and windy out in the open, on the earth’s surface, too dangerous to survive there, so people themselves decided to dig out the cave to find a shelter/home/sphere? In this way, the cave appears as the first model of building a home, a safe isolated place of dwelling—building one’s cave is what distinguishes us from the beasts, it is the first act of civilization....

>Finally, there is the standard postmodern variation: the true myth is precisely the notion that, outside the theater of shadows, there is some “true reality” or a central Sun—all there is are different theaters of shadows and their endless interplay. The properly Lacanian twist to the story would have been that for us, within the cave, the Real outside can appear only as a shadow of a shadow, as a gap between different modes or domains of shadows. It is thus not simply that substantial reality disappears in the interplay of appearances; what happens in this shift, rather, is that the very irreducibility of the appearance to its substantial support, its “autonomy” with regard to it, engenders a Thing of its own, the true “real Thing.”

>>11248879
>>11250061

>For Lacan, there is no end to this story, it continues on dialectically, the subject absolutely able to change the Symbolic world around is, fundamentally unable to alter the forms of its own constitution. The impossible will happen, things will change, but what we can read from this ending is that the subject cannot. The radical change is always too traumatic for the subject, to close to the means of its constitution. And so while the Symbolic can be radically altered, the split in the subject will always return, along with it, this potential for greatness and its inexorable madness.

there is always being because being can't let go itself, can't take that plunge of absolute erasure