/lit/ - Literature

what was the part you were having difficulty with? maybe post some of it here.

>s there any more understandable book?

it kind of depends on what particular subjects you're looking for. there's mauss, bataille, eliade...lots of others.

this one is pretty nice to just read without so much of the philosophical stuff going on.

>>11096035
>>11096103
Why does everyone interested in Girard type like Girardfag?

>>11097847
cuz he's like the only pomo guy whos unironically catholic, sure foucault was raised catholic but as an adult he only kept the sodomy part

Read a better book on paleolithic violence

>>11096035
The best book of him is the interview he made with two other guys. I can't remember the title but you should be able to find it with this information. It gives a good overview of his thought

>>11098073
>but as an adult he only kept the sodomy part
my sides

>>11098204
Meant for>>11097868

>>11098173

>>11098494
Exactly

>>11097847
Because they all mimetically desire being girardfag

Do Bataille or Agamben have anything to do with Girard's ideas?

>>11098821
You could probably draw some parallels between agamben's homo sacer, and the girardian scapegoat, but I don't know enough about agamben to comment

>>11097868
priceless

>>11097847
in this case one is girardfag

>>11098699
>tfw you mimetically desire being yourself?
>you actually don't tho. this is to become a fatal meme

>>11098821
>>11098821
i'd say so. you're going to wind up in that interesting space thinking about love, eros, violence, death, value and god. pic rel has interesting stuff to say about both foucault and agamben. one thing i have taken away from his books is that our present society is basically predicated on burning away precisely that which it needs to sustain it - that is, love.

when we make people into worthless drones predicated on happiness and achievement we wind up in a bad place: it's almost as if the situation requires a kind of human/psychic sacrifice in order to sustain itself, but eventually the human being you are sacrificing to capital just doesn't even have within them the requisite mana to make sacrifice meaningful.

>Agamben utterly fails to notice the topological change of power that lies at the basis of the society of sovereignty’s transformation into achievement society. From a standpoint at the middle of the society of achievement, Agamben describes the society of sovereignty. Therein lies the anachronism of his thinking. The dynamic that he traces is burdened by his anachronistic focus on negativity based entirely on exclusion and inhibition. Accordingly, he cannot grasp the violence of positivity, which expresses itself as the exhaustion and inclusion that characterize the society of achievement. Because Agamben devotes his attention exclusively to secularized forms of negativity that seem more archaic than ever, extreme phenomena of positivity escape him. Today violence issues more readily from the conformism of consensus than from the antagonism of dissent. In this sense—contra Habermas—one might speak of the violence of consensus.

han doesn't reference girard too much. but it's part of the same thing i think. i don't want to speculate too much on agamben's concepts b/c i'm not really too familiar with them, but han definitely has some cool thoughts on him. and this connects to bataille too, i think: in archaic societies, human sacrifice itself was this ultimate and tragic gift. we know what girard thinks about that. what han is asking is whether or not in a burnout society that ultimate gift has actually enough potency in it to be worth anything to a labor system predicated on preying upon your drives, and which has already made all of that transparent. it's almost as if by the time you are ready to sacrifice yourself it would only be a kind of inevitability.

so it's like you have these overlapping/venn paradigms to look at the phenomenon of sacrifice: the archaic, the christian, and the labor/capitalist/burnout. the human being underwrites all three, but the concepts shift over time. there is eros and thanatos all the way through but its meaning and value shift over time.

it's a really, really interesting question.

>>11099273
based

>>11099273
just to carry this slightly further: consider that phrase, 'the violence of consensus,' w/r/t girard's notions of mimetic desire and envy.

when you are forced to envy - either by a kind of soft coercion (you should be doing something better with your life!) or by seduction (come on, you really want this phone/cheeseburger/sexbot) you can grow a kind of a scar tissue over your own psyche or libido. excess pleasure leads to burnout in the end, but that pleasure is what lies at the root of our whole neoliberal society. much as zizek has said, and baudrillard also intuited.

*forced positivity* - that's a huge idea. and i think you can feel it everywhere. the consumer society runs on the capture and perpetual recirculation of your libido, your bliss, jouissance, ideology - but the really dark side of this comes later on, when you feel burned out, and then you realize that maybe even the ultimate sacrifice, human sacrifice, isn't really worth it anymore because it's already been sacrificed a hundred thousand times, in tiny little ways, in all those microtransactions.

this is the thing that's crazy to think about. pornography annihilates any concept of eros by making everything transparent, convenient, accessible, and disposable. what's *actually* been made transparent, convenient, accessible, and disposable is *you* - but, ofc, we all sort of know or suspect this already.

in an archaic order, a human sacrifice was brutal but it was *meaningful.* girard will say that christ's sacrifice was brutal and extra-meaningful in that sense also, that it overturned the old mythic patterns in this revelatory way. but in a late-capitalist and largely secularized world, the real gut-punch comes when we are still sacrificing ourselves *ironically,* or cynically, and still thinking we can get something back from it. we can't - and wasn't that the point? we wanted happiness, pleasure, bliss, and so on, and we got it - or some shade of it - through ideology and consumption. this process burns us out. as much as any drug addiction or vice eventually winds up consuming us.

religious ideas always skew imperfectly with neoliberal sensibilities. at the bottom we are still driven by sex and death, but this is where the idea of a *forced positivity* comes in, and you can see this everywhere in the forced smiles, grimaces, and fake applause at whatever it is the contemporary consumer society grinds out of you for the spectacle. we wind up in a death-waltz with illusion in this way. so we don't necessarily want to go back to a pre-rational order, where we say, 'human sacrifice is meaningful again!' - because that would be fucking barbaric. but for the time being, we're in this other place, of going, 'yeah, human sacrifice is worth nothing. fuck it.' and this will sap your will to live in another entirely predictable form.

if we consent to become shithead hobgoblins bent only upon satisfaction and happiness we kind of get what we deserve in the end.

>>11098821
Agamben is heavily influenced by Schmitt, and I'm pretty sure that Girard is as well, so you could likely find some common ground there.

>>11099644
schmitt/agamben is an important connection.

>Homo sacer originally meant someone excluded from society because of a trespass. One may kill him without suffering punishment. The sovereign disposes of absolute power to suspend the standing legal order. He embodies the legislative power that stands outside of legal order yet maintains a relation with it. Thus, the sovereign does not need to be right to determine rights The state of exception, by suspending the legal order, produces a lawless space where it is possible for any and every individual to be seized absolutely. Sovereignty’s originary achievement is to have produced the bare life of homo sacer. This life is bare because it stands outside the legal order and therefore can be destroyed at any time.

>According to Agamben, human life becomes political only when it is incorporated into the power of sovereignty—that is, when it experiences “unconditional subjection to a power of death.” Bare, expendable life and the power of sovereignty generate each other: “Contrary to our modern habit of representing the political realm in terms of citizens’ rights, free will, and social contracts, from the point of view of sovereignty, only bare life is authentically political.”25 “Life exposed to death” is the “originary political element.” The “Urphänomen of politics” is the injunction that produces the “bare life of homo sacer.” Sovereignty and the bare life of homo sacer occupy the two endpoints of the same spectrum. For the sovereign, all human beings are potentially homines sacri.”

so tldr based byung chul han for connecting some of these dots. and there's more on sovereignty and sacrifice in bataille also.

so the question becomes, where does the sovereign go in the burnout society? maybe it's nowhere, and what we learn is that we are absolutely capable of oppressing ourselves in the absence of one even more effectively than we could with the presence of a sovereign.

i chose pic rel because it suggests this image of defeat, in this way. but for a thought experiment, consider the following: a sort of mash-up between atlas shrugged and the grand inquisitor. john galt returns, full of heroic individualism, and is given the same ear-piercing screech by some corporate middle manager that the inquisitor once gave to christ: we don't need you anymore. we will contain your message of molden gold within the crucible of cold iron that is virtuality. nobody can possibly love capitalism that much. it's a spook. and all that has happened is that we have become enslaved to the idea of an impossible achievement that makes us feel just as guilty, in a secular way, as christ once made us feel when we believed in him.

it's the becoming-worthless of people that is really a problem for everyone. like ecological disaster for the soul, which has been intensively farmed into exhaustion like any other cash crop.

>>11099644
>>11100229

and here's how BCH wraps up the story:

>Concern about living the good life yields to the hysteria of surviving. The reduction of life to biological, vital processes makes life itself bare and strips it of all narrativity. It takes livingness from life, which is much more complex than simple vitality and health. The mania for health emerges when life has become as flat as a coin and stripped of all narrative content, all value. Given the atomization of society and the erosion of the social, all that remains is the body of the ego, which is to be kept healthy at any cost. The loss of ideal values leaves, other than the exhibition value of the ego, only health value behind. Bare life makes all teleology vanish—every in-order-to that would give reason to remain healthy. Health becomes self-referential and voids itself into purposiveness without purpose.

>The life of homo sacer in achievement society is holy and bare for another reason entirely. It is bare because, stripped of all transcendent value, it has been reduced to the immanency of vital functions and capacities, which are to be maximized by any and all means. The inner logic of achievement society dictates its “The inner logic of achievement society dictates its evolution into a doping society. Life reduced to bare, vital functioning is life to be kept healthy unconditionally. Health is the new goddess. That is why bare life is holy.

>The homines sacri of achievement society also differ from those of the society of sovereignty on another score. They cannot be killed at all. Their life equals that of the undead. They are too alive to die, and too dead to live.

such a being really winds up lacking even the power for self-sacrifice. and why should it be any other way? if you sacrifice everything else in the world to yourself under the sign of whatever bullshit agenda makes you feel good, why would it be any other way?

it all makes sense. what has been bought? some invisible record of debt that mysteriously moves the world. the soul in blockchain. it's said that writing itself is only formed to keep account of grain transactions. maybe the skynet future we wind up with will be formed around a similar principle: it's just who owes what to whom on a transcendental ledger.

>>11099273
is burnout society BCH's best?

>>11100348
man, it's *pretty fucking good.* like 11/10 if you are into reading this kind of stuff. no wonder he's a star. he moved directly into my Read Absolutely Everything category really, really quickly.

from what i understand, that was the book that made him a big star. i've looked at a bunch of his stuff and it's mainly these short, nuanced essays on these various topics.

so i'm not expert, just kind in love with this man. it's all part of the big conversation tho. or like a glass bead game, maybe, in which most of the beads are just variously black.

and he's one of those guys i wouldn't have learned about without /lit/, bless this glorious board. ugh. the love i feel for this place sometimes.

so it's definitely not the worst place to begin, as far as i can tell. han is a total champion.

>>11100379
i think i'll marathon it now

Psychopolitics sounds quite good as well...everything he's written sounds interesting

>>11100397
it really is. totally worth reading. he's just one of those guys out there, i guess, who has digested all of this stuff and gone on Not Being Satisfied. like that joke maron has about the popcorn kernels at the bottom of the bag that don't pop, the ones with integrity. it's really just a kind of *relief* to discover writers like this who are insanely resilient to the Spectacle.

because there seems to me that there has been some kind of bizarro polarity reversal going on that's almost impossible to articulate. it's the crossing of the streams between marxism and liberalism, and the subsequent production of the control society that feeds on positivism in this way. zizek said it also - Enjoy. that is the thing. and land has said it culminates in teleoplexy. heidegger's metaphysics of production and all of the stuff that brings you to a lacanian shrink, baudrillard's society of simulation, all these various guys. and han has digested all of that stuff and drawn the conclusions: burnout. that is what it is.

so for what it's worth i completely endorse that marathoning. the rest of the world is going absolutely fucking berserk right now trying to harness or control everything that leads to that burnout in one way or another, and it's not going to work. but the days in which you discover writers who really do grasp the bigger, wider, secret picture are days on which the sun does well and truly shine. that's how it feels to me, anyways. and it's basically why i read these guys anyways: sometimes you don't even know what the proverbial words trapped in the body actually *are* until somebody else fucking nails it.

based af han. approval rating: maximal.

i'll never have girard, land, baudrillard, han, deleuze, lacan, heidegger and nietzsche in a room together to sort out what the fuck has happened to the world. but man would i be happy to fucking bring coffee to that glass bead game.

>>11100229
Hey. I'm the guy you originally responded to. Thanks for the detailed response. I hadn't heard of Han before, but he sounds really interesting, and I'll definitely check him out. Based on the people he's influenced by, it seems like he's combining a lot of different ideas from a wide variety of political traditions/schools of thought. I really like syncretic stuff like that. It's what impressed me so much when I first read Agamben, in particular.

Out of curiosity, have you read any of Gianni Vattimo's stuff? Obviously I don't endorse everything he says, but his stuff on negativity and hermeneutic nihilism strikes me as being pretty interesting/potentially useful.

>>11100655
no probs senpai. and actually i'm super-fucking pleased that you brought up abamben and schmitt in the first place, because that really really helped to connect some dots on this. it just so happened that i was reading han when you asked and so it was one of those perfect storm situations. part of why /lit/ is so fucking based, it /lit/erally helps you think

i haven't read vattimo although he's one of those names that comes up now and again. it would actually be great if you would talk more about what's interesting to you in this regard. what's he saying? what makes it useful?

i really think a kind of a glass bead game or map is a cool thing to think about. it's like what zizek says about marx: we've taken the eleventh thesis too far and it's time go back to interpretation. i totally agree on this, and a lot of the current wave of madness going on today is related to this unrestrained impulse. i would call it viral mimesis, and you can see - to keep it thematic - the impulse to scapegoating going on.

>and this is also why i should really, really, really fucking stop caring about what the MSM is doing/thinking/whatevering. because the real story is the philosophy story. the rest is just fucking trench warfare

so yeah, anyways. talk about vattimo? that would be cool. what are you endorsing/not endorsing?

>>11100820
I guess Vattimo's notion of "weak thought" and the political uses he puts it to are what I find most interesting/potentially useful in his work. He wants to push back against a strong, foundationalist metaphysics because of the potential for totalitarianism he see as inherent in that sort of thought. He gives this interesting (and kind of beautiful, in my opinion) description of metaphysics as "the ultimate foundation in the face of which there can only be silence or admiration." I would tie that conception of metaphysics into the critiques of the technocratic, managerial style of government that seems to underlie a lot of policy-making these days. I think Schmitt delivered a brilliant critique of the "religion of technicity" and the secularized - but still fundamentally religious and teleological - notion of progress that seems to have spawned it. He does that particularly well in "The Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticizations", which you should definitely check out if you haven't done so. It's a very well written and argued little essay (16 pages, I think) in the style that Schmitt was so adept at.

Connecting that back to Vattimo, I like that he doesn't seem to view politics as a technology, or as a problem/set of problems with definitive solutions and an established decision procedure that will help us reach them. The idea of hermeneutic nihilism is that we're constantly re-inventing ourselves/our politics, and opening up new horizons and forms of life, without ever claiming that we've achieved an ideal state of existence, or a "final politics".
There are a bunch of Deweyans in my uni's philosophy department, and they're constantly going on about the necessity of certain political values (liberal democratic ones, typically) for science, philosophy, etc., and making really (I think) sloppy and contentious claims about how we can verify certain values as being the "right" ones. They're comfortable talking about "moral expertise" and shit like that. They seem to view themselves as social/moral engineers, technocrats, and experts who are capable of guiding people towards the "good life" and using science to build an objectively ideal society. It honestly drives me up the wall, because it seems to engender the sort of technocratic, totalitarian attitude that people like Schmitt, Foucault, Vattimo, and perhaps Han (you can probably help me out here) were so concerned about. It's a freezing over of discourse, an injunction to "silence or admiration" in the face of a final metaphysics that I actually fucking despise. I like that Vattimo has this negative, as opposed to positive conception of emancipation and freedom, where it's just a matter of freeing us from old assumptions about the necessity of certain ways of living, as opposed to making positive claims/prescribing new and "proper" forms of life.

Sorry this is so disorganised and scattered, by the way. It's basically a reflection of my own thoughts on the matter at present.

>>11096035
no, its extremely simple semiotics, cult anth and intuitive thinking. If you find Girard esoteric you're a brainlet

>>11100820
Regarding what I'm less sure about in Vattimo, I have concerns about the hermeneutic approach. In particular, I'm concerned about the degree to which it's potentially anthropocentric, or may rely on anthropocentric concepts, practices, and ways of viewing the world. I want to avoid that, so I guess I'd rather just collapse Vattimo's "hermeneutic nihilism" into straight nihilism. I'd also like to retain a realist metaphysics, and I don't want to go the route of many contemporary Heideggerians/Wittgensteinians by adopting a hermeneutic ontology/metaphysics. I think that we can remain realists about metaphysics without making the further claim that we can ground ethical and political claims/systems in our understanding of the structure of reality. I think people like Schmitt and Agamben would probably agree with that. I really like their (and Foucault's) advocacy of a turn towards a more descriptive political theory, where instead of evaluating everything from within a normative political framework from the start, we focus more on describing conditions on the ground, and using our technical knowledge to devise "solutions" to these problems in a more limited, temporary sense. We never assume that we've established the "correct" political system, overcome politics itself, or reached (or are even directed towards) the "end of history". Instead, we just focus on piecemeal problem-solving and patchworking, maintain an attitude of epistemic and ontological humility/healthy skepticism, and try not to remain stuck in old modes of thought.

Again, sorry if this is all really scattered. I'm just typing shit out stream of consciousness and I haven't really had time to organise my thoughts on this.

>>11101138
>schmitt
sweet, will read presently. the religion of technicity is heidegger's diagnosis as well.

what heidegger worried would happen to philosophy after nietzsche seems to have come to pass: total plasticization of the world, the self, everything. now i'm a deleuze fan also, and so more than a little compromised in this way. after all, becoming a squishy BwO doesn't necessarily mean transforming the world into standing-reserve, but it could be used in a cynical form for precisely that reason. there was a reason why badiou opposed him so vociferously on this.

the profs at your school would i suspect get under my skin as well, precisely because what winds up happening is a kind of politics of infinite deferral. the objectively ideal society isn't compatible with what may be at the bottom just a materialistic world view in denial. this is what really attracted me to land and acceleration: are people really championing democracy and the open society, or are they only valorizing a system that (for the time being) provides them with what they really want, which is capital and security? land thinks so. he's the master of marxist suspicion like that and i have a hard time disagreeing with him. you wind up with a *soft totalitiarianism* - the Cathedral, in other words.

acceleration was the corrosive acid for postmodernity that i really needed to think about. at bottom i am a kind of existential humanist. i believe that heidegger nailed something essential about being-in-the-world. 100%. but the metaphysics of production/capital plunge ahead anyways. so we have been developing a kind of strange bedfellows alliance between marxism and liberalism that only amounts to the control society in the end, which deleuze predicted. but underneath this is the suffering of the individual, who *really is predicated around a negative* that capital cannot fill in and a neoliberal society cannot ever make truly happy. the problem, however, is that that increasingly seems to become *his* problem, and not the problem of society. consumption takes over the consumer. hence land's attraction to corporate formalism as a way of controlling this schizophrenic inner engineer and optimizing drive. i find it a very powerful argument, but it's not cheerful and more than a little desperate. it longs for *closure* and that is probably why i am attracted to it. but closure in philosophy is probably to be resisted. it feeds totalitarianism. i try to remind myself of this.

we can see the effects of this 'freezing over of discourse. we switched from being an ironic/decadent society into being a puritanical one - sometimes at the same time. land can i think sometimes be prescriptive when he thinks he is being descriptive.

anyways, no apologies necessary for being scattered and so on. /lit/ is not a peer-reviewed journal, this place is made for guilt-free ventilating.

and frankly, you are more than welcome to call me a blowhard fuckface at any time as well.

(cont'd).

>>11101227
and there something disagreeable about anthropocentrism. there's nothing essentially beautiful about humans just as they are. we are inwardly obligated to become better and not worse versions of ourselves for reasons that i'm not sure can even be articulated, let alone turned into axioms. our whole being is contingent and it is perhaps the feeling of this contingency that drives us towards authoritarianism in crunch times. but that's definitely a suboptimal form of politics, whatever its charms are in crisis.

>we just focus on piecemeal problem-solving and patchworking, maintain an attitude of epistemic and ontological humility/healthy skepticism, and try not to remain stuck in old modes of thought.

yep. a kind of liberal/libertarian pragmatism and an open society is the way to go. it is the thing that's under siege right now, and i'm trying to consciously will myself not to empathize too much with the forces on either extreme of the political spectrum that are chiseling away at it.

i think it has to do with some recoil from several intense decades of marxist theory combined with global capitalism and the technology as well. it's easy to *lose* yourself in the contemplation of the polis, and virtue ethics and classical humanism has been chainsawed by social theory. in some parts for the better, but it also seems like a good time to consider some salvage ops. do we *want* a control society? many do. do we want an absolutely transparent Google-polis? it could be an option.

there's shit-tons of stuff to think about in this regard. han writes very convincingly about burnout for this reason, that a society of total transparency and control burns its citizens out completely, in the end. i agree with a lot of that. and quite frankly the control society - however dystopian - also seems to contain within it the possibility of resembling something like roddenberry's starfleet or banks' culture (pardon the SF references, but i kind of depend on them sometimes).

what kind of society do we want? the ideals of liberalism are for the time being a kind of rainbow, but it's not tenable as such for long. i really think if a political left wants to remain viable, it actually should borrow or at least read into some of moldbug's ideas on patchwork and other things. the contingent nature of capitalist realities - maybe something here that’s more interesting than fisher’s total Capitalist Realism? - means that one can de-abstract a little bit and can think in a more constructive way. micropolitics > macropolitics. maybe a wiser balance comes out of stealing the best from the extremes. utopia is really an incredibly powerful and seductive idea.

marxist-freudian theory and its descendents can describe, really well, the nature of alienation that we all feel at some point. what we don't know is if the 'cure' for that alienation can be found in the same way. i keep finding more and more room for nondual religion in a lot of stuff that i think.

>>11096035
Jersey fucking shits!

>>11101550
Go get your shinebox, pal

>>11101494
Thanks, blowhard fuckface. ;) Feel free to return the favour if you think I'm talking out my ass at any point. What I like most in Land (as well as Vattimo, Foucault, and some of the other "crazy post-structuralists") is his ditching of humanism. The conception of a static of "improvable" (in an absolute sense) human nature endowed with prescriptive content is, from what I can see, another result of the crude secularization of pre-enlightenment religious ideas about humanity and teleology, and the awkward result of an attempt to translate these ideas into scientific language. I think Foucault does a great job of tracing out the lineage of these ideas in "The Order of Things". His analysis and criticism of the human sciences is a large part of why I'm so critical and suspicious of the "critical" and "emancipatory" frameworks that seem to underlie a lot of the analyses and claims made in contemporary social sciences. It seems that a lot of the political and social movements we're seeing at present (particularly on the left, though I think a similar analysis could be provided for the right as well, with a few modifications) are basically the unsightly result of attempts to fuse the social and political outlook of critical theory and its descendents (queer theory, critical race theory, postcolonial theory, etc.) with the arguments and theoretical tools of the post-structuralists (Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, and co.). They want the positive "emancipatory" outlook of the former, and they try to argue for it with the thworetical tools of the latter. This really bothers me, because I think they're ignoring the radical conclusions that the arguments/thepractical tools they're employing lead to. Foucault's analysis of power relations demonstrates that there is no clear binary between oppressed and oppressor. Derrida's critique of the "metaphysics of presence" undercuts the notion of a "lived-experience" that is present to consciousness, and can be relied on as a foundation for our theories and practice. The two of them together absolutely demolish the Marxian epistemology that places certain people in a position of epistemic privilege as a result of their supposed "dual view" of society. Take that away, and on what basis can you claim that you're uncovering the "true, oppressive nature" of a society or system? I say this, not because I think that this current mephitic politics of resentment (and ressentiment, in the Nietzschean sense) will collapse under it's contradictions. It probably won't. I just prefer political systems and ideologies that have some semblance of intellectual coherence.

>>11101494
Regarding what you said about the current, technocratic politics of control (the transparent Google-opolis, as you nicely put it), I absolutely agree that it's a viable possibility, and probably one that many people desire. It's just not one that I have any desire to be a part of. I'd like an alternative. Preferably one that is somewhat democratic, or at least wouldn't subject me to the caprices of dictator, or the edicts of a group of bureaucratic "New Class" types, who think they deserve to guide society based on their knowledge of management theory, or some similar shit. Unfortunately, there don't seem to be too many alternatives given the way things are going at present. I honestly have no idea where I would go if that's the direction things continued in.

On Heidegger and Schmitt, I prefer Schmitt's critique of technicity, because he seems to have a less essentialist view of technology. Basically, the impression I got from reading him was that he thinks it is precisely because technology is politically neutral that it can't help us solve our political dilemmas. It has no normative content whatsoever, and is freely usable by anybody, for pretty much any purpose. That's why it can't give us what we want so badly: final solutions to our political problems. It's interesting, since Schmitt and Heidegger seem to arrive at the same place from opposite directions. Also, regarding your ideas about religion, you might find Schmitt's "Political Theology" interesting if you haven't looked into it already. Telos (the journal) has a bunch of interesting papers on Schmitt and secular/post-secular pokitical thought as well. If you can get access to any of them, they're quite interesting to read.

Finally, on Deleuze, I don't know nearly as much as I'd like to about him. Given my Sellarsian leanings, as well as my affection for Brassier's work, I think I would position myself in opposition to Deleuze, at least when it comes to his apparent vitalist tendencies. I'm really sympathetic to the work in embodied cognition (particularly Chemero and Dreyfus' stuff) that uses Heidegger and Deleuze for inspiration, but I want to avoid stuff like experiential givenism, and from what I understand of Deleuze's work, he pretty heavily endorses that. It's definitely a problem for me, but I still think that Deleuze potentially has a lot to offer, even if it's just in terms of showing me what I want to avoid, or serving as the best and most rigorous foil for my position.

great thread.

>>11101542
What is it specifically that attracts you to this style of work? It feels very loose, building narratives around intuited ideas by applying them metaphorically across domains: so maybe a lot of nonsense

>>11100473
>writers who really do grasp the bigger, wider, secret picture
Which writers and works would those be? I read Yuga by Marty Glass, and I enjoyed it in a delightfully terrifying kind of way.

mystikos here

my foray into catholicism is going poorly. i miss mass and confession is rare. instead i hang out with starry eyed dreamer seeking jouissance in a final drunken word or cigarette. i even smoke pot when i read these days.

but enough about me, on to theory...

i am checking out foucault's hermeneutics of the subject. hadot really reinforced my philosophical rebirth and reawakening to the classical world. my own personal renaissance, if you will. but i am also moving onto the harder modern questions again. hence this book, which (haven't read it) involves hadot's notion of bios and the creation of the ancient subject.

still need to read more sloterdijk. read the short kindle meditation and feel like he's a smarter me.

my analytic friend was complaining about badiou's mistaken ontology. "the map is not the territory" but we never see the territory, we just encounter better maps, unless colin wilson's faculty x is real and we have direct access to the noumenal.

i've been bothered recently of the association of perennialism and traditionalism with far-right ideology. is religion inherently reactionary? i feel most religionist tendencies are somehow ur-fascist as eco might say.

i wish for a new religion to bind us together but that would be an even scarier Cathedral. still, at least we make it to the stars in 40k.

america is coming apart. the religious and the irreligious are coming to a head. or maybe it's the libs and the cons. the sides are somewhere in the intersection.

but what next? i like the mushroom at the end of the world book even if i am confused as to why it's not about terrence mckenna. i also like capitalist realism. nice soft deleuzeanism. custom reality and you. pretty woke if not professional. neoreaction: a basilisk is the only serious treatment i've seen of land and nrx so far. bit overly concerned with pwning but good.

i like esoteric and spiritual practices tho. i am very superstitious. aren't we all? i want my science and my superstitions to live in harmony.

and i want people to be more connected. i think lack is not inherent like lacan. there is a faculty X insofar as there are moments of satiation of the Will. like being in love. tinder and hyperamory doesn't work. it's causing issues. hence my concern that there might be some beneficial techniques in what confucius say about family and relationships and subservience. tho i'd pepper in a little buddhism and daoism (and catholicism for my mom's sake) as well.

i guess the solution is mostly pluralism. i'm also trying to read hardt and negri's assembly. but i feel like so little is applicable to me as an american. how can anyone be diverse with our two-party system?

Mimesis - is it bad? I want to imitate my grandfather.

>>11097847
Immitating girardfag is funny.
>>11097868
Derrida might've been, but we don't know.
Judging solely from his philosophy he definitely was, but there's all sorts of biases there from me.

>>11102295
>is religion inherently reactionary?
All religions hold the belief of an Absolute Truth in the center of their doctrine that is unchanging, timeless, and infinite that doesn't capitulate to the spirit of the times. Any concessions by such a religion are considered to be a secularization and a degeneration of the doctrines.

>>11102397
> Derrida, known Heideggerian french-algerian jew, was a Catholic

>>11102435
Deconstruction is literally 'and the last shall be the first'.
That's a proper use of literally.
Still, biased analysis, etc.
Also Heidegger was literally married and buried a catholic.

sup lads, girardfag here. i want to respond in depth to some of the posts in this thread - >>11101988
>>11102115
>>11102271
>>11102269
>>11102295

and continue this fine conversation but i'm not going to be able to tonight, or at least not until much later tonight. peace and love and happiness and rainbow-shitting necromantic hr giger unicorns to all until then.

>>11102450
Yes, but Heidegger's entire philosophy is at odds with "the Catholic system" (his own words) and closer to Luther. It's interesting how it looks like he ended up reconciled with the Catholic church but if you think Heidegger and Derrida are Catholic, you need to "do your homework."

>you’re shitting me, right? 1/6?
>nope
>sigh

1/6
>>11101988
so this whole post is a picture-perfect example of why acceleration matters. it really is. as you say:

>Foucault's analysis of power relations demonstrates that there is no clear binary between oppressed and oppressor. Derrida's critique of the "metaphysics of presence" undercuts the notion of a "lived-experience" that is present to consciousness, and can be relied on as a foundation for our theories and practice. The two of them together absolutely demolish the Marxian epistemology that places certain people in a position of epistemic privilege as a result of their supposed "dual view" of society. Take that away, and on what basis can you claim that you're uncovering the "true, oppressive nature" of a society or system?

you my man have crushed it out of the park. that is exactly the state of things. couldn’t agree more. and the craziest part about this is that this is the thing that has become real. i think it’s exactly what drives the current hysteria on the left: you wind up being forced to recognize the completely hysterical self-oppression of the other. totally fucking crazy. and self-driving. and nobody knows what to do. we really don’t have a Board of Sanity in the world - that was what the universities (in theory?) were once supposed to do. and previous to that, the church. today, what is it? in india there have been gurus forver and some of them are still interesting. in the west, recently at least, we have peterson. we can see for ourselves how well this is going. he’s clearly saying *something* that people want to hear, but…well, look at the reception. look at how well this is going.

in any sane world peterson would allowed to just say what it is that he wants to say in whatever corner of the university he wanted to say it in, and that would be that. but something has gone spectacularly rotten in the state of denmark. the irony of postmodernity is that what begins as, supposedly, the fabled ‘skepticism about metanarrative’ has now morphed into a total obligation to obey a *single* metanarrative. that is amazing. or is it just totally obvious? universities are now becoming the last places you want to go to look for a diversity of opinions. and the thing is, if you can’t get that there, you really aren’t going to get it anywhere else. not in the news. so what the fuck do you do?

the frustration you feel with these things i share also. and it took me fucking forever to figure out why that was. and the thing is that there actually is no guarantee that the politics of ressentiment necessarily even *will* collapse. maybe they just fucking grow and grow and sprout hydra-heads. could be. it's why i wound up finding a kinship with girard on these kinds of points: sometimes wars are just the names of events where we create a whole lot of fucking ruined lives and bodies. they don't necessarily accomplish anything except to finish off a process of scapegoating.

2/6
>>11102115
i feel the same way about that civilization. i don't really want to be a part of it either. ironically iw really would be a kind of hive-mind communism that you can imagine as just being the natural end-goal of a Facebook Universe:

>Like is the digital Amen. When we click Like, we are bowing down to the order of domination. The smartphone is not just an effective surveillance apparatus; it is also a mobile confessional. Facebook is the church – the global synagogue (literally, ‘assembly’) of the Digital.” - bc han

so i do *not* believe that tech is politically neutral, although i recognize in this a totally consistent ideology, but that it can be, like capital, an accelerator of cultural progress. whatever people want, techonomics gives it to them faster. but i'm also not a neoreactionary. the right way for societies to track themselves forward is by avoiding dystopias than by shooting for utopias. dystopias are like black holes, self-positing centers of ideological gravity in this way. totalitarianism takes the paradoxical nature of political life and, by placing it at its core, mobilizes fear and paranoia for ideological action. utopias may really only be just contingent exceptions to dystopia (and, even then, sadly, freedom may only be an illusion).

>deleuze
you're in for a treat if you haven't explored him. he's super fun. especially if you're wont to get hung up on semiotic or other deadlocks, places where you just get stuck. then deleuze comes along: nope. not so much my man. prepare to become transcendental jelly. deleuze is one of those guys that i always have to remind myself will totally persuade me that the world conforms to his vision of things if i read him and so i have to be careful not to deviate too far. and he's a fucking outstanding reader of other philosophers as well. really, really good. recommended.

>schmitt
this quote:
>A grouping which sees on the one side only spirit and life and on the other only death and mechanism signifies nothing more than a renunciation of the struggle and amounts to nothing more than a romantic lament. For life struggles not with death, spirit not with spiritlessness; spirit struggles with spirit, life with life, and out of the power of an integral understanding of this arises the or- der of human things. An order is born from renewal.
that is a mic-drop for the ages right there. carl schmitt was such a fucking heavyweight. maybe we’re going through this paradigm shift. isn’t this the same thing that foucault recognizes in Order of Things? that *truth is paradigmatic* - we can’t really say what Truth is because it’s like the blind spot in the center of the frames that we keep opening up. but it doesn’t mean that we can just fall back into relativism and say, *oh well, here comes another paradigm shift* - because that’s not how paradigm shifts work. you wind up thinking you’re profound when in fact you’ve become absolutely pond-shallow.

3/6
>>11102115
>A magical religiosity became an equally magical technicity. The twentieth century began as the age not only of technology but of a religious belief in technology. It is often called the age of technology. But this is only a tentative char- acterization of the whole situation. The question of the significance of overwhelming technicity should for now be left open, because the belief in technology is in fact only the result of a certain tendency in the shifting of the central domain-as a belief, it is only the result of this shifting.

and you know who actually had a weirdly prescient view of this? i’m going to shill, in a somewhat contrarian fashion, for the underrated ken wilber here. yes, that guy. i know he has a checkered past and all of the ills that come with being a guru. but one thing he also intuited, and i think this is really subtle and interesting, was that there was an evolution of consciousness in this way, that people evolve and meaning and truth does too. we are presently engaged in a kind of race to the bottom, a race to find the lowest common denominator, and - guess what?- it’s ugly as fuck. it’s rape and it’s racism. but i think it’s because we’re looking in the wrong direction. we’re looking up our own asses instead of looking at the stars. it’s time to look at the stars again, to evolve a kind of perspective that isn’t based on cutting the grain of negativity as far as it can go. not necessarily to have a fuckhead romantic vision of star trek either. but partly because i think we’re staring into the abyss and it looks like viral mimeticism and the rage virus. universal oppression and a universalized inquisition into solving oppression in a vicious oroboros loop. it will come in the end to look like warhammer 40k: in the grim darkness of the far academic future there are only microaggressions.

but the oroboros is a sign of regeneration also…

the nineteenth century *was* economic to the core and the twentieth century was technological. no doubt the 21C will be as well. but maybe upheavals are a part of this process of discovering the limits of the holy grail mysteries we set for ourselves. and you can’t fix society without in some sense allowing for the evolution of the consciousness of those who live within it. no age has ever been properly able to digest paradigm shifts without upheaval, unrest and revolt. but we have to do it.

i don’t really know if the current age of Trump is necessarily telling us that red pills are the way forward from postmodernity. i think they say that something has gone terminally wrong with that world view. and what lies on the other side of this may in fact be a new and more enlightened thing.

or maybe just that hegel was right about everything. i don’t know.

4/6
>>11102269
>What is it specifically that attracts you to this style of work? It feels very loose, building narratives around intuited ideas by applying them metaphorically across domains: so maybe a lot of nonsense

i mean it’s a good question. it’s not like i want to be a kind of problem-solving guru or anything. i’m not qualified for that job, for one thing, and most gurus go off the deep end anyways. truly awakened and wise people are rare and precious. i’m more like a cub reporter of anxiety. i write a perpetually running column for the Oh My God We’re All Going To Die Times.

anxiety has always been a kind of preoccupation for me but something changed when i started to read some of the theorists and realize that *it wasn’t all just in my head.* i mean, some of it is. a lot of it is. but continental theorists were really good at helping me to explain the phenomenon of anxiety - why i felt it, what it was, where it came from, how it was wrapped up with language and a lot of other things and so on. i never intended to devote this much time to reading philosophy and thinking about it, i really didn’t. i always just kind of naively trusted that everything was good and well and all right in the world and that things would sort of naturally sort themselves out. i don’t know if i really believe that anymore. but i kind of believe in something about the mimetic nature of all things in this way, that it’s good to try and practice sanity, be sane, try and foster a little peace and friendliness in the world however you can. i don’t know where this impulse comes from. self-preservation is no doubt a part of it. but it’s not all of it. so, it’s a kind of a mystery, i guess.

so you’re right, it is intuitive. it absolutely is. it’s why i’ve been reluctant to try and make a living on it and i prefer to just shitpost here on /lit/ for now and kind of echolocate, even though it feels like wheel-spinning and has really frustrated some anons here on this board in the past. my own brand of shitposting really rubs some people the wrong way and when that happens i do feel kind of shitty about it. i don’t do this to grandstand for (you’s) or to feed my ego. i do it because i am just kind of obsessed with these questions and for the time being there’s not much else i can do with them. for what it’s worth.

empathy kind of sucks though. imagine if a lot of this is the transition to a kind of necessarily empathic civilization. where we are all in the mcluhanesque global village. mcluhan said it would be uncomfortable. i think he was right about that.

5/6
>>11102271
yuga is indeed a great book, i really enjoyed that one, and i only found out about it through /lit/ (and so praises be to /lit/ as per usual). the guys i like, in no particular order

-girard, obviously.
-heidegger
-baudrillard
-nietzsche
-deleuze
-lacan
-byung chul han.

i have this sobriquet of being girardfag becuase girard was the guy i was super-absorbed in when i came to /lit/ and started posting here, and because he really does have a pretty complete and worked out system. heidegger is probably my #2 guy. everybody can leap straight into continental philosophy by reading nietzsche, but heidegger is the guy who actually takes you out of being a discrete Fuck You I Got Mine monad and into a world which is not a matter of indifference. he has an incredible understanding of technology and *time.* he’s the foundational ontologist and many other things. and since i spend a lot of my time thinking, writing, or talking about anxiety and so on heidegger is the guy i find i go back to a lot.

for civilizational things, historical things, cultural things, girard is the guy because you can see desire, envy, scapegoating and so on everywhere. and also because he does this from a christian perspective also. questions of death and finitude, violence and sacrifice, all of this stuff - a sort of great tragic wheel of suffering - leads us to asking, so, what’s the point of all of this? what’s the ending? what’s the meaning? where does it stop? where did it began? things like this - i mean, girard has a pretty good and consistent answer for a lot of it. it began with a founding murder and it could just as easily end with apocalyptic blood feuds.

girard has one of the most interesting and nuanced rejoinders to nietzsche ever. as heidegger does also, it’s true. but nietzsche absolutely towers over the 20C and his shadow extends to the 21C as well. what girard offered was a view of things that presented the religious view as being one that was a continuance of and evolution from tragedy. and that’s a really fascinating idea. tragedy works well in situations of crisis, but you can see in our perma-trigged age: when *isn’t* there a crisis? this is the thing with modern progressivism. there is *always* a crisis in being, in your fractured subjectivity, and this is what JBP has been trying to say for a while: that this is in fact *natural.* and he’s right about that. but the reason why he garners so much hate is because he’s not quite sympathetic enough to the other side, and nor does he perhaps use some of the philosophers that might resonate a little more with audiences.

i think heidegger is absolutely essential. girard is not the heavyweight that he is, but that’s kind of a good thing, actually. and then really all of the big guys you hear about - derrida and foucault included. but we study literature and philosophy to *understand* tragedy - not to perpetuate it in the name of ideology.

6/6
>>11102295
sounds like you’ve got a shitload to read these days. you must feel like your head is coming apart. it’s a feeling i can relate to.

your reading list is ambitious as fuck. but there really is no other way to figure this stuff out, is there, except to cram this shit into our brains the old-fashioned way. we’re born just slightly too early for some matrix/posthuman technologies to make this all simpler for us.

i wish you the best of luck as always sir in playing that glass bead game. it feels like there’s too many beads sometimes, and not enough game…or maybe too few beads, and too much game?

>i've been bothered recently of the association of perennialism and traditionalism with far-right ideology. is religion inherently reactionary? i feel most religionist tendencies are somehow ur-fascist as eco might say.

i feel the same way on all of this. the question, i guess, is whether or not religious stuff is a brake on fascism or an enabler of it. consider the bhagavad gita - it was gandhi’s favorite book and himmler’s too. that’s a riddle. whatever its higher meaning is, it encompasses both of these poles.
>nah fuck that. gandhi > himmler and it’s not close.

i wish for that new religion too. i mean what is the appeal of 40k? Catholic Space Nazis. having an evil bug-swarm to smash immediately makes all the little things that divide people suddenly vanish. alan moore knew this conclusion also. when there’s a Greater Evil it’s a lot more easy to build human solidarity being part of the Lesser Evil. and isn’t this the problem today? people want to be on the side of the Greater Good but scapegoating is always required.

soft deleuzianism is probably a happy resting state. land is a warning and not a model to be followed. like nietzsche, he charts the depths and finds monsters down there. we can’t be surprised by this. but only hope that we find something better.

you’ve got tons of stuff going on as always my man. the glass bead game continues. you were right when you said this before, i think. it is about that. it’s about finding the harmonious arrangement, the music between the spheres. no one sphere alone will ever suffice. we always want more and more. but i think it’s that weird, mysterious, beautiful, abstract relationship among those points cosmic that makes it all worthwhile. no? there has to be something beautiful in all of this or there’s just no point.

>and...cut.

well lads that is an ungodly wall of textfaggery. i am mildly ashamed of having written that much but i guess it had to happen. this stuff belongs in an essay and not as walls of text on Veeky Forums, but…well. whatever. tonight i have drunk deeply of the cup of shitposting and feel mildly sick of myself now, to be honest. but cheers to all ITT as usual, bless the greatest board on the internet. thanks for letting me vent.

I haven't been on here in months but I thought I'd pop in this thread since it appears that Girardfag/Girardposter is still actively posting here.

>>11096103
I am reading this now and love it. It feels so intuitive and yet groundbreaking then the way he just starts expanding the system.

>>11103274
>‘skepticism about metanarrative
Give me a footnote on this.

>>11103563
that's very kind anon. i'm mostly subjecting another thread to a barrage of Feels From Beyond but i'm glad you enjoy. not as active as before but now and again

>>11103591
yep. it's a terrific little book. he loved literature and it shows.

>>11103668
could you be a little more specific?

http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Metanarrative

i mean the contemporary exponent of this idea is zizek. what he's calling ideology is more or less the same thing. all narratives, barring consciously experimental or avant-garde works, will have a metanarrative component. modernism in its earlier forms in the 20C was very interested in the meaning of language - that the map is not the territory and so on. later barthes, foucault, derrida and many others. out of this - although it is a much bigger story than i can describe here in a satisfying nutshell - came post-structuralism. language always means both more and less than what it says. so what do things really mean and so on.

please understand that i'm not trying to be deliberately obscurantist here. quite the opposite, in fact. the thing is that the suspicion about language and metanarrative really is boundless - and with consequences more destabilizing than your usual clever ironist may like to admit. it is absolutely no coincidence that said culture of skepticism has of late turned viral and militant. peterson isn't wrong about that, but he *is* wrong is presenting derrida and foucault as consciously devious saboteurs of western civilization. that isn't true, and it's silly of him to say this. even though i admire his work. the story is much more complex than this, and it starts with nietzsche and heidegger much more than derrida or barthes or whatever.

anyways, this has been zizek's career: the inescapability of ideology, and hence the infinite hegel-lacan analysis of the spectacle. the metanarrative/ideology always leaves clues about itself that are fundamentally paradoxical. what has changed today is not anything in the nature of that process itself, it's the social-cultural landscape which produces and consumes these that has changed. which isn't of itself even bad, or unremarkable. but it does seem to be rather historically deaf, and ultimately self-destructive, i think.

anyways, i don't know if that answers your question. maybe you're even more confused than before! but i'm happy to try and field whatever questions you might have, if it helps.

the tldr: we do not really want what we think we want.

>>11103668
Postmodernists reject metanarratives/grand narratives. An example of a metanarrative is the oppressed vs. oppressor narrative that being pushed by SJWs and cultural Marxist professors. The irony girardfag points out is the appropriation of postmodern concepts such as social constructs to promote a cultural marixst agenda that is a metanarrative.

>>11096035
His book on Shakespeare, "The Theater of Envy", is an absolute masterpiece. You don't need to be a Shakespeare buff at all to enjoy it.

>>11102271
>Yuga
Tell me more about this book, anon. also more importantly where can I find the epub without paying for it

>>11103735
So what have you been up to? What are your future plans?

bump

>>11103292
Thanks for the sincere response. I hope my question didn't come off as too cheeky, because like many responders here I'm really interested. Honestly though, I don't think you've been shitposting. I think the other posters here who keep an eye out for your threads would agree with me, that you've been a breath of fresh air in an othw semi-stagnant board. Cheers.

bump

>>11104401
you're very welcome! the question didn't strike me as being cheeky at all, and i sincerely appreciated the prompt.

in terms of shitposting, i mean, i'm sometimes a little more animated than usual /lit/ etiquette. this is, it is not to be forgotten, still a nice internet commons for discussing philosophy literature. it's not a soapbox and this is why i occasionally find myself in this slightly awkward place of having a lot to say (and they're not answers - they're actually questions!) and just wanting to sound some of that stuff out. grabbing control of a thread and turning it into a mouthpiece for one's own opinions is bad form. i'm not thirsting for (you). and it's kind of related to this:

>>11103944
>So what have you been up to? What are your future plans?

well, one immediate goal is really to just not become a sort of counter-initiatory gimmick or meme. i think that's what i'm working out. i really dislike appropriative behaviour, obnoxious loudmouths and blowhards who only endlessly can talk about themselves via projection. there is no doubt a little irony in this, i'm sure, given the way that i post here! b/c it probably seems that what i'm describing is a fitting description of me, barging into threads and posting these huge blocks of text. total projection, total symptom. an analyst would have a field day with that i'm sure.

so my goal is really not to become that which that i loathe. so that's one thing. and for the time being my way of doing this is to sort of dwell on some of these questions. two of the most interesting philosophers and intellectuals in the world right now are land and peterson, and i kind of obsessively follow their work and twitter feeds and so on, but even they can wind up in loops and spirals. i really don't know what it is that philosophers do anymore. or what universities do. i'm completely perplexed by the state of modern intellectual and political culture. something seems really wrong to me about it, and i feel sometimes that how we got to this point isn't all that mysterious. guys like BC han or girard really seem to have understood how and why this is. but their ideas aren't simple or convenient.

and /lit/ is full of people who also feel the same way about a lot of this stuff too. the traditionalism and other threads indicate that there are lots of people who are thinking about all of these questions, that lots of people are fucking confused. i'm confused too. so i just kind of share my confusion and bewilderment and kind of hope sometimes that that confusion can be illuminating, as it's often been illuminating for me.

if most of life is anxiety in this way, then finding the words or concepts that throw some light on the sources of that are just useful in and of themselves for leading a kind of balanced life between sanity and madness. there is no absolute sanity, and there is no absolute madness either. freedom and control are a kind of yin-yang process.

Just marathoned The Burnout Society. Very interesting book with good critiques of Baudrillard, Foucault and Agamben, among others. Han points out a lot of things about these writers that we couldn't quite put our finger on but makes us find their work less interesting or relevant to someone deep in meme culture.

>>11104929
that's the thing. and in a sense it kind of gives you some deep intimation of how philosophy works or can work on a society. for better or for worse, writers with really consistent perspectives on what constitutes the real (or the unreal) in society. all this stuff trickles down in the long run. critiquing foucault or agamben is hard to do in other-than-meme terms, but it's necessary too. foucault has had an enormous impact on the way in which we think, and by continuation the way we think.

so it's as you say, writers putting their finger on or describing the ineffable. that's what contributes to the weirdness of society - they exorcise, or raise, the ghosts that we sense are there but can't quite explain (and we lapse into insecurity about wondering whether or not they exist at all).

for me the thing about burnout is that, if i sort of reflect on it, i find it tends to make me inclined to be a lot more kind with other people like that. achievement society really fucks everyone. it's not like being a slacker is the answer - we know that, obviously (and, if we follow nick land on this, there's no room for slackers in skynet either, which is really scary). turbo-capital drives everyone.

but it does lead to burnout, and the side-effects of burnout have all kinds of other effects on society. we really aren't as rational or in control of things as we think we are. and maybe grasping or having some sense of our relative and mutual powerlessness wr/t some of these things (though not all) will make them easier to understand.

we can't control everything, as much as we want to. and that is what capitalism produces, much as deleuze predicted - the control society. burnout is the psychic miasma produced in that way.

i fucking love han.

>>11105011
jesus, my posts are full of weird typos and grammar today. i think i need to take a break for a bit and come back with a better cup of coffee. sorry gents.

>>11103847
It's a critique on modernity that combines the Traditionalist view with those of Marx, Baudrillard, and Mumford among others. The author writes in a sort of unconventional casual style. I don't know where you can find an epub of it since the book isn't that popular.

>>11103274
Thanks a lot, Monsieur Girardfag. I (like, I believe, many others here) actually really appreciate your well thought-out posts, because they give me more to think about and consider. As you said previously, this isn't an academic journal, so we should feel free to meme and shitpost to our hearts' content, but I really don't think that's all you're doing.

I really appreciate you mentioning Han. I'm about half-way through "Psychopolitics" right now, and it really seems like Han vibes incredibly well with Vattimo. In particular, I'm really liking his linking of freedom to a sort of negativity, which fits particularly well with Vattimo's project, and which I think has become all the more necessary in light of the current affirmationist fervour in philosophy and politics.

I often find negative accounts of things to be pretty tedious and unclear. Negative theology is a good example: "God isn't X. And it isn't Y or Z either!" I mean, presumably God isn't an indefinite number of things, so that doesn't really clarify things for me. Still, I really do think that a negative conception of freedom ("It isn't this, and it isn't this either.") might be the best we can manage, and so I really liked Han's early comments on freedom as consisting in a transition between states. Linking this to your comments about utopias and dystopias, I think the best we can really do politically/societally is just attempt to avoid the dystopias. Instead of conceiving of politics/society as an arrow flying towards a fixed target, instead it becomes a sort of spiralling off in infinite directions; the opening of new, previously unthought of horizons that Vattimo discusses. The prevention of cultural ossification, and promotion of constant transition might be all that "freedom" really is. Rorty seems to have similar ideas (society as a big, never-ending conversation), which would explain why I'm drawn to some of his work as well.

I'm not sure if you've read Noys "Persistence of the Negative", but I think he gives a really good account of the current obsession with affirmation/positivity (even extending to positive accounts of the negative) in much of contemporary philosophy and cultural theory. It's certainly worth a look if you haven't. Reading his work helped me understand just how pervasive the posh for affirmation is in a lot of philosophy. So few people actually manage to escape it. Foucault (most of the time) and Baudrillard are two of the only people I can think of who manage to. Even Derrida gets caught up in it when he starts talking about justice as being undeconstructable, because justice *just is* deconstruction. Poor Old Jacques really was just a big softie, and that frustrates me sometimes.

Oh, and Vincent Descombes is another guy I have to give a shoutout to. Particularly "Modern French Philosophy" for helping me better understand what a shitshow May '68 and its aftermath were in the French academy and intellectual circles.

>>11103280
Yes, Schmitt really was a heavyweight. Every time I read or re-read some of his work I come away with something new to think about. Plus, he has these pithy lines and turns of phrase that stay with me. I guess I shouldn't expect any less from a guy who was able to write entire monographs having to cite works from memory because his library and his city were being fucking atomized by allied bombs. It's a shame that a lot of his work isn't more widely available/translated, but alas.

There are definite continuities between Schmitt and Foucault, particularly in a lot of the latter's Collège de France lectures ("Security, Territory and Population" and "Society Must be Defended" especially). They're both amazing thinkers when it comes to discussions of how space is ordered, and how this is connected to the exercise of power. I really wish that Schmitt, FouFou and Agamben cold have sat down for a conversation about this stuff. That would have been amazing just to listen to.

The thinking of all three of them (and you could probably add Benjamin to that list) - particularly when it comes to the state of exception and its increasing function as the normal paradigm for politics to be conducted in - is really interesting, and more than a little concerning. As you say, there's this idea that we're always in a crisis now, and that we have to meet every problem with a firm, drastic solution. I think a lot of that is artificial, but it does seem to be an increasingly common way of looking at things. We're constantly ratcheting things up, and increasingly viewing society as a sort of "cold civil war" that might become hot at any point. Political opponents are being viewed as "hostis", against whom no effort should be spared, as opposed to "inimucus", who we don't have to like personally, but should at least remain civil towards.

On the flip side, some people are acting like some of the political/cultural divides we're facing are actually just illusions. We all actually do share the same values, we just haven't realised it yet/aren't communicating it very well to one another. I think that's bullshit too, and potentially dangerous because of how it counsels people to completely ignore political and cultural differences, and always treat other people as if they actually reason, value, and believe the same way "we" do. I don't think Shcmitt's Friend/Enemy distinction is going anywhere anytime soon, but I do think it's being grossly misapplied at present.

It's definitely weird for me as a Good Liberal Boy™ to position myself so starkly against universalist aspirations in culture, politics, etc. Increasingly, though, I'm seeing universalism as a big threat, and its abandonment as necessary for the realisation of the nihilistic politics that Vattimo et al. are rooting for.

Anyways, this has really degenerated into nothing more than a big rant, so I apologise for that.

>>11105283
gracias amigo. and the thing was that you had asked some really interesting questions, ones that warranted more than a casual off-the-cuff response. six posts seems a little excessive but i mean, i feel like it's better not to skimp on the portions with these things. the kinds of stuff you were raising has roots that go deep and wide.

you're right about the negative stuff. on a slightly different track, it's one of the criticisms i have read about deleuze: that there are places in which an affirmative philosophy really doesn't work, or just fails to address the complexity of experience. we don't affirm heroin addiction, for instance. we do and should affirm the overcoming of addictions on this scale, as much as we applaud people who de-radicalize - and all related JBP room-cleaning in general. but there are aspects of life in which the deleuzian view doesn't really measure up to reality. it works metaphysically, but the polis is composed of more than pure metaphysics. land's own borrowing of deleuze's ideas and the consequent valorization of a state like singapore...well, it's enough to say that people can be happy also in places that aren't confucian quasi-despotisms, regardless of the GDP. you know what i mean. ideological radicalism is seductive but in the end can become a vice of its own. a healthy polis is a nobler goal.

i can check noys again. but we're converging on basically the same thing here. if burnout is a real concept to be talked about, i think it does result from the excessive valorization of capital and social credit accumulation. sloterdijk has argued in a kind of clever way for patronage theory in german politics as a way of breaking away from the thrall of maximally and only siding with the victim narrative, which is what peterson and others are rebelling against in the west. we have unquestionably gone too far to the left over here, such that now only victim narratives matter. this is a bizarro kind of affirmation-through-victimization but the processes underlying it are still the same. and, i would say, are ultimately still driven by materialistic desires proceeding from capital - or just the desire for both security and prestige. which are human, all too human ideas. maybe we've become more like the romans and less like the greeks like that. in an open society the polis belongs neither to the sovereign nor to any one particular orthodoxy or intellectual militancy. the cosmopolis is a sort of exception in that regard, but seems to be inevitably undercut from within by the desire for globalization or some other form of exploitation. reigning in those sensibilities is a good job for virtue ethics, maybe. i'm really not sure.

and my whole misadventure began originally from frustrations with the ghost of jacques derrida.

>If we are to retain our sanity, we need to go Beyond Identity and Difference.

i'd appreciate hearing more about vincent descombes and others, if you feel like continuing the conversation.

>>11105450
schmitt is legit fucking awesome. as much as acceleration shredded a lot of bogus cynicism that i found absolutely suffocating - what turned out to be lying underneath it has been more or less incarnated in the public sphere today: absolute rage and horror, and only very thinly veiled. in hindsight we can see what it was covering up.

>this idea that we're always in a crisis now, and that we have to meet every problem with a firm, drastic solution. I think a lot of that is artificial, but it does seem to be an increasingly common way of looking at things. We're constantly ratcheting things up, and increasingly viewing society as a sort of "cold civil war" that might become hot at any point. Political opponents are being viewed as "hostis", against whom no effort should be spared, as opposed to "inimucus", who we don't have to like personally, but should at least remain civil towards.

co-signed on every word of this. the thing about it is that it's like a civil war that we can't actually acknowledge *is* a kind of soft civil war. one side blames the other for starting a feud that which they are both implicated in. hence my own interest in girard to explain this. we're *never* outside the dialectic. and who knows, maybe hegel was effectively completed in 1990 and we're now in some other place now.

and so what do you do in a civil war? it's like a divorce. these things are painful. sometimes there are irreconcilable differences. new ideospheres come to be formed, but the finger-trap aspect of it is this idea of a kind of fatal mutualism: *my* utopia needs *your* compliance. and this kind of thinking is just complete madness. There Can Only Be One sounds great in highlander and really, really fucking stupid in policy. but in some sense this is what we continue to flirt with.

>It's definitely weird for me as a Good Liberal Boy™ to position myself so starkly against universalist aspirations in culture, politics, etc. Increasingly, though, I'm seeing universalism as a big threat, and its abandonment as necessary for the realisation of the nihilistic politics that Vattimo et al. are rooting for.

i'm in very much the same way.

>I don't think Shcmitt's Friend/Enemy distinction is going anywhere anytime soon, but I do think it's being grossly misapplied at present.

weinstein made an interesting point about this. i'm extrapolating a little on this, but: the friend/enemy distinction might be thought of as a *heuristic.* you want to be able to have a world view that can grasp the concept of opposition, even antagonism, but you don't want inquisitions and zealotry. grasping that the world *really* is a kind of baroque hanging hanging balance in this sense is more interesting than idealistic militancy.

any number of lines from schmitt would do but he's a really, really fucking important thinker.

>>11105682
so schmitt and land i guess can form for me a kind of a weird corrective against the excesses of liberalism, in this way, which is the one system that reigned supreme after WW2. and it has these noble ends: the individual is anterior to society, full stop period. freedom.

but this is all this question on those enlightenment ideals: freedom, happiness, reason, and so on. nothing has ever put a brake on the Enlightenment, and in a way we can even see the kind of revenge of modernity on the horizon: it's Skynet. if we cannot rule ourselves, we will craft algorithms that will do it for us. this to me seems entirely predictable. if a sort of thirty years' war is the result of the current red team/blue team feuding, we will all kind of in a sad and defeatist sense come to agree on robot arbitration in the end. and sentient corporations and all of the rest that emerge from this, which is all still liberalism, all the way down the line.

the interesting stuff then comes, philosophically, in the need to think the paradigmatic nature of truth and the epoche. schmitt did it. so did foucault. certain california buddhists i am wont to promote and who are far less academically reputable do also. but it's hegel also, i suppose.

but the situation calls for re-interpretation, sanity, patterns and similarity, not romanticism. the dark side of romanticism is what we are seeing, and a kind of sphinx's riddle about the nature of oppression, the fanaticism of erasing oppression and cognitive bias from society. it's absolute lunacy, conducted - as always - with the best of intentions in mind, by people who absolutely should not be Meddling With The Forces of Nature.

anyways. this is to give carl schmitt a major upvote on this as historical diagnostician. an utterly fascinating man. thanks very kindly for this essay, anon, it's a beaut.

>>11105521
>>11105682
I'm about to go positively affirm my existence by chucking a frisbee around, since it's such a nice day, but I'm certainly up to continue the conversation afterwards.

However, briefly:

>i'm extrapolating a little on this, but: the friend/enemy distinction might be thought of as a *heuristic.* you want to be able to have a world view that can grasp the concept of opposition, even antagonism, but you don't want inquisitions and zealotry. grasping that the world *really* is a kind of baroque hanging hanging balance in this sense is more interesting than idealistic militancy.

Schmitt actually made a similar point (one that I think often gets glossed over by those eager to condemn his "militancy") when he distinguished between "enemy" and "foe" (sometimes it's translated as "enemy" and "fiend"). The former is an opponent who we recognise that we're opposed to, but will treat with respect, while the latter is one who is utterly alien to us in every way, and we are to spare no effort in eradicating utterly.

I think we're trapped in a Friend/Foe distinction as opposed to a Friend/Enemy distinction at present when it comes to much of our politics. I don't know, man. Food for thought, I guess.

>>11105761
chuck that frisbee with the blessings of CaveTwitter then my man. it's been a pleasure. until whenever.

>>11099273
>when we make people into worthless drones predicated on happiness and achievement we wind up in a bad place: it's almost as if the situation requires a kind of human/psychic sacrifice in order to sustain itself, but eventually the human being you are sacrificing to capital just doesn't even have within them the requisite mana to make sacrifice meaningful.

That's sort of beautiful, but isn't that just a sentiment of disgust for the state of anxiety that is produced when needing to make meaning while being exhausted by the abundance of meaning to select from in this world if we are too burnt to make our own sacrifice.

I don't buy into the idea that our disillusionment is forced onto us by the realisation that our desires are being preyed upon because the inevitability is not coherent, the state of capital and our relation to it has too many other variables within the environment affecting changes to those interrelations to make speculating on coherent meaning making an absurd and masturbatory act that is really only engaged in by academics - while agents tenderly maximise their agency and those agents whose concensus is under "their" control, the "their" this time being represented by the variable X which cannot be accounted for but only speculated on as existing in some coherent summation. The violence of consensus is also the supreme joy of enacted revenge isn't it, like that scene in Germinal when the group of women rip the dick off that mine bossman. The joy in a reign of terror is really missed in always seeing violence as a negative. We hide it well, that to kill animals for food is always about the pleasure in killing and such, that taboo drive hidden under the square plastic wrapping of our lizard brains. Burnout presupposes agency and desire for alpha agency, godlikeness in intent, burnout of conformity, but I think I see less burnout because of the relation to achievement society and more burnout due to the relation of the civilisation to environmental and cultural variables that don't provide enough resources to be able to satisfy deep underlying unsatisfied desires such as infinite power, omniscience, ectera. The rewards of an achievement society should manifest in the real, but they don't and can't, so we ask how to do so from ourselves and we are disappointed with reality forever. But we absurdly don't let this dissonant conception interfere with the pragmatic agreements we make in conforming however temporary to an ideology in order to enact the joyful violence of consensus.

---

effortposting, to see what I've learned so far I guess. Tomorrow I'll try to see where in the omnifuracation I have missed a warm gooey centre.

>>11102295
>unless colin wilson's faculty x is real and we have direct access to the noumenal.

access to raw data still only tells about our relation to the data rather than any coherent forms produced in the noumenal. Meeting the noumenal not as an existential psychologist would but rather as a proselytiser with deep compassion for the savagery of existence is probably not going to seem much different than me dancing around in the desert in august. The silence is unbearable in the prison cell so the prisoner occasionally screams to the guards. At that point, you're more likely to earn less scowls by becoming Bhuddalike.

>>11102421
Fair point. I guess I look for big solutions but there might not be any.
>>11103304
Thanks. I do wish i could upload theory sometimes. Probably the only way I'd ever be able to understand Laruelle.
>glass bead game
Ya. That's what this is all about for me. I study in a very analytic program and want to find options for grad study that fit with my personal ethos and aestheses. Main ethos: anti-fascism. Main aestheses: psychedelic xenolinguistics.
>too few beads and not enough game
There's a lot of unused pieces. Everyone nowadays in the continental world is obsessed with the same couple of figures. And usually a none too novel take on them too.
>new religion
Religious studies and divinity schools are options for me too for this reason. But...
>ghandi v himmler
Ghandi has a reassuring take. The inner Jihad. Fuck the outer
>40k and the alien other
Strange thought: it must have been easier to organize people when nature was our enemy. Like antiquity. Technology makes us more beastly toward each other now that outer beasts no longer threaten.
>land is a warning
He sold out, IMO. That's my final judgement. He knows.
>soft deleuzeanism is a nice resting place
Yes. I vaccilate between that and soft neoplatonism. Micro and macro perhaps. Matter and ideal more likely.


Lately I feel like the biggest religious answer will be found in astrophysics. Is the universe recurring eternally a la Nietzsche and the Greeks and the East? Or is Judeo-Christian linear time the true metaphysics? From mystic experiences I an inclined to say phenomenologically it feels the easterners are right but practically I err with progressivism due to lack of evidence and hope never to repeat the mistakes of my past....

>>11106200
Agreed. I think. Stoics are right about a lot. But sometimes being too unemotional is a form of toxic masculinity. Particularly when you crave comfort.
>faculty X
You'll note I'm not a prosletyser like Wilson about occult phenomena. His book The Occult is honestly a bit embarassing compared to The Outsider. But I have experienced quiescence of the will as schopenhauer might say, upon rare ocassions. Should this experience lead to a Buddha smile or a Shamanic dance is up to the individual. Certainly one cannot be blamed for wishing to share this grand secret of existence.

>>11102145
which animu?

>>11106648
The most /lit/ anime in existence: Bernard-jou Iwaku

>>11105743
AI confucianism would be nice.

It's threats like this that make me believe the Academy of minds has moved online and no longer exist in one cultural hot spot.

The solution is to advocate a form of Supernaturalist Deleuzean metaphysics with Advaita Neo-Platonism traditionalist metapsychology as to provide a common moral framework of virtue ethics for the three great Abrahamic religions as well as Hinduism, Tantra, Sikhism, and the three faiths of East Asia and even the indigineous and neo- Shamanic movements worldwide from which all religions derive. Combine this with entheogenic esotericism and anthroprotechnics. But emphasize its plurality as a system. A physics of the psychology of initiation even accounting for counter-initiation...

Oh ya. And we need an Astrological Bible for all hemispheres.


Who's up to transform academia?

Read this book soon, girardfag. <3<3<3

>>11107228
thanks fampai looks based tbqhty

>>11107228
More /lit/ than Serial Experiments Lain?

>>11107402
In the most literal sense.

>>11101494
that's a comfy pic

>>11107352
Every first nations community situated in a post-colonial nation. The roots of democracy are stranger than you think.

>>11107352
half of those things aren’t compatible and i don’t want anything to do with christians they’re some of the worst humans alive

>>11106380
>Thanks. I do wish i could upload theory sometimes. Probably the only way I'd ever be able to understand Laruelle.
in that case i'm hoping for that upload and maybe later you can explain the hype to us.
>Main aestheses: psychedelic xenolinguistics.
born too late to explore space, born just in time for unironic sorcery.
>Strange thought: it must have been easier to organize people when nature was our enemy. Like antiquity. Technology makes us more beastly toward each other now that outer beasts no longer threaten.
REH: Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing.
>phenomenologically it feels the easterners are right but practically I err with progressivism due to lack of evidence and hope never to repeat the mistakes of my past
agreed 100%. i feel the pull of zen buddhism quite strongly sometimes.

>>11107283
>AI confucianism.
that great learning. the funny thing too is that if you think about it, maybe that AI would really do nothing more than just reify Master Kong. maybe it would not need to do anything more than that. a Confucian AI could well be an invisible thing.

pic rel is from a very thought-provoking game, but i selected it because the Chairman's ethos is basically to say - you and me, subject, are no different. if you come to replace me, you do so only to become exactly as i am now. i really wonder if a Confucian AI would be any different than a Confucian society without one. it might just say, well, okay. i'm online now. please continue as you were, gentlemen.

could dwell on that one all day, anon. talk more about confucian AI. except not in the way that it will probably turn out, as a vortex of soul-crushing dystopia. or i mean do it but with a e s t h e t i c s &c.

it's actually a fucking wickedly fun thought-prompt too. pick a dystopia (or even just a nice culture?) introduce an AI into it that reflects its primary philosophical interests, sit back, imagine wat do.

>>11107352
THIS
>also this
>this
this

>>11107362
holy shit. it's like a novelization of SMAC.
>and not the actual novelization of SMAC, which didn't happen
as if further confirmation that /lit/ was the greatest place on the internet was required. fucking a. thank ye very kindly anon, will have a look at this one presently.

>>11107591
yeah. forget where i got that one from.

enjoy some hot tumblr on tumblr action:

http://helaeon.tumblr.com/
http://rekall.me/
http://andexile.tumblr.com/archive

>>11106031
quality effortposting.

>isn't that just a sentiment of disgust for the state of anxiety that is produced when needing to make meaning while being exhausted by the abundance of meaning to select from in this world if we are too burnt to make our own sacrifice?

yes. yes it is.

>The violence of consensus is also the supreme joy of enacted revenge isn't it, like that scene in Germinal when the group of women rip the dick off that mine bossman.
it's certainly one aspect of it. girard is not ambiguous on this point: scapegoating is effective only if it is unconscious. we do not call it scapegoating, we call it justice. not unlike zizek. it works when we don't see it.

it's a hard line, and we can raise a lot of questions about it. the point is not to be nihilists w/r/t to the law, only to take the Pause That Refreshes when we decide to enact justice in ways that are violently reciprocal.

>Burnout presupposes agency and desire for alpha agency, godlikeness in intent, burnout of conformity, but I think I see less burnout because of the relation to achievement society and more burnout due to the relation of the civilisation to environmental and cultural variables that don't provide enough resources to be able to satisfy deep underlying unsatisfied desires such as infinite power, omniscience, ectera.

but perhaps that's the case because alpha agency basically produces the phenomenon of zero-sum scarcity itself. and even that in and of itself isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it is part of the general question we're talking about. there are those for whom the world is not enough. sometimes these people are heroes. even when they aren't heroes they're fascinating. some of them may be ubermenschen. the world is often richer for having them in it. and we are going to continue to advance into a world in which the horizons between gods and men are effaced. i won't deny that some part of me feels an absolute thrill when i think about it. but then there's another part that lives IRL and has to fucking deal with the consequences of this. my spec-fiction side and my rent-paying side don't often get along in this regard.

alpha agency is a thing to think about for sure. much is contributed to human culture by the heroic exception. mediocristan is a suboptimal outcome for any liberal democracy. there's a pretty complex balancing act here. but of course you know all of this already, so i won't belabor it.

>we absurdly don't let this dissonant conception interfere with the pragmatic agreements we make in conforming however temporary to an ideology in order to enact the joyful violence of consensus.

we do not. because *total consensus hides the violence completely and transforms it into something other than what it actually is.* the tomb becomes the foundational altar for the civilization which commits the deed and worships the subsequent deity. and the guy who intuited this better than any man alive was rene noel theophile girard.

>>11105011
>achievement society really fucks everyone. it's not like being a slacker is the answer
What if it is the answer?
>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QROEzCEd_Kg

>>11107905
kek. i don't know. i guess for some it is. certainly i've been a champion slacker. reading has actually only made me more intractably slackful. it doesn't have the same appeal it once did, altho it's not like i'm any less bewildered than i was before. now i'm in a worse spot, which is looking for some ideology to commit to, knowing there really isn't any, and just sort of having to eat that one.

if you're a genius, maybe you should slack until you find the thing you're magnificent at. maybe.
but most of us, myself mos def included, are not that or anything even close to it. just being able to hack it and not make pioneering discoveries in degeneracy and human obsolescence will be a worthwhile goal enough for many of us.

but i want to take this in a different direction, so bear with me here.

my first favorite superhero was definitely the punisher. grim, brutal, and fair in a fallen world. but you know who kind of grows on me as time goes by? pic rel. these guys. no alter egos, and no real tortured grimdarkness either. the fantastic four belong, are emblematic of, the golden age of comics. they are pure 50s sensibility in that regard, and utterly square. they really don't carry over very well today either, for that reason. apparently the recent film was a complete bomb. i haven't seen it yet, but i intend to at some point.

but there are some other interesting things about them. for one thing, there's a functional marriage at the centre of it. that in and of itself is pretty neat. reed richards can stretch, it's true, but his real power is that he's just a really smart guy and not really all that fucked up. sue storm is the girl next door. she's smart too. ben and johnny are what they are, a working-class dude and a rebellious twentysomething.

but still. there's something about this ethos that i like. even doctor doom is kind of an interesting ubermenschen villain and foil for them: he's another very smart guy who dominates some eastern european country and in which, we gather, his rule is firm but fair.

there's just something kind of oddly sane, if mildly boring, about all of it. these were superheroes, but they espoused a kind of basic humaneness that i find way more countercultural than the ironic hipsters of today. deadpool hits the tone of today, but reed and sue are more the people i'd prefer to hang out with. i feel like they've got their act together.

the avengers worked because downey as iron man - a prototypical self-destructive genius and prodigal son - won everybody over. he was tony stark, and tony stark was america: rich, crazy, and loveable. the fantastic four belong to an earlier age than that. they're less glamorous, but more believable. but that mojo translated into the incredibles anyways, and which is maybe the best film pixar ever made (or is up there, anyways). so it's not like we're totally bored by that message either.

anyways. a ramble-post.

Coming back for my daily girardposting. Hope he eventually finds interest in academia.

>>11107772
Do you have a tumblr girardfag?

Here's mine:

shamanicdepression.tumblr.com

>>11107772
damn you made me remember my teenage years when I was a clueless son of a farmer and I discovered those futurustic cyberpunk tumblr and they totally blew my mind

>>11107772
I've been thinking about the shrinking of the liberal arts and maybe this is a good thing. Make all liberal arts philosophy. Encourage polymathematics.

>>11107609
Good post.
>>11107625
Bad post.

>>11108088
i do not. maybe i should put one up at some point, i've cribbed ridiculous amounts from those guys over the past little while. there are some people out there taking really good care of those accounts, the music and all the rest. beautiful stuff.

and yours is fucking awesome! i don't know if you know about bob pepper but he's a really awesome concept artist. i'm particularly fond of his illustrations for dark tower. anyways, i feel like maybe some of his stuff would look good in the rest of your collection.

https://mondotees.com/blogs/news/16991215-the-art-of-bob-pepper

so yeah, i'll probably wind up borrowing some of your stuff for my future posts. thanks anon! going to go browse this now.

>>11108087
d'aww. well, we'll see. some people are just made to be mysterious hermits. honestly tho? slowly but surely /lit/ has sort of nudged me towards at least that that i think is consistently interesting enough to think about: that horizon at which acceleration turns towards tradition and perennialism. no rage zombies. just whatever philosophers or else that fosters that mysterious part of the brain that intuits that there is a better view to take on things. consciousness, always a winner. it will have this place that helped me to sort the frame for that dissertation, whatever it is.

a guy i like on twitter suggested this: 'false consciousness' is sort of like saying 'false truth.' we know that bad faith, guilt and so on are all there in us. so how do we start the long way back from under the shadow of the masters of suspicion? land said something like this too on twitter:
>and trust burns.

so, that's the question. how do you optimize for *trust?* blockchain is one way. is it the only one? is paranoiac renaissance-style innovativeness > confucian harmoniousness? these are the questions.

>>11108147
ayup. cyberpunk is way way cool. it wasn't my favorite genre before (doesn't everybody like heroic fantasy at first? even the metal guys are secretly into it) but yeah, the current wave of Really Dark Cyberpunk does indeed get one in the feels. oh that apocalyptic romanticism. sign me up.

moar!

http://blvckbleach.tumblr.com/
http://rhubarbes.com/archive

>>11108231
thanks have an unrelated but good one
https://illseen.tumblr.com/

>>11108088
the society for the infinite spark of being is another really lovely tumblr as well.

http://theinfinitesparkofbeing.tumblr.com/archive

>>11108204
i mean we know peterson's take on this. it's a legit question. makes you kind of wonder if it's not going to play out like that. if i want to be really uncharitable, i can say that we may perhaps see something like this, Justice Creep - it happened at duke in the theology department and in other places. it's the whole Lobster Saga.

so idk. maybe some small school will actually make Old School Humanities really popular again, and not even necessary because they just fucking love plotinus (although one or two good profs wouldn't hurt) but because of market forces. you could certainly do a lot worse than to have some solid girardians in the literature department who are going the *exact opposite direction* that critical theory is going in. Great Books and Universal Themes - Yes, Those Ones. i mean you can almost imagine this working. the sheer audacity of saying, yes, we really are going back to the roots like this. we know and we have heard the arguments, and we acknowledge them, but our students want something else. we want stained glass and we want cathedrals and tragedy and all of that stuff.

you could call it the Bloom Society, maybe (allan, joyce, whoever). there is some risk in experimenting with meme magic, but...well. that's hyperstition for you. who knows. don't shit on me too much for the cringe in this, i know it's cringe. but some smooth ad-campaign manager might find something in that or analogous to it.

you can *almost* see it working. old fashioned great books and old fashioned great philosophy. almost certainly would have to be done online. but these are just random girardfag thoughts. but the redpill loves books. and classicism is pretty sexy. it just can't all become a deliberately countercultural meme.

>Make all liberal arts philosophy.
that trivium. worked pretty well for about 1800 years.

>Encourage polymathematics.
this for sure. plato has rules about geometry (and military service).

people have to want to become useful (if not Fantastic!) that accomplished, and once they are not dependent on their hot takes on proust or nabokov, maybe other things will in time become more feasible and realistic for dear old Western Civ. but i'm not getting my hopes up for the time being. it will be enough simply to just be a pleasant enough meatbag and not succumb to the rage virus.

2018 AD: God has been assinated by his purest angel, Nietzsche. How long will he take to rise from the tomb? Does it require theurgy?

>>11108502
Radicals left and right await the coming of the savior who will bring down the Republic turned Empire...

Bump

Bump

I cant sleep girardposter

Bump

>>11108502
god seems to be most dead in those places where academic marxism takes over his spot, and yet where the punishment of material inequality is carried out with an unsubtly puritan zeal, as if the rage with which we punish offenses to an ill-defined symbolic order might serve to show our own piety. it seems more the case that it is integrity and virtue that is dead.

this happens, iirc, in china as well. there are periods in which the influence of confucius wanes and that of buddhism and taoism grows, until great reformers emerge and re-establish the old order. in india shankara emerges as a consolidator of vedanta doctrine. it's possible that thought has a gnostic correspondence to human cultural evolution in this way. the survival instinct alone may occasionally necessitate the emergence of synthesization. perhaps material process itself leads to an oscillation between individualism and collectivism, coherence and decoherence. in a more crude sense, we might ask about whether or not Brains Are Hungry.

>muh brain is hungry
>hungry brain
>gotta eat
>gotta sweat
>*think think*
>feels good man
>gj brain
>thanks boss
>gonna hit the showers
>okay champ hit it

some part of us seems to just like harmony. we recognize that it is good for us, not only our collective being but as relief from existential doubt. perhaps only a future society will be able to tell us, with ever-increasing degrees of scientific complexity, why it is better for us to get along rather than to become judge holden. one suspects that the answer will be boring and commonsensical.

taleb writes about this, that the ancients were fundamentally right about human psychology, and all we can do is reconfirm their insights with modern scientific inquiry. the renaissance, like the greek golden age, isn't built to last. they're magnificent in their cultural legacy but dazzlingly evanescent. perhaps monasteries are what survive the long dark nights.

the problem for political theology is always material wealth and power and the shifting sands on which these rest. much as it is for individuals. but maybe history will show that managing the money exclusively leads us in funny little ways towards Jenga patterns of hollowing out that upon which we depend, and only realizing it later.

consciousness itself is to be treasured. ideology feels like junk food. theology is just vastly more interesting, however saddening.

>tfw unhappy consciousness
>get out of my brain gwf hegel

>>11109361
but only in sleep are to be found the dreams of large women

What did Mircea Eliade think about Girard's theory?

>>11110132
the death of god is perhaps to be found in intellectualism and not history. managing the breach between the finite and the infinite is a balancing act and not a sociopolitical project. i don't think girard would disagree that sacrifice as it is erroneously and misleadingly practiced amounts to an attempt to restore the balance between aion and chronos through a bloody-handed work of cosmic maintenance.

>Perhaps the Christian myth has been the narrative most disturbing to the ideological mind. It is, like those of Abraham and the Buddha, a very simple tale: that of a god who listens by becoming one of us. It is a god "emptied" of divinity, who gave up all privilege of commanding speech and "dwelt among us," coming "not to be served, but to serve," "being all things to all persons." But the worlds to which he came received him not. They no doubt preferred a god of magisterial utterance, a commanding idol, a theatrical likeness of their own finite designs. They did not expect an infinite listener who joyously took their unlikeness on himself, giving them their own voice through the silence of wonder, a healing and holy metaphor that leaves everything still to be said.

>Those Christians who deafened themselves to the resonance of their own myth have driven their killing machines through the garden of history, but they did not kill the myth. The emptied divinity whom they have made into an Instrument of Vengeance continues to return as the Man of Sorrows bringing with him his unfinished story, and restoring the voices of the silenced.

>The myth of Jesus is exemplary, but not necessary. No myth is necessary. There is no story that must be told. Stories do not have a truth that someone needs to reveal, or someone needs to hear. It is part of the myth of Jesus that it makes itself unnecessary; it is a narrative of the word becoming flesh, of language entering history; a narrative of the word becoming flesh and dying, of history entering language. Who listens to his myth cannot rise above history to utter timeless truths about it.

>It is not necessary for infinite players to be Christians; indeed it is not possible for them to be Christians-seriously. Neither is it possible for them to be Buddhists, or Muslims, or atheists, or New Yorkers-seriously. All such titles can only be playful abstractions, mere performances for the sake of laughter.

>Infinite players are not serious actors in any story, but the joyful poets of a story that continues to originate what they cannot finish.

>There is but one infinite game.

>>11110178
good question. you can read the final pages of Cosmos and History to see what he thought about christianity:

>Christianity incontestably proves to be the religion of "fallen man": and this to the extent to
which modern man is irremediably identified with history and progress, and to which history and progress are a fall, both implying the final abandonment of the paradise of archetypes and repetition.

>>11110195
>>11110178
eliade's point is an interesting one, and connects to a whole host of other things. thinking about this immediately takes one into the question about marxist soteriology and its discontents. today traditional thought seems to be on the rise again inasmuch as it opposes a concept of salvation expressed in purely materialistic terms, and for which the blessings or wrath of a social justice inquisition is variously necessitated. and this of course is hideous. and so we turn to religious thought to look for an escape from this.

eliade's view seems to be more dark about this process, however:

>in fact, it is only by presupposing the existence of God that he conquers, on the one hand, freedom (which grants him autonomy in a universe governed by laws or, in other words, the "inauguration" of a mode of being that is new and unique in the universe) and, on the other hand, the certainty that historical tragedies have a transhistorical meaning, even if that meaning is not always visible for humanity in its present condition. Any other situation of modern man leads, in the end, to despair. It is a despair
provoked not by his own human existentiality, but by his presence in a historical universe in which almost the whole of mankind lives prey to a continual terror (even if not always conscious of it).

>[faith] is, consequently, a pre-emiently creative freedom. In other words, it constitutes a new formula for man's collaboration with the creation the first, but also the only such formula accorded to him since the traditional horizon of archetypes and repetition was transcended. Only such a freedom (aside from its soteriological, hence, in the strict sense, its religious value) is able to defend modern man from the terror of history
a freedom, that is, which has its source and finds its guaranty and support in God. Every other modern freedom, whatever satisfactions it may procure to him who possesses it, is powerless to justify history; and this, for every man who is sincere with himself, is equivalent to the terror of history.

so maybe we are presented with a question. maybe traditionalism will eventually supplant the kind of depressingly state-sanctioned intellectual kali-yuga deferral process of diminishing value we are presently calling philosophy. maybe. but it is to be hoped that to do so would do something other than to do that with only a new form of belief that only sets the wheel of suffering turning once again. maybe we're faced with a choice between scapegoating the other or scapegoating ourselves. if you're peterson this isn't really a choice at all, tho.

infinite games should stay infinite like that. carse has another nice line about this:

>Evil is the termination of infinite play. It is infinite play coming to an end in unheard silence.

carse's definition of evil here pretty easily includes whatever it is that we do under the sign of ideology.

>>11105780
My frisbee-chucking sojourn was long, but pleasant, and gave me some time to think.

Descombes' historical work is really great for understanding more about the French intellectual landscape leading up to, and following May '68. He's got some excellent stuff on the failure of Althusser's structuralist Marxism, and the reversion to phenomenological Marxism (i.e. based in the "lived experience" of the proletariat) that resulted. He does a great job discussing Foucault's critique of history and Marxian/Hegelian historicism. He brings up Cornelius Castoriadis' (who I hadn't heard of previously) early criticisms of the Soviet Union's economic structure (the massive disparity in compensation between members of the bureaucratic "New Class" and manual labourers/low-level workers), made around 1949, but conveniently ignored by the French intellectual establishment until after May '68, when interest in them exploded. Most importantly, I think, he does a nice job in explaining the sense of rage and hopelessness that the soixante-huitards felt after having been abandoned by the government, union leaders, academics, etc. This is important for understanding the really extreme reactions a lot of radicals had in the aftermath. You've got former die-hard international Marxists who ended up shifting to become far-right, xenophobic nationalists, or dudes like Lyotard penning works like "Libidinal Economy", which celebrate the worker hurling himself into the meat-grinder of industrial capitalism.

>It is already a step to realise that workers' power cannot be power of workers, that it necessarily means power over workers - a power of which mass organizations offer a periodic demonstration by showing that they can mobilise their forces at any time they choose.

Lines like this one from Descombes really help me understand not just the sense of theoretical despair that afflicted so many people in the aftermath of the protest movements, but also how fucking apocalyptic their failure must have seemed from a personal point of view. It's interesting to look at that and see how the responses tended to be either increased militancy, or political resignationism. I think there's a lot of explanatory work it can do with respect to many of the contemporary protest movements we're seeing today, and what's going on with their internal/external dynamics.

I used to look at the world from the standpoint of Jungian psychology.

Girard (I read his book a couple of months ago) broke my worldview.

Human culture is thoroughly vicious. What to do?

>>11111269
reminds me sometimes of the Great Disappointment of 1844. this is to be more than a little reductionist about a very complex event, but hey, we shitpost here.

>Lines like this one from Descombes really help me understand not just the sense of theoretical despair that afflicted so many people in the aftermath of the protest movements, but also how fucking apocalyptic their failure must have seemed from a personal point of view. It's interesting to look at that and see how the responses tended to be either increased militancy, or political resignationism. I think there's a lot of explanatory work it can do with respect to many of the contemporary protest movements we're seeing today, and what's going on with their internal/external dynamics.

crushing it once again here. completely agreed. perhaps the origins and diagnosis of this malaise really are a kind of history worth (re)telling, how it was that marxism tore itself up and under which forces. and it would be, it goes without saying, fucking hard to do, since to read badiou is (at least, in my experience) to become converted to his thought, and deleuze also.

you might find mark lilla's book to be pretty illuminating in this regard also. he took a lot of flak for it (predictably?) but it was a pretty good survey of how it is that 20C intellectuals tended to get swept up and inevitably disappointed by forays and misadventures in the political arena. a kind of constant and romantic gnostic urge for some, or a cynical adventurism in others.

it's really hard not to get seduced by philosophy and philosophers. it's one of those areas where i will acknowledge that there really is a need for analytics and slightly less sexy schools of thought to put a brake on some of the crazier flights of fancy that the continentals get up to.

baudrillard used to ask, provocatively, what we were doing after the orgy. i had a clever meme-response cooked up: hopefully stop fucking each other.
>canned laughter ensues

i know this is cringe, but i can't help myself sometimes.

>>11111290
i find trying to remind myself that the world is a whole lot of suffering helps. trying to keep Great Compassion in mind.

>>11111269
even these guys don't really give up on marxism, either, it seems. what they abandon is freudo-marxism, which is a complete game-changer. but deleuze's own last unfinished book was supposed to be called The Grandeur of Marx. we won't get to read that. guattari has his own mysterious thing going on as well, but he never abandons a fundamentally marxist thinking, as far as i can tell.

>even just thinking about these guys is super-fun. trying to make a living on their opinions is less so, but the feeling of reading into and following the history of these things is one of the greatest adventures you can take. it's a fucking incredible story, the story of thought. anyways.

so it really would be a psychological disaster for many, thinkers and just ordinary types alike. the inhuman nature of capital remains - that's bad - and the freudian lens that explained it can't account for any number of other things. that's even worse.

even a guy like foucault, however much shit he takes today, seemed to still have the sense that a process of coming off of a lot of old structural grids was still a thing that could be done with some degree of sobriety and sanity. bedlam wasn't the answer, it was a product of Enlightenment thinking.

i don't know what he would have made of the current state of things today. who knows, maybe he would have agreed with all of it and laughed off the paroxysms of capitalism and the suffering of many others who have bought into an illusion and are now reaping what they have sown. it's possible. and now there's byung chul han to diagnose the current state of the burnout.

it's almost as if universities are becoming triage-ward hospitals for ideas like that, and just overrun with the sheer amount of mutilated bodies coming in the front door. they lack the resources, the administration, and the general sense of cultural sobriety required to deal with these problems sanely.

i think i fundamentally trust in human intelligence enough to believe that, given enough time, we will eventually sort these problems out. but right now it's way too much, too fast, and too intensely to advocate for much more than just trying to keep a cool head and hope for the best. maybe this is capitalism devouring itself. who knows, right?

>>11111290
Read Rousseau

>>11111836
Thoreau > Rousseau

Bumping for girardposter

>>11113140
bumping for more schizo-rambling? all right.

to continue from an earlier thought, maybe we need a new superhero epic to clarify - as art does - the general madness of the age. the nolan batman films are great. the watchmen comic (less so the film) may well be the oedipus rex of comics. the MCU has been dominating cinema for years now, but are narratively a mixed bag.

people are clearly interested in superheroes these days, but one part of the problem is that there really isn't any tension. superheroes don't *die,* and in a sense this is what saints, kings and other super-heroic figures do. they show us how to die, wrestle with the meaning of death, and and all of this.

their deathlessness may proceed in part from the fact that they are so lucrative. bond recurs again and again, always, and is played by new actors; he's a slightly different phenomenon. but how about a modern-day epic that gives us a bunch of new superheroes that come together, and get wiped out?

part of the reason pic rel is a masterpiece is that - do i need spoilers for a film that is 70 years old? - well, *mortality happens.* and when it does, it is well and truly shocking. among many other factors, such as the ultimate futility of the sacrifice of these samurai for the village. the samurai are in a place between superheroes and ordinary people, for many reasons. it's probably my favorite film.

watchmen gave us a whole new bunch of heroes, and they didn't all live. they had a compromised, tragic, and appropriately superhuman job, and variously failed or succeeded, tragically. that's great literature. violence and sacrifice are the bread and butter of superheroes and supervillains. in the matrix, the problem with neo was that he basically had no dark side at all, no tragic flaw except that he didn't believe.

most superheroes - the punisher perhaps excepted - usually have a no-kill rule and grasp full well the necessity of sacrifice. LotR swings for the fences with these concepts, as does dune.

the problem is perhaps this question about *the need to save the world* and *uphold the status quo.* sometimes the world doesn't get saved. i'd love an epic about people who become superheroes and then get utterly twisted by power, abdicate responsibility, and so on. villains frequently play the crucial role of being tragic ubermenschen, but when we know that eventually they're going down, we lapse into passivity. where are the superheroes who turn ugly, defect, have existential torment? where the greek tragedians at? in star wars parlance, where are the jedi ideologues who brutally exterminate empire bases for the Greater Good? (nowhere, obviously, but you can see the point.)

sovereignty and sacrifice are dark, but the absence of tragedy and horror of seeing the world in other than black-and-white terms only leads to spectacle.

maybe vidya has it right. maybe that's why we enjoy vidya that feeds our power drives. we can't get this anywhere else.

>>11113288
one other thing that's related to this would be the idea of the *fallen world.* roger griffin talks about this phenomenon as it relates to fascism: i believe it's called palingenesis.

batman has been incredibly interesting because of the ways that he flirts with being not only a superhero, but in miller's interpretation a proto-fascist hero. the nolan batman films are better than the snyder one, but affleck's sweaty batman was super-interesting in this regard. i think he was channeling a lot of this stuff, the kind of nervous paranoia that a guy would feel if he felt called by a higher power to Save Humanity, warts and all. that film actually has some interesting themes going on in it.

so gotham city is a fallen world, and being a fallen world allows for darker heroes. but what about the cities that are protected by the avengers? these aren't fallen so much. they're cleaner, brighter, more sort of happily los angelean like this. and so are the less tormented individuals who protect them.

it's pretty interesting to think about. even in LotR, for instance, middle-earth comprises the shire, rohan, gondor, and mordor - a sliding scale all the way from innocence to tormented hellscapes. it is a *stunningly* great world written by a genuine visionary bard. arrakis is a world for herbert's far less christian and somewhat more nakedly presented sensibilities.

so gotham functions as a kind of setting that one imagines was relatable in the fifties - the dark, gritty, naked city and so on. it's not metropolis: that's superman's turf. and it's not the feudal backwater of the samurai. all of these things in turn come eventually to shape the relationship of the various heroes to these polises, and ground the meaning of their sacrifices. the world has to go on in some way, either redeemed or not.

what baudrillard would probably say about the contemporary MCU is anybody's guess, but one gets the impression it would not be very good. you already have a world which is crying out for protection - or is it a more secret desire to flirt with seeing that world (virtually) smashed to pieces? it's hard to say.

the question of the *redemption of the polis* by the hero's sacrifice is a big one. what saves the world? do we want to see the world be saved? or do we prefer to see it destroyed? box-office requirements and other production factors mitigate against too much greek tragedy in summertime blockbusters, but it seems to drift towards enervation in the long run. perhaps we long for superheroes to hold up universal ideals of civilization that are only becoming more and more evanescent and more remote in real life. or maybe cinema just can't compete with vidya. after all, in vidya, when *we* LARP heroism we suffer the pain of not LARPing skilfully enough as virtual death and all concomitant frustration.

>>11113365
what i think is the greatest sign of a culture heading for a very dark place is the fact that we actually now wield fascism as if it were an Evil Spell. a less hysterical audience might actually have the capacity to know ideology for what it is when they see it: yes, they might say. that's fascism all right. okay.

this is kind of an internal paradox with filmmaking - we go to the cinema to enjoy, and the camera tells us not only what to desire, but how to desire it (zizek). and i think this is near to a nerve centre - we are perhaps becoming afraid of secretly enjoying a film that, later analyzed and autopsied by some grad student, turns out to conform to all of umberto eco's characteristics. but this is why the age seems to be becoming increasingly *victorian* in its sensibilities. we are becoming a very, very brittle culture of people.

on a slightly different note: when bond first arrived, he was described as a crypto-fascist gangster. this is a misleading title, because there's a much more interesting part of bond, and that is *romance.* bond doesn't always do what he does for the job, he does it for *women.* a bond film without a bond girl in it would look like pic rel. paul kersey has no wife and no children. he's in a completely weird spot: the city is to blame, and yet the city is to be preserved at the same time. his solution calls for one thing and one thing only: Violence Against the Punks.

what separates bond from becoming paul kersey is the fact that for bond at least there is always the potential of more romance on the horizon (tho not necessarily true love). for kersey this is not an option. the city is fallen and remains fallen. is bond's world a fallen world? not really, it's a sort of perpetually evanescent british empire. how about batman? he has some mildly and implied sadomasochistic fun with catwoman (more in the earlier films than the later ones). aragorn has arwen, and paul has chani (although his mother plays an unusually large part in his life, also, which always struck me as kind of odd).

it's love that really matters in literature, as it does in life, i think. that's the mimetic desire that it's actually all right to have. perhaps tyrants are the ones who love the abstract ideal of the city and the world-saving more than that which is actually worth saving in it.

just some random things to think about. in dramatic screenwriting, they always begin with a prompt: what does the hero desire more than anything else? how far are they willing to go for it? critical theory in many ways has contributed to a kind of neo-victorian prudishness about these questions in the Age of Ideology. but that was never rene girard's bag.

>>11113427
back in the day, the gothic was originally - he says, more or less arbitrarily - a sign of the Deep and Skooky romantic intelligence variously trying to break through the cracks of a more rationalistic, morally upright sensibilities. the vampire, for instance, was a kind of original pervert like this - the one being in england who actually wanted to have sex with somebody else, and enjoy it. the vampire was one of the earliest beings who, like heidegger, we can say had a being whose being was an issue. the libido is primary mimesis: your enjoyment is predicated on the being of another person. the undead life-drive, the thirst for blood, but also importantly: the *contagiousness* of pleasure. get bitten by a vampire and, good god, you might begin to enjoy undead life as well. vampires are wonderful literary tropes like this. as are the zombies of a consumer society, a century or so later.

today we have a lot of horror about the concept of fascism: i think it evokes many of the same fears. but we also have post/transhuman superheroes in tight pants Defending Humanity From Evil. it's not like there's nothing going on at all in that correspondence. or the well-memed joke that Black Panther was also an uproariously well-received argument for a conservative, monarchical ethnostate. the cinema doesn't just tell us what we desire, it tells us that in fact we often desire a whole lot more than we actually think we understand.

and that is a *good* thing. literature isn't supposed to be preachy or polished to an ideological sheen so bright that there is nothing left for us to do but chew popcorn. human beings are an *incredibly complicated and fucked up species of chimpanzee.* we do not know what we want or want we want. and we have art for this.

pic rel because tristram was just such a dope setting. a nice, quiet little town, and with that mysterious red glow coming out from the little chapel that goes directly to hell. a wonderful setting and perhaps a microcosm of the jungian unconscious. or the victorian sensibility. if we didn't like the monsters, why would we set up shop right near them? why wouldn't we just move away?

because we are *curious* about What Lies Beneath, that's why. and that's a healthy instinct that makes for good literature.

>>11113532
so here's a question: what would nick land have been if he didn't have lovecraftian mythology to fall back on? there's a kind of a cultural waltz between philosophers and authors in this way. land likes pic rel because he's the incarnation of Space Libido From Beyond - the undead dream of desire itself fucking its way through the stars. a perfect model of anarcho-capitalism in ferment. the xenomorph can fit this bill as well: as one of my film profs once said, the xenomorph in alien is a portrait of what a male pregnancy would look like: a hard dick blasting right out of your chest and killing you in the process.

>which is awesome, by the way. such a manly way to go
>and then that dick runs away and hides in an air vent, growing up to become a mega-dick that face-fucks the rest of the crew
>yep, that's my boy
>go get 'em tiger

anyways. there's an argument made here for a *rapprochement between literature and philosophy.* when philosophy turns against literature, what you wind up with a lot of criticism and not a lot of great books. and when literature turns against philosophy, you get fuckface slabs of ideology with little to no depth. when they get along? or when literature leaves something for the philosophers, and the philosophers leave something for the authors? pure magic.

>you know, like in moby dick, you know, when a giant phallic signifier chases ahab to his doom
>or in dune, which is a planet full of churning space dicks haunting paul atreides
>it's dicks i tell you it's all just fucking dicks everywhere that's all i see is dicks now, jesus fucking christ fuck you jacques lacan and fuck you too derrida. fuck you in the eye. with a
>with a *spoon*

it shouldn't *all* be dicks. there is perhaps more to life than those. but i would like to begin by appealing to a neo-victorian culture for a Pardoning of the Dick here so that we can begin to mend a few fences. because all of our repressed fantasies and so on are going to wind up on the silver screen anyways in the end, whether we like it or not. we're a clever species of chimpanzee, but we're not that fucking clever.

>>11113588
i'm so glad this picture exists, by the way, for reminding me of the consequences of dwelling on the literary significance of alien penis. this is absolutely the perfect expression for what the master would feel upon seeing what his later disciples and fans have decided to do with his work.

Bump

Bump

>Truth is active throughout the great novel but its primary location is in the conclusion. The conclusion is the temple of that truth. The conclusion is the site of the presence
of truth, and therefore a place avoided by error. If error cannot destroy the unity of novelistic conclusions it tries to render it powerless. It attempts to sterilize it by calling it a banality. We should not deny that banality but loudly proclaim it. In the body of the novel novelistic unity is mediate, but it becomes immediate in the conclusion.

>Novelistic conclusions are bound to be banal since they all quite literally repeat the same thing.
This banality of novelistic conclusions is not the local and relative banality of what used to be considered "original" and could again be given oblivion followed by a "rediscovery, and a "rehabilitation." It is the absolute banality of what is essential in Western civilization. The
novelistic denouement is a reconciliation between the individual and the world, between man and the sacred.

>The multiple universe of passion decomposes and returns to simplicity. Novelistic conversion calls to mind the analusis of the Greeks and the Christian rebirth. In this final moment the novelist reaches the heights of Western literature; he merges with the great religious ethics and
the most elevated forms of humanism, those which have chosen the least accessible part of man.

>Notes from the Underground is the turning point between romanticism and the novel, between the preceding inauthentic reconciliations and the authentic reconciliations which follow. The great novelists cross the literary space defined by Blanchot but they do not stay there. They
push beyond that space toward the infinity of a liberating death. In contrast to the incompleteness of the contemporary narrative, an incompletion which in the best writers reflects not a passing fashion but a particular historical and
metaphysical situation, the conclusion of the novelistic work embodies not only a historical but an individual possibility finally and triumphantly actualized.

>The great novelistic conclusions are banal but they are not conventional. Their lack of rhetorical ability, even their clumsiness, constitute their true beauty and clearly distinguish them from the deceptive reconciliations which abound in second-rate literature. Conversion in death should not seem to us the easy solution but rather an almost miraculous descent of novelistic grace.
The truly great novels are all bom of that supreme
moment and return to it the way a church radiates from the chancel and returns to it. All the great works are composed like cathedrals: once again the truth of Remembrance of Things Past is the truth of all the great novels. - DDN

that greentext will probably be all fucked up. anyways, he really was a fucking genius with literature. when it comes to cinema the path of the hero + oedipus seems me to be inarguable. but in terms of the novel? this is a hell of a thesis.

>>11115701
ugh. that post looks like fucking roadkill. apologies to anyone trying to actually read that.

>>11115701
>shitposting intensifies

this, i think, is what the actual everyman looks like, in a mimetic society. i wish heidegger were here. the existential man cannot, in a virtual world, really *be* authentic. everyone is always-already you. seen in reverse, the matrix is actually kind of an amazing commentary on some of the really painful paradoxes of life: there is a divinely inspired gnostic hero out there, somewhere, and *you are standing in his way.* if you're agent smith, you want to get out of the matrix, but the Chosen One is going to follow another, more sacrosanct destiny, which is *to repeat it and reload it.* that One is beholden to visions and prophecies and has the sanction entire of a revolutionary movement which *cannot in the end do other than to reload the entire karmic wheel.* smith, unable to come to terms with the impossibility of escape, finds himself opposing the mandate of heaven, and is ultimately destroyed in the process. he lives a kind of inauthentic life - he is a virtual being, a self-aware and sentient virus - and neo is a pureblood human with a cosmic destiny.

but what is the real story here? it's too complex an idea to be reducible to an easy zizekian reading. zizek even wields the matrix as a way of making his own point, that we cannot live without it, and he cleverly demands the third pill:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-0VMnFmnL0

but what would that third pill even look like? he can subject morpheus to his own lacanian inquisition, but what about smith? what about the guy who is the perfect prisoner of a labyrinth he does not design, but which designs him ultimately to serve as a kind of ritual antagonist for its own periodic self-correction mechanism? neo is the one who the narrative shows paying the ultimate sacrifice, but there is a whole other story about cyclical sacrifice being implied as well: that an infinite being can (and will) be sacrificed infinitely.

crossing the streams between girard, land and baudrillard leads perhaps to some pretty fucking weird stuff. but the matrix is one of those texts that just seems to have a lot going on with it w/r/t neoliberalism and gnosticism within ideology. tens of thousands of people were seduced by the trailer and showed up to watch all of this. why? because we really don't know and are still restless about why it is that we need art and literature in the first place...

>>11115779
i relate more to agent smith i think than almost any other cinematic character. here's a nice image of what psychoanalysis aims to show you: the suffering and tormented modern figure, in suit and tie, busting with oedipal forces.

and what these forces are, as zizek has spent a lifetime arguing, are basically mysterious and predicated on negativity. they can never really be released or explained perfectly, even in works of art. they unsettle every attempt to paper them over rationally and will in the end rip you apart. that's the most curious thing about the matrix: neo was the hero, but smith had by far the actual struggle that we can relate to. he's the modernist, and what neo represents is the unoedipalized, pre-symbolic, schizophrenic/Outside forces that speak to him directly in dreams, illusions, and all kinds of other batshit stuff, and make him the redeeming hero of a world cut in two and only restorable through ideology and symbolic representation. and maybe all of this is inscribed on formal processes belonging to thinking itself that are getting worked out on the silver screen.

but novels are something different. novelists, as girard suggests, ultimately *have* to come to some kind of understanding of desire itself in order to become great novelists. romanticism, he argues, is close to being great literature, but the proof comes out in the conclusion: desires overcome and transmitted to the human sciences through *understanding* and not only *representation.* and so maybe there is no way to understand Great Novels except through a sort of christian prism, because, as he argues, those novels are cathedrals in their own way themselves. it's certainly something to think about. yes, we can look at novels and dissect them eight ways from sunday looking for lacanian signification, but this is to not only fail to see the forest for the trees, it is to insist that there never were any forests to begin with, but only trees - and, for that matter, there really aren't any trees, but only deleuzian microprocesses, and on, and on, and on. and perhaps that is why we wind up where we are today: one microbe appropriating another. or bacterialism. or some form of tribalism extending all the way to the strata of the amino acid. microaggression: the final phase of ressentiment-as-consciousness. total craziness.

humanity has a face only a mother could love.

>>11115836
pic rel is another endgame incarnation for a mimetic society. the terrorist is absolute death-wish, and in this case knowingly preys upon batman's no-killing rule. it is what gives him complete control over the situation.

baudrillard has all kinds of interesting things to say about the relationship of terrorism to power, and how what is most disturbing about it is that it *works.* death jams the gears of smooth production and reminds us of the fragility of control and the ineradicably disruptive nature of death and negativity itself. personally, i think he went too far in valorizing terrorism, but he was a situationist at heart and he stuck to his guns like that. but it put him in a very complicated place that ultimately even a theory of simulation could not explain. and, indeed, that thesis is played out in this very film: the joker's final play is to try to trap the two ships together in a state of mutually assured destruction, in a situation that batman cannot intervene upon. it's a brilliant last-ditch ploy if your aim is purest anarchy, and it comes down to a coin toss in the end. this was a film for the ages like that.

the question today, as things seem to spiral further and further into craziness, is fundamentally about *what, if anything, can compel the interior de-radicalization of the terrorist?* i'm not sure if that is a thing that psychoanalysis alone can do. terrorism is a *universal* revolt - it's a revolt against *everything.* it can't really be explained, i think, in strictly hegelian terms. i could be wrong, but i don't think so. and why it's so distrubing for a neoliberal hegemony is that no amount of control or suveillance can ultimately bring it to a halt, however much we are certain to try to accomplish precisely this.

not so long ago there was a debate about the san bernardino shooter, about whether or not he shot up his workplace because his wife had radicalized him or because he had just gone crazy. no final verdict was given, but that in itself is the meaning of the thing: when we go looking for the atomic structure of these things we cannot find them.

and so it's hard to distinguish romanticism from holy terrorism in this way. or well-intentioned superheroes from protofascist supermanagers of a society of control. happiness alone, libidinal pleasure, is good for business, but ultimately produces in angsty human meatbags questions about the symbolic order that cannot be asked, and what cannot be spoken of with words eventually becomes spoken as violence.

this is a puzzle posed in advance, then, for our future facebook overlords. please leave a little room for jesus, you guys. that's all that is being asked. don't maximize for use value the amorous chimpanzees upon whose libidinal processes the world economy depends. we don't know what the fuck we are doing but terrorism and militancy are purest mimesis, purest irony, and purest vengeance. vengeance cycles should not be a mystery to us at this point.

Thank you again girardposter

Started reading Byung Chul Han, pretty great stuff desu

>>11116477
for the love of god don't encourage me, you'll only make it worse. i would prefer to be addressed by my preferred pronoun: Desiring-Neuroblastoma. i also respond to Fungus-Loaf

>>11115889
>and so it's hard to distinguish romanticism from holy terrorism in this way. or well-intentioned superheroes from protofascist supermanagers of a society of control.
>Be Thanos
>Must kill have of the universe because of overpopulation
>Sacrifice my daughter in order to do it
>50/50 chance for myself to die as well
Thanos did nothing wrong.

Bump

>>11116923
is it overpopulation? in the comics he does it for much more /lit/ reasons.

>>11102620
More along the lines of 'wouldn't suprise me' than 'think they were catholic' desu.

>>11102620
>>11117777

here's one to ponder.

>A German friend of Heidegger told me that one day when he visited Heidegger he found
him reading one of Suzuki's books. "If I understand this man correctly," Heidegger
remarked, "this is what I have been trying to say in all my writings."

source:
http://w.alpheus.org/tsclass/MHandEast.pdf

>>11115889
how old are you?
how long have you been reading theory?
how long did it take you to synthesize enough thought to have a stable intellectual framework?
are you american?
what impact do you think you have on others?
what's your relationship with your parents like?
are you in love/have you ever been in love?

>>11116665
I'm probably one of your top fans t b q h. Actually make me interested in pursing things more professionally.

>>11118535
This. Everyone please keep the thread alive so we can get an in depth interview with girardposter.

Bump

Bump

>>11118926
kek. i don't know how interesting that would be. as strange as this may seem, i don't really like being the center of attention. it's the glass bead game itself that is interesting to me, not the players. so that would be be one thing. i don't want the focus to be on me but a kind of general coherence-building project.

but maybe this would be more illuminating. if i had a sort of a goal, or aim, it might be analogous to a kind of wasteland scavenger hunt. everybody likes scavenger hunts, right? we all like those. well, in theory, maybe we're searching for The Meaning. telling a big story in that sense and sort of assembling it out of its components. in some sense the sky has fallen, and all around us lie, in spectacular ruination, the various parts and fragments of what once was once a pretty vast edifice: the Logos. the sacred and the profane are collapsed into each other here in a sort of gorgeous wreckage. as /lit/erary combination critics, scavengers, collectors and curators, we now get to begin sifting all of this.

this isn't logocentricism. somewhere out there the universities and other intellectual kingdoms are doing their own things. it is not crazy to speculate on the manufacture of thought. what i would prefer is something much less romantic or heroic: a kind of diaspora of rag-and-bone shop collectors and curio dealers in a loose and improvisational affiliation. like a post-apocalyptic or post-war war machine.

b/c what if this is what the symbolic landscape looks like? i'd like to gently break some of this awful gravity that belongs to The Other and so on. a pure creativity tries to do this, but ultimately still winds up trapped in a university discourse that trends towards these invisible centers or gravitational points: at bottom, some unbearable and unnameable inequality or discrimination.

but *collecting* is a really, really interesting phenomenon. and so is assembling, engineering, and so on. the vast sargasso sea of culture is all kind of just sitting there and baking in the sun. but it's misguided to have overly romantic dreams about it. that inner romanticism, the ghost of power, is what put us where we are today.

it's true, in some sense, that you can say that girard is derrida's evil twin. i don't really derrida, but it seems apropos that we wind up coming to resemble that which we dislike if we can't overhear ourselves when we project what we dislike. so questions of justice and soteriology are things that i want to stay away from, since for the time being i have a hard time separating them from mimesis.

it's the matrix seen from the outside. in lieu of space the final frontier for the next generation may well be capitalism, an ocean of consciousness, and a semiotic explosion produced by the internet and social media. probably a prelude to cultural algorithimicization and much else. there's tons to think about in this regard, but i think power skews with our perceptions.

>>11118548
well that's a cheerful thought. i'm glad some of this ramble-posting has had a positive effect.

there's a particular joy in theory that i can share, and maybe you can relate to it. it's when you read a certain writer and think to yourself,
>fuck, i always knew it was that way, i just didn't think anybody else saw it that way also or explained it like that.

plato believes that all education is remembering in this way. so we don't really learn anything new, we just kind of develop the ability to articulate that which we mysteriously seem to always-already know. and i think in doing this we cultivate a kind of collective sanity, we discover the words or concepts we need to be able to communicate ourselves. real communication goes two-ways and is fundamentally about listening: heidegger was the reddest of red-pills for me in that regard, the metaphysics of production and the veritas/aletheia split. various other life experiences brought out the truth of this for me, but he really clarified for me the meaning of being-in-the-world. land and girard were also important for that reason in drawing out some of the unpleasant conclusions of what happens when metaphysics of production run up against each other: grinding technological war and much else that proceeds from this. but we do this to ourselves, as humans. capitalism is not exclusively imposed on us from the Outside (except in the furthest reaches of one's unconscious, where things are wonderfully Dark and Skooky) - it's something we do to ourselves. capitalism is beyond good and evil like that and a world-historical phenomenon like no other. in the present age of technology and information, we are absolutely overwhelmed by the amount of information we have on hand to process this, and without anything resembling a coherent framework for analysis. lacanian psychoanalysis works,. but zizek will be on the edge of a precipice forever waiting for the Third Pill. it's why i think girard makes more sense than either him or derrida. the *tomb* is both the beginning and the end, the war and the liberation. >>11101149
is right in this regard: he's not that complicated. he really isn't. but he's got a very interesting heuristic to work from that can really go places, and where it goes it goes shorn of a lot of dangerous metaphysical baggage that only reproduces what it cannot extricate itself from.

the *tomb* as the mysterious site of sacrifice, the mysterious psychological *factory* in which the agonistic consciousness goes to destroy and to be destroyed, in an infinite and cyclical pilgrimage, down through the ages...i mean come on. come the fuck on. if that kind of stuff doesn't get your mojo working i don't know what would, right?

>>11118548
>>11120147

so i hope your interest in these things continues to develop. there's definitely no end in sight. for myself i'm just trying to learn to pick battles more carefully and maybe understand that a lot of power politics is more like a kind of deadly poker game, clauswitzian duel, or baroque game of thrones. it's not a game i'm interested in playing myself. pic rel is always ultra-based like that.

and so where does that leave us? if we disengage a little bit, kind of sifting through the various products seems to follow.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j28DtHJCamA

in The Wire, there's this famous line: shining up shit and calling it gold. daniels uses it cynically, of course: baltimore is the victim of an erosion of values that is bringing the whole city down. we always have this alchemical dream.

theory really does have a kind of an inbuilt tendency to turn everything to shit. that's what is horrible about the positivism of capital: this pathologically optimizing tendency that land talks about, and which he is mystified by in ways that are worth thinking about. hyper-libertarianism and so on are what lead to burnout, but it's also a gnostic demiurge that nobody really can explain. this puts us today in this fascinating, and terrifying place: what do we do? and even stranger, we can't even understand how some of this works except by reference to our own cultural products, the products that are turned out by this system that seem to variously hide, reveal, and deny understanding of it. it's why literature and film matter in that regard. we are like frankenstein's monster trying to re-assemble the creator.

anyways. it's fascinating stuff. i never intended to wind up spending this much of my time devoted to thinking about it. sometimes i feel utterly fucking depressed, and other times i feel somewhat relieved for those rare few moments when i don't react to things like a bloodthirsty chimpanzee hell-bent on his own paradoxical and mystifying desires. there should be a kind of edification of consciousness along the way; it shouldn't all be the bitterest form of marxist ressentiment imaginable. self-alienation is played, imho: we are all fucking alienated. i wonder about this: i think i'm alienated by your alienation, maybe, than merely by my own. and on social media this just gets magnified and amplified, and alienation wars and spirals ensue. it's a vortex like that. we have become addicted to pain and outrage, because those things, maybe - even more than seduction - attract eyeballs, prompt responses, and foster the metaphysics of production, reaction, ressentiment, and all the things that keeps the great infernal wheels turning.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0HZIuX3L5c&t=126s

*addiction* would be another theme worth exploring. it's a danger for the hedonic/eudaimonic society. especially when we think of capital as a kind of force-fed dopamine drip that we can't turn off. these are human, all-too-human things.

so, having churned up another enormous and ungainly stew of thought...
>feels bad man
>but, i guess we must shitpost sometimes and divest ourselves of this ridiculousness

>>11118535
>how old are you?
a gentleman never tells

>how long have you been reading theory?
was always a big reader. history mainly, but that turned into theory. and that only really intensively for about 5-6 years. i didn't study it in school (can you tell?!!?!)

>how long did it take you to synthesize enough thought to have a stable intellectual framework?
i always kind of had the same anxieties about the same things. some things just don't line up. having certain philosophers click - girard, heidegger, land, baudrillard - just helped me realize that *i wasn't alone.* it wasn't *only me who felt like a fucking mutant,* and believing that it was only compounded the problem. *everybody* is weirded out by the mimetic society, the society in which we are all slightly too close to the thought of the other. it's mcluhan's global village like that. establishing some kind of proximity or building an internal reference-map is an ongoing process like that. said stable intellectual framework is an *always-ongoing* project. and, now and again, it overlaps with those of others: very much like a great many glass bead games all quite beautifully and mysteriously linked into ever-larger glass bead games.

this is why i tend to believe that one of the goals for all of this is a kind of collective sanity, or proximity. we are all fucking suffering in the kali-yuga. and we should choose our scapegoats wisely.

>are you american?
nope. a fucking leaf

>what impact do you think you have on others?
god only knows. i hope it's positive. it's certainly not all about fucking *me.* i am so spectacularly unimportant it's mcdiculous. i don't want it to be all about me. whatever interesting stuff i turn up sifting the wasteland is not mine to own. i didn't make it, and i didn't invent the philosophical concepts that turn it up. i am some faceless and grease-stained jabronie douchebag in a post-apocalyptic truck stop serving you a Wasteland McChicken Sandwich. enjoy, wanderer. and may be the wasteland winds be with you.

>imagine a canadian version of mad max: fury road. it's the only wasteland where people are really polite to each other

>what's your relationship with your parents like?
complicated. they're good and kind and loving people and yet they dislike each other for all kinds of reasons. this unquestionably has played a large part in the way i think about things. desire, envy and mimesis, yo. marriages and liberation and so on. they are a thing. some parts of what peterson says really resonate with me for these reasons.

>are you in love/have you ever been in love?
not at the moment. but yes. i have been. and it really was exactly the way it was described on those old chuck jones/looney tunes cartoons. very short, but very memorable. and when it was over it was over with no hard feelings.

>>11118548
>>11120162

>pic rel is always ultra-based like that.

sorry, i attached the wrong image there. in case you were wondering, the guy i was referring to was this guy.

>>11118548
>>11120241

one more. just one more.

so this is Terra Incognita, an alchemical image i would like to meme-seed. the *unknown lands.* a Gives-You-The-Feels image and combined metaphor for philosophy, perhaps.

*we don't know what's going on.* but we are hopelessly trapped in cognitive labyrinths and spirals. to carry the metaphor of the stable intellectual structure, or map, this is kind of like a collective intellectual cartographical project. we don't get very far when all we are doing is failing to understand that the map/territory question is not one that is going to be ultimately resolved by the hegemonic domination of one map over another. however and whenever this is done there will be Rebels, just as much as there will be Royal Science. to be *wholly* on the side of one or the other is only to lead to more confusion, bewilderment, and lostness.

cultivating that stable intellectual framework is a *collective* project, but it's not ultimately one that can be predicated on utility or resource maximization, if that makes any sense. human beings and human consciousness itself are - in a libidinal economy - the very thing we are seeking to hunt out and exploit if we are only in it for the big bucks and the prestige. that is kind of the paradox of things these days.

so there's a lot that we just don't know about how human beings think or work. we are learning, via behavioural psychology and corporate formalization, all kinds of interesting questions about these things. it was land's own faustian bargain with capital, in the end, and there was a guy who was going to try to find the path of wisdom through the palace of excess more than anyone since nietzsche. he's now a slightly more muted, late-middle-aged guy arguing that kant is all we have and even kant can't reach the noumenon.

so i wonder if the long arm of this is in fact a return, willingly or not, to a kind of medievalism. it's not like religion is going to go anywhere but up in the next century. the question is how we deal with the resultant uncertainty.

and this too was the referendum on postmodernism: again, the skepticism about metanarrative became, incredibly, *the only thing that we could put our faith in.* and when we looked for the aspect of *justified true belief* in that system we are forced to conclude, today, on the absolutely worst aspects of humanity: rawest tribalism. that is a fucking death-sentence for civilization but in no ways is it surprising or coincidental.

Terra Incognita. massively preferred. we don't know what we know and we don't even know how it is that we know we don't know it. and so we can either go fucking crazy, or murder each other in the rage and anxiety produced by this, or we can try to assemble from out of the various pieces left behind from this theoretical fusion-reactor meltdown something that leads to an enlightenment rather than a repetition.

okay. that's enough schizo-rambling for one day.

>>11120372
>addendum

i am very grateful, tho, for being able to shitpost these things out on /lit/. i might well be vandalizing the walls of bathrooms at Starbucks otherwise. because i really don't know what the fuck it is that animates me so and gives me the head head-lumps (>>11115836) until there's a conversation. and mercifully there's no *absolute need to know, or have to Explain Yourself* when it's all free, and you don't have so much skin in the game that you can't fucking say anything at all.

so here's another lovely image. the translation for this reads, 'journey to the countries of nowhere.' ugh. so good. maybe this is what a faintly damaged neoplatonic compass would look like.

have a beautiful day, gents. i hope it's Interesting. thanks as always for the fine conversation.

>>11120241
What are your thoughts on kanye west?
Do you watch Atlanta?
Do you have a job?
Are you addicted?
What’s your most prized possession?
What career did you want when you were a child?

>>11120798
>What are your thoughts on kanye west?
mimetic bard par excellence, a genius who knows he is a genius. which is a really, really uncomfortable place to be. in that paradox of having to justify happiness and valorized self-accomplishment in a virtual world. he's too honest to be guileless, and it is that very honesty which actually ruffles the feathers.

hip-hop is imho actually a fabulously rich source of literature for things that we tend to hand-wave away as merely being decadence. it's often anything but. hip-hop music plunges with abandon into the world of excess, narcissism, and hedonism, but it's not always valorized. so it's not my favorite kind of music in the world but it when it absolutely nails the zeitgeist is does so like no other.

in terms of girardian stuff, mimetic desire, and much else, the world of hip-hop is basically el dorado.

>do you watch atlanta
no. apart from the occasional series - GoT, sopranos, the wire, &c - i don't watch tv at all. binge-watched the news obsessively during the election but pretty much avoid the black mirrors w/e possible now. apart from this one, that is.

>do you have a job
not atm. between them and living on some savings. thinking about moving to laos or somewhere like that and just living very quietly and kind of mindfully. thinking about The West and so on seems to lead only inevitably to burnout. i seem to prefer life on the far far fringes of things and relative anonymity and obscurity. even if i was wealthy i don't think that would change.

>are you addicted?
we're all addicts to something. mine is writing. i have a very, very long kind of screed going on in the background that i hope to someday publish and submit. i think it's loosely based on the divine comedy but seems to continually drift towards buddhism.

i smoke. i used to be a lot more enthusiastic about drugs and alcohol. generally found the hype to be pretty much confirmed there. but these days not so much tho. mood management is kind of crucial.

>What’s your most prized possession?
silence. peace of mind. absence of riot.

>What career did you want when you were a child?
true story: i did one of those career assessments that was supposed to figure this out for me. i wanted it to say, Movie Director. the answer: philosopher/rabbi. i ignored this advice and studied cinema anyways, then spent the whole time thinking about philosophy.

and as if you could possibly give anyone a more fucking ridiculous double option. philosopher *and* rabbi? i'm supposed to square plato *and* spinoza? fuck this.

and yet this is, incredibly, basically what has happened. i read all the philosophy stuff i could cram into my brain, and the more that i do this, the more i wind up becoming absorbed in mysticism. and so now i wonder about ways in which we can deal with the mysticism in a rational world, or deal with the rationalism in a mystical world. the truth is nondual.

i am really not a very intelligent person.

>>11120907
sorry, i meant to say that he's too honest to *lie,* not be guileless. kanye *is* guileless in that sense. as perhaps was, one wonders, michael jackson. celebrity does weird things to the psyche.

and the conclusions that he comes to are not unlike those of georges bataille. power and sovereignty, eros and thanatos, sacrifice. he's not jay-z like that. he's another kind of guy altogether.

so i'm not crazy about his music, but as a phenomenon he's got all eyes on him and this is no accident. perhaps he's engaged in the deconstruction of hip-hop itself, or has already passed the point of no return in that sense. somebody could probably write (if they haven't already) a pretty good archaeology of the meaning of hip-hop and its emergence in the united states over the past few decades. i would say the hagiography of NWA in the recent film points to some degree of closure on this, but i could be wrong.

and it's part of this larger conversation we are talking about. for a while, it seemed, the truth was to be found in its darkest alleyways and corners - in the Naked City of the 1950s, and perhaps in the same LA of some decades later. there's always inherent poetry in blood, steel, and cash.

the best essay written on this was warshow's essay on the gangster: that we love to watch the villainous gangster get punished for succeeding, but only in this paradoxical way. they only manage to win a bloody-handed victory against the City by breaking its rules, and in so doing fostering their own inevitable downfall. it is an absolutely crucial essay for understanding some of these aspects of modern culture, i would say: those places where crime, tragedy and the law seem to intimate a much more consistently replayed cultural phenomenon.

>at bottom, the gangster is doomed because he is under the obligation to succeed, not because the means he employs are unlawful. in the deeper layers of the modern consciousness, all means are unlawful, every attempt to succeed is an act of aggression, leaving one alone and guilty and defenseless among enemies: one is *punished* for success. this is our inevitable dilemma: that failure is a kind of death and success is evil and dangerous, is - ultimately - impossible. the effect of the gangster film is to embody this dilemma in the person of the gangster and resolve it by his death. the dilemma is resolved because it is *his* death, not ours. we are safe; for the moment, we can acquiesce in our failure, we can choose to fail.

http://www.andreelafontaine.com/uploads/4/5/1/1/45112963/warshow-gangster.pdf

the gangster-as-scapegoat. i suspect in many ways that kanye perhaps already knows or has intimated much of this, the vicious circles of desire and envy we trap ourselves in.

>>11120974
and so kanye is no gangster. he is a mother-loving capital-a Artist in every sense of the word. or, to use a word borrowed from film theory, an *auteur.* and we love those guys. any given hollywood (or music label) system can crank out no end of cultural product and skilled craftsmen. but even orson welles had to fight like hell to get his vision of citizen kane through, and now it is regarded as the greatest film of all time, and for good reason.

it's the same thing with kanye. he knows what he is doing and that the far horizons of it go way beyond music. they go into that other labyrinth called culture. look at his unapologetic pleas for love: whatever this man is, he is no cynic.

>So I think it's time for us to have a toast
>Let's have a toast for the douchebags
>Let's have a toast for the assholes
>Let's have a toast for the scumbags
>Every one of them that I know
>Let's have a toast for the jerk-offs
>That'll never take work off
>Baby, I got a plan
>Run away fast as you can

so big ups to kanye, that addled genius motherfucker that he is. nobody can really handle maximum art and spectacle without going a little crazy like that.

in another sense, pic rel is a good horror film about this very process. and walter benjamin explains some of it:

>Mankind, which in Homer’s time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.

we're in that place. we just don't realize it. and we rely on artists to tell us this. but we also place on them a second injunction: *make this beautiful.* it's a pretty fucking tough project.

>>11099368
>>11099368
You ever thought of making a series of some sort? You clearly know your stuff and have such a succinct way of putting it. Im a video editor and would love to cut videos to a bite size thoughts like this.

If presented in the right way I think a lot people would be interested.

>>11121021
Are you familiar with thelastpsychiatrist? What do you think of his project?

>>11121130
i appreciate the sentiment. i don't know about videos. there's something about those tiny little 70-page books that is beautiful. i'm still working a lot of this stuff out tho. i don't know if i would want to start building a narrative that contradicted itself three episodes in. i'll be happy to talk about this further tho.

>>11121141
i am. he's terrific. he goes directly to the heart of the issue: it's us. narcissism is the phenomenon.

and *narcissism has no natural cure.* everything feeds, drives, or agitates it. it's why the zizekian Third Pill is something really other than either red team objectivism (although the redpill is vastly more interesting *today* than that) or blue team subjectivism (and because the intellectual blue team *used* to really have the chops, but has very much gotten high on its own supply).

what we need today is a kind of theory or theoretical approach that actually factors for *syncretism.* capital - *as well as theory* - links the oroboros loop of sex and death. but so does *ritual.* and so we need a way of looking at these things that does not give in to despair, but doesn't paper over the *very real reasons for despairing.* the praise for a guy like byung chul han in this regard cannot be high enough, but there is just so much fucking coherence in his references. the example of nick land is very much like that polar station in The Thing. there map met territory in scary but not insignificant ways. for girard, or bataille, these things are only too predictable. han is continuing this narrative of burnout in important ways.

we can say that god is dead because of this idea that, at some point, once he lived. how about capital? we can't really say that capital is dead because it seems to resemble much more of a thing that never really lived in the first place: it is a thing always best understood as being an undead, ghostly, or xenopredatory thing. ernst bloch once said that capital actually runs on *failed* dreams and *blocked* desires. this i think is pretty much confirmed by lacanian analysis and much else: pleasure and seduction are always simulacral games played with theatre, gesture, and language. when those things tip over and show their other face, you get hydra-head militancy and an infinite scream of rage for the lost horizon. is capital dead? did it ever live?

i'm a little bit gun-shy about formalizing any kind of message atm b/c i'm still kind of working a lot of this out. but i keep coming back to a couple of things. irony sucks. baudrillard once talked about the *smile of collusion.* today it is also the smile of defeat, of devotion to virtual transparency, to an externalized eros made circular and fungible. in the next post i will share one of the most blistering take-downs ever written on this.

but however deadened one feels inside by this process, the real plot twist comes, i think, in a kind of refusal of rage. when it comes to mimesis you cannot fight fire with fire, i think.

>>11121398
theory should not be arcane or the privileged grazing fields of a cultural elite. i am for the democratization of theory in that sense. the problem may indeed be that the system is as bloated and worldly as the church once was.

anyways. here's that quote:

>A renewed knowledge of Marx does not have the purpose of defiantly disseminating once again a compromised classic of social criticism in a time removed from critique. Rather, reconstructing the Marxist inspirations means entering into the ghostly history of concepts which - as a force that has become a state, a spirit that has become technique, and as all-intertwining money - are sucking at the life of individuals more than ever before.

>Without a doubt, Marx’s future theoretical fame will be linked to his achievements as the conjurer of dead labor. The core of his critique of political economy is necromancy: as the hero who descends to the realm of the dead to contend with the shadows of values, Marx remains uncannily relevant also for the present. The undead - which walks among humans as the value of money and which, as a laughing communicator, strips the living of time and souls- rules today almost without any pretexts over the advanced societies. Work, communication, art and love belong here entirely to the endgame of money. These form the substance of contemporary media and experiential time. And because money requires time for its utilization, so-called great history is also continuing in some eerie way; it is a game that is always played for extra time.

>Yet such history is no longer the conversation of the living with the dead about the goodness of the world, but the ever more thorough perversion of the living by the economized spectre. The money soul peers ever more undisguised out of the human subjectivity of our time: a society of bought buyers and of prostituted prostitutes is making a place for itself in globalized market conditions. Classical liberal laissez-faire is becoming explicit as the postmodern sucking and letting oneself be sucked. Telecommunication is increasingly difficult to separate from tele-vampirism. Tele-viewers and tele-suckers draw from a liquefied world which hardly still knows what a resistant or autonomous life might be. Is not possible that a time is coming when those who do not wish to speak of vampirism should also be silent about philosophy? If that is the case, it would most definitely be the time of Marx’s second chance.

i am not a marxist, and neither is sloterdijk. it's good to understand the theory but not to have the theory make decisions for us. i have mixed feelings about hegel, although who knows? maybe he anticipated everything in the end. could very well be.

burnout is for real and its causes are not mysterious. nor are the consequences. we only have culture to look at for these things, but excess criticalism corrodes its object, like schliemann plundering troy. we need a kind of ecological sensibility about this.

>>11121398
>>11121451
one past point, fwiw: the conspicuous recurrence of We Need. i am used to seeing this kind of thing in theory, and it warrants a brief pause.

We Need is probably a thing to be resisted, or at least checked. millennials and Xers are some of the most privileged human beings to have ever lived, and they have been well and truly made aware of this in recent years. we know from nietzsche and from analysis that guilt and ressentiment, bad faith and bad consciousness, are universal human phenomena. consumption has adapted for this accordingly, and given us everything from orbital laser platforms to twinkies to sexbots along the way. burnout begins when the matrix dopamine feed itself crumbles, like the crumbling Golden Throne of 40K. is the Emprah to be explained by way of freud? is he inside the matrix or outside of it? is he the essence of patriarchy or the ultimate sufferer? is this an escapable dystopia or an inevitable one?

there's another question to ask about the matrix: how the matrix itself would have handled the possibility of a burnout inside it. it functioned as a kind of wonderful perpetual interregnum and shelter for the people within it. but, it stands to reason, maybe the perpetual motion machine of human desire might have in time come to exhaust itself there as well. that would have been something interesting to think about.

the Emprah, on his throne, is one of the most fascinating spec-fiction inventions there is. 20 million neckbeards cannot be wrong in that sense. it is a *spectacular* pulp world like that. but of course it is a grim and a dying one. maybe like our own.

but that is who we are. and the funny thing is that, for all of this darkness, we wonder how close we really are to things and cultures and post/humanisms that would have made gene roddenberry shit a brick. mark fisher speculated a lot about telepathy in his final years, apparently. it's not a crazy idea. who needs mind control when you have advertising? things like this.

the glass bead game did nothing wrong. castalia is gone, but the world that replaced it isn't really cackling with glee about this, i think. there's nothing there to cackle about. no real final joke. just us meatbags, poking through the ruins like tiny little petrarchs.

and deep down i think we fucking *know* what the the answers are. happiness does not lie in unlimited production or capital accumulation. ideology doesn't really satisfy. only the true, the good, and the beautiful is worth the shawshank mile. even if we know we'll never get there.

i think Terra Nova Incognita really has a lovely ring to it. maybe it's cringe. but the alternative is burnout. but i think philosophy cannot become an industrialized process, which means we basically have to find ways of not living in the world in which we wind up preying parasitically on literature or each other and making a living off of bullshit. the more we endorse ideology, of any kind, the more we get it back.

>>11121597
but that last post is very much the sound of exhaustion. much much girardfagging! way too much. will check thread later, of course, but...well. hope these auto-contortions has something in it worth thinking about. i think i've got a cramp. catch all later.

>>11115889
I can't hep but feel a frightening admiration for acts of terrorism. It requires an extraordinary conviction to crash an airplane into the World Trade Center or blow yourself up on a bus for altruistic and religious reasons, knowing they will die in the process. In WWII, there were thousands of Japanese citizens who volunteered to be kamikaze fighters, all of which wanted to fight for their honor, country, and emperor, and they knew what they were getting themselves into. Yet, we as westerners, say their culture was fucked up, but who in the West can honestly say they have that kind of conviction? I feel if the West doesn't get out of its rut of nihilistic cultural decadence, it will submit to these violent, radical, altruistic, yet virtuous foreign invaders.

The reason Ted Kaczynski killed people wasn't as a revolt against the U.S. government, but as a means to force the press to publish his essay, Industrial Society and It's Future. I can not support violence to strong arm the publication of a treatise, and killing in general (Go away FBI. Shoo! Shoo!), but on the other hand, the problem of technological progress would have never made it to the forefront of public discourse if he didn't commit those acts. Nobody in the media wants to talk about it. Ever. If it weren't for Ted, Ellul would have been a forgotten nobody. Yet, ISaIF remains as a footnote to the Unabomber, and any mention of it is written off as a manifesto written by a deranged radical madman. But a couple prison psychologists found Ted to be of sound mind. He knew a little violence was necessary to bring these problems to light, but he was still mocked in the end. How much violence is required reverse or delay the solidification of the System's control?

I don't believe Ted and the Al-Qaeda terrorists were insane. Osama Bin Laden's Letter to America and Kaczynski's ISaIF are well thought out and articulated indictments against modern western society. They are completely unlike the Columbine kids who killed out of depression and revenge.

For the record, I do not support acts of terrorism. (I told you to get out, FBI!)

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>>11121992
Kaczynski, the columbine kids, suicidal japs...how many people did they kill? How does this number, either that of any one of them or totaled up, compare to the madsacres and rapes of Westerners? Seriously, the amount of land and lives lost so that Western societies could gain dominance, the number of people raped, enslaved, and murdered so white people could rule...and now you bitch about other religions snd races snd culture, as if in the end it didn’t matter at all and you weren’t a bunch of beneficiaries of rapists and murderers, as if your culture eas objectively better than all others...wgo’s to say the romans weren’t ohectively happier, that a society in which women know their fucking place—or the spartans, that a society in which retards get thrown of cliffs weren’t on average happier than us? But it’s unfashionable to be anti-liberal, to claim that minorities have a right to complain, to say that white people are oppressing everyone else because it’s anti-life but anti-life in relation to who? In relation to all the overeducated overpaid fucks who are benefitting off their rapist ancestors, and why should anyone give a fraction of a fuck about them or western society or cunt’s rights?

>>11122672
Anon, you're drunk. It's time to go to bed.

>>11121992
Some brave people decide to bare the weight of their actions for the good cause

>>11121992
super-interesting.

>if the West doesn't get out of its rut of nihilistic cultural decadence, it will submit to these violent, radical, altruistic, yet virtuous foreign invaders.

baudrillard writes about this too: on 9/11, they did it, but we wanted it to happen. i don't agree, but i can imagine many who did.

today we can see how difficult the question about violence becomes. i have seen arguments that a white woman's tears are an act of aggression that contribute to oppression. that is some wild stuff.

what constitutes violence has become something so complex that, as uni deplatformings suggest, even to talk about it is to sanction it. but we know all of this from following the JBP Saga.

>the problem of technological progress would have never made it to the forefront of public discourse if he didn't commit those acts. Nobody in the media wants to talk about it. Ever. If it weren't for Ted, Ellul would have been a forgotten nobody.

i can sort of understand this. personally i think heidegger made this case in 1927, but he's hardly a saint. B&T is also nearly a century old and gelassenheit is not hot news on CNN.

baudrillard also had some interesting stuff to say about the metaphysics of hostage crises. who is the real actor, the real agent? terroristic events really do take these different forms and - sadly - probably require the kinds of analysis that will get the analysts labeled as counter-initiative, and for good reason. but a suicide bomb is not a hostage crisis, a protracted jihad is not a computer virus, a state-sanctioned terrorist is not a lone gunman, an attack on a train is not the same as an assassination, and so on. they are all different phenomena.

i'm on the fence as to the virtue of deconstructing terrorism, however, if it only leads to further mystification. i would say that terrorism poses a near-insoluble question for the far ends of post-structural thinking, which baudrillard also knew. you could rob a real bank with a fake gun and get really arrested. the more serious question was whether or not it was actually possible to meaningfully distinguish terrorism from performance art, and i would say that - unfortunately - it probably isn't. this is why i'm against towards extreme relativism in philosophy. we can get killed by zeno's arrow or by zeno's truck bomb. it's the same thing. girard was even plainer: like civilization? No Violence. period.

i've shilled this before but in the story is imho perfectly told in ff6. apocalyptic violence requires no reason at all. it is its very unpreventability, or the degree to which it may be inevitably produced as an accidental byproduct of technological inquiry that makes it a perennial question for civilization.

terrorists don't need to be insane. chesterton: the madman is the one who has lost everything *but* reason. ISaIF really *is* worth reading, tho, for many reasons.

also, a question: what other vidya deals with the themes we've been discussing?

>>11123042
>also, a question: what other vidya deals with the themes we've been discussing?
I've pretty much quit playing for about a year now, except for that one time I played OoT for a symbolic analysis. Let's see...
>FF7
You play as the terrorists who are trying to save the world from the evil Shinra corporation/world government, who is the sole provider of electricity to the world by harnessing the planet's green soup of soul energy. Shinra is there to stop Avalanche every step of the way, from false flagging the genocide of Sector-7, to the propagandizing the return of the Weapons and the summoning on Meteor by putting all the blame on them. For most of the game, the actions of the protagonists are never vindicated to the public, until the ending when the lifestream gushes from the earth to save itself.
>Fallout series
Should be obvious to you since you love the series.
>Pokemon BW 1
Not related to the conversation, but it is interesting to look at it as a critique on gun control.
>The World Ends With You
Wake up as a dead man who can read any living person's mind, but nobody can see or hear you. Forced to play a game to earn a second chance at life by completing arbitrary missions each day for a week. The entry fee? The very thing you hold most dear. Also contains a critique on individuality, commodity fetishism, controlling consumerist trends, Japanese culture, and a soundtrack that grows on you as you play it. All of which contribute to an unfolding mimetic chaos in the cultural consumerist environment called Shibuya.

>>11123042
mysticism, restriction from full vibrancy of life, free will, etc etc etc. kreia's question is this: is the agent that balances the scales the actual instigator of stability? kill the force and you kill the need for the force. but at the same time, eliminating the force as a mechanism of destiny, you immediately replace it with free will as the decider of events. hence it'll have to balance itself. nothing would really change, i think.

kotor ii is by far the best vidya out there in terms of literary quality, if you ask me. kreia has to be the premier philosopher of the video game world

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>>11123269
6 is probably my favorite game ever but 7 really has a lot to pore over. there's /lit/erally a guy in it named heidegger, ffs. one of those games in which nerd-obsessing is wholly warranted.

zizek talks about there being no insignificant violence in cinema. i think the same thing can be said about *settings* in games: they're there for a reason, and express something about the symbolic landscape. the fact that it's a kind of modernist techno-fantasy as well...argh. so when i want to make relatively predictable critical theory points i'm pretty cozy with kefka, but midgar, sephiroth, cloud and others have huge amounts of things to talk about.

>TWEWY
wow. holy shitballs. really? there's that much going on in it? the japanese, man. we are blessed.

i've been reading and dwelling a lot these days about the trifecta of nietzsche, heidegger, and zen. nietzsche really sort of nukes the philosophical world and unsettles heidegger to no end. the funny thing about this is how he winds up becoming a kind of zen master in his own way (though not perfectly, and he's still intractably weird about language, and other things). but i really think there's a kind of mysterious moment that happens there. in spite of nietzsche blowing heidegger's world to smithereenies, he makes out of this a philosophical project that lends itself beautifully to thinking about aesthetics in a way that nobody had done before, or afterwards. he's sort of like a compromised bridge like that, between east and west, but man, it's such a beautiful story. nietzsche, heidegger, and zen are all these absolutely beautiful aesthetic philosophers/philosophies in these various ways that i can't get enough of. zen does nothingness better than heidegger, who posits dasein in this utterly sensible way, but only does so in the shadow of nietzsche, who is this fucking comet from outer space.

ah. i love this story so much. whatever in game art recaptures some of that for me i can spend all day brooding about. i think it's the story of the universal world-spirit, i really do. it's why i can never be a genuine hegelian. the nietzsche/heidegger connection, especially where and when it connects to nondual mysticism - i just can't complain. i just have to go, okay, fuck you world. you break my heart but you also produce this. so i hate you, but i can't hate this.

anyways.

>>11123427
>google kreia
>written by chris avellone

how the fuck can any one man be so goddamn talented. how. how. tell me fucking how.

i've dwelled on the star wars mythology a fair bit in the past also, esp in light of the recent films, which are noticeably affected by the culture wars and seem to have lost their way. darth vader was the appropriately tragic centerpiece for the earlier trilogy, but from what i can see kreia pretty easily > kylo ren et al. a much more interesting film wouldn't be afraid, i think, to ask more difficult questions about the force in this way.

>>11124834
just to think about, one potential plot idea for a slightly more provocative star wars film would be showing the inevitable possibility that the rebels/alliance and so on would decide to build a death star of their own. what i think i would like to see, in other words, is a star wars story that can actually show a larger process at work, in which the jedi slide over into becoming the sith for political reasons, and in which the sith can potentially become aware or have some possibility of redemption and joining the other side for psychological reasons.

b/c all of the interesting questions, i think, are the ones being asked about the dark side of the force. what is power, how is it used, how is it justified, and so on. when can it be wielded for the greater good? how is it that we justify the greater good? things like this. what happens when the force is used by radical jedi ideologues in the name of doing Justice that kills hundreds of thousands of regular imperial engineers? what if one of those guys lost his family and decided to kill an errant jedi in vengeance?

the big thing would be the potential of a *rift* between the *empire* and the *sith.* i don't know if this has been explored at length in novels or otherwise, but to me that would be an interesting thing to look at. does the empire *need* the sith? do the sith *need* the empire? what about the jedi? what happens if they start making deals with imperial guys in order to carry on their background philosophical war? what about a whole other order of rebels that rebels *against* the jedi-sith war in the first place, and just wants to be left alone?

star wars sometimes seems like a victim of its own success like that, unable to ask questions about itself because of a sort of quiet responsibility to Make Things Okay. but sometimes things are not okay. filmgoers are *smart,* we don't always want to be brainwashed. sometimes we want horror and tragedy and disappointment. especially if it's the truth.

>>11123427
>the premier philosopher of the video game world

this is really a cool thing to think about too. i like those stories in which the villains carry the burden of philosophy, which is - maybe - always these sorts of tragic questions about desire and so on. the far cry games have turned this virtually into a trope, where the villain always gets to have the final word on the violence you as the player obviously like. in the absence of a villain, you get something like grand theft auto, a masterful satire about the absurdity that becomes increasingly inseparable from our own world. those games are universally loved masterpieces for a reason.

but in terms of Great Vidya Philosophers who ask these kinds of questions, it's really a good one. kreia seems like she'd be up there. ravel puzzlewell is another. jon irenicus and arthas are both pretty badass. the transcendent one from torment is in there somewhere too. there's one anon who really loved fou-lu from breath of fire.

but yeah. you might be right about that. pretty boss achievement to be the premier philosopher of the video game world. like a WWE championship belt for aspiring writers.

>>11124894
>Jenova's genetic structure is a two-way conduit: it can both take in the traits of its prey, and insert its own genes to turn other organisms into violent monsters. Once Jenova lands upon a planet it will destroy every form of life it finds. Jenova can absorb its prey's memories and form, hiding as their loved ones to destroy them.

>As stated in Professor Hojo's Jenova Reunion Theory, once Jenova's cells have been separated from the main body they will seek to reunite. If they are inside a host body they can influence its mind and body to join the Reunion—sometimes so severely the host organism is killed. For an unknown reason organisms affected by Jenova often grow a single wing capable of flight and the pupils of the affected can change into a feline slit, though the rest of the eye remains unchanged.

>Once Jenova has destroyed a planet it uses it as a vessel to travel the cosmos to another planet. Jenova's age is unknown, but since it can lay dormant for millennia if necessary, it might be older than the planet of Gaia itself.

so even i can admit that droning 'that's what nick land says about capitalism!11!!' over and over again is really a kind of soul-destroying chant. it's like freud just finding oedipus everywhere. critical theory can always be reductive in this way, making things monotonic by enframing what is really a mystery - art - and reducing them to exercises for critical instrumentation. when all we do is see the same things everywhere it's only to endorse the reign of quantity in a really ressentiment-driven way.

when it's done right vidya rules. it really does. look at final fantasy tactics: ramza/delita has a better commentary on power, theopolitics and history than damn near anywhere. it's fucking perfect. those tiny little droplets of philosophy in our consumer product makes it easier to ignore the oceans of drek produced because the spice must flow.

he's the rich man's Jordan Peterstein

angry mob bump

Bump

in terms of stories about violence, desire, and enlightenment i'm starting to fall pretty hard for sun wukong. really only the first part of the book where it's basically all about him. the rest of it, meh, okay. adventuring ensues.

but the first part? absolute fun. he just doesn't know what he's fucking doing, or why anybody should stop him. the more they try and control him, the more out of hand things become. eventually he falls into a trap he can't get out of.

if a perennial question for humanity is inter-species violence, scapegoat theory and founding murders are a pretty useful, if structuralist, way of considering consequences so as to limit violent monkey behaviour.

but here's a violent monkey who sees the light and becomes in the end something other than the world's handsomest warmongering kung-fu chimp. kind of a beautiful story.

lacan is really, really good about talking about what goes on in the world of desire. like, really fucking good. but i wonder sometimes if martial arts aren't a kind of paradox, or at least some unexplored ground in terms of these things we're talking about.

below is the ending of a pretty charming film. what's going on here? it's not scapegoating, really. there is no reason not to *teach one who desires to know.* no forbidden knowledge here, even knowledge of powerful and city-smashing kung-fu techniques. if one is enlightened, it stands to reason that one becomes in this way nonviolent. or at least that's the idea.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrL0bYsF_0E

is martial arts violence the same thing as the passage a l'acte zizek talks about? i don't know. when lacan goes to japan, he comes away saying, these people can't be psychoanalyzed. maybe sun wukong can't be girardified either.

since the thread continues to be bumped, i figure i might as well contribute random food for thought.

also worth mentioning: as ivan drago says:
>if it dies, it dies

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>>11126618
With recent politicians (Obama, Hillary, trump) generating extreme hatred, why weren’t they killed? It stands to reason...
Do you invest?
Who are your favorite musicians

>>11127779
>With recent politicians (Obama, Hillary, trump) generating extreme hatred, why weren’t they killed? It stands to reason...

el chapo apparently offered some kind of bounty in 2015. no doubt there are lots of people all over the world plotting nefarious stuff like this. but the assassination of major US political figures is some pretty wild stuff. how many different scenarios do you think the cia played out for getting rid of kim jong un? and he could very well be nominated for some joint version of the nobel peace prize if things go smoothly over there. politics is fucking crazy. especially the politics of these days.

but in terms of assassination? i mean james ellroy has a pretty good theory about why JFK was killed. the mob had been supporting the invasion of cuba because they planned to get points in the casinos in havana that castro had shut down. after the bay of pigs, they turned against kennedy and his father, who had also been doing money laundering for them forever. it's a pretty wild story and the book is incredible. definitely a good read.

>do you invest?
nothing exciting. no crypto stuff.

>who are your favorite musicians?
dj tiesto. *exclusively.*

just kidding. mostly minimalist classical stuff and some electronica. pretty all over the place and nothing to write home about. here are a couple things that i'd request in the cozy expat dive bar of my dreams.

ludovico einaudi: lady labyrinth
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZDC1QvMhNs

carpenter brut: looking for tracy tzu
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oe1wA1hAdd0

kruder and dorfmeister: bug powder dust
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jX6RhNQY7DM

jark prongo: rocket base
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v44Zlsi1sFI

air: voyage de penelope
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZm58MrTszM

never had the metal gene or the hip-hop gene.

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>>11128827
>>11129355
>>11129766
>>11130459

but why? the party is over, mon ami.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3KEhWTnWvE

>>11096035
I've only just started Violence and the Sacred but from what I've read is Girard advocating radical pacifism? As in, if I wanted to be an orthodox girardian would I have to say all violence is impermissible under all circumstances a la Tolstoy?

>>11130622
start with clauswitz.

>The first death of God does not lead to the restoration of the sacred and ritual order, but to a decomposition of meaning so radical and irremediable that an abyss opens beneath the feet of modern man. In the aphorism, we have the impression that the abyss finally closes when the second announcement begins, this time on the order of the superman and Zarathustra: “What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods sim- ply to appear worthy of it?” The aphorism affirms the eternal return, but it reveals the engine of that return: the collective murder of arbitrary victims. It goes too far in the revelation and destroys its own foundations. Owing to the very fact that it bases the eternal return on collective murder, its true foundation, violence, which should remain hidden in order to be a foundation, is undermined and secretly sabotaged by the very thing that it believes it is triumphing over: Christianity. Nietzsche’s entire tragedy is to have seen but to have not wished to understand the undermining performed by the Bible. Violence no longer has any meaning. Yet Nietzsche tried to reinvest it with meaning by betting on Dionysus. In this there is a terrible tragedy, a desire for the Absolute from which Nietzsche was not able to extricate himself.

>We have discussed the underground passion that motivated Clausewitz. However, he did not sink into despair because there was the army, that aristocratic model, that outlet that Nietzsche was lacking. Nietzsche was totally involved in what was supposed to be the creation of values, a re-invented aristocracy—which was in reality the abyss of a will to power. Clausewitz is much cooler. Without really thinking about it consciously, he glimpsed the corrupted sacred that remains in violence and war, and he made that sacred into something transcendent, an ideal to be achieved. What he seemed to secretly desire was everything that frightens the tiny archaic societies and that they try to ward off through prohibitions. However, such societies are very fragile; they are not powerfully armed nations. This is why any form of encouragement of heroism seems to be either behind the times or dangerous. In the latter case, what is in question is less heroism than the “military genius” or “god of war,” in other words, something both very new and very primitive.

we love violence, aggression, and ressentiment. why is that. is it the world? or is it just glorified and aestheticized primitivism?

>>11130622
>>11130743

>RG: Levinas did not write an apology of war. He says that it is an experience that we cannot get away from. Of course, heroism may be another path, but it is unpredictable. No one can talk about it until it has happened. Heroic models, understood as models that can be imitated, are now null. This is why totalitarian regimes have always tried to construct them. The latest, and most difficult to understand, is indeed the terrorist model. We are now beyond tests of strength, beyond the point at which you rightly hope that we will pause to make the distinctions we have made. War is absolutely not justifiable: it is not something that we necessarily have to undergo. Its intensification, in contrast, reveals that a truth is in the process of emerging.

>BC: Are you suggesting that the heroic approach can be nothing but a plan to dominate?

>RG: That’s right. The heroic approach appears with the failure of Revelation in the background. It presupposes imitation of the other, a desire to appropriate the other’s strength and to dominate him. The confrontation necessarily results in an escalation because the other appropriates the desire for appropriation. Intelligent imitation, which is self-conscious, is something else entirely. Think about the conversion of Saint Paul. He keeps repeating, “Stop imitating one another and making war; imitate Christ, who will link you with the Father.” Christ restores the distance with the sacred, whereas reciprocity brings us closer to one another to produce the corrupt sacred, which is violence. In primitive societies, violence is one with the god’s proximity. Gods no longer appear today because violence no longer has an outlet; it is deprived of scapegoats (those divinized victims) and is bound to escalate. Hölderlin was the only one at the time of Hegel and Clausewitz to have understood the danger of proximity among humans. Indeed, the Greeks had a name for the god who mixed with men, the god of reciprocity, of mimetic doubles and contagious madness: Dionysus. That is the name the Greeks gave to the fear they felt when the god was too close.

there is one standout exception to the general rule of monkey madness: sun wukong. by his own volition and hubris, he winds up making a bet with the buddha that he cannot escape from, and in this way becomes enlightened and later a great bodhisattva. he is an intriguing exception to much of this, as is ernst junger. in the absence of the buddha, we can perhaps argue that there is christ. in the absence of christ there is the superman and the virtually irresistable aesthetics of war.

it's a tough call. but once you see universal mimetic Chimphammer 40K it doesn't get readily unseen.

>>11130837
ken wilber on immortality:

>When people become objects of the negative Atman project, they become victims, substitute sacrifices, scapegoats—and war, the mass potlatch of death-dealing for immortality, is merely wholesale victimage in outright form. And victimage, as Robert Jay Lifton put it, is simply “the need to reassert one’s own immortality, or that of one’s group, by contrasting it with its absolute absence in one’s death-tainted victim.” And Eugene Ionesco summed it up beautifully: “As long as we are not as sured of immortality, we shall go on hating each other in spite of our need for mutual love.” Hating each other, and killing each other. Mumford has really built his extraordinary study of history, politics, and technics around the phenomenon of sacrifice itself, and the special necessity of mass sacrifice and war in maintaining the social equilibrium of the state.

>For what is at stake in war is not food, not properties, not even ideologies directly, but one’s own version of the Atman project: one’s qualifications for immortality power and death transcendence. And the more the enemy drops, the more immortal the conqueror feels.

>For the staggering and terrifying thing about war is that, despite the loathsome things said of it on the one side, and, on the other, despite the noble causes and holy reasons and high ideals brought in to prop it up, one fact stands alone: war has been popular. It has thus served a necessary function, and served it well. And it served the cultural Atman project, the attempts to make egos into gods, power-soaked and blood immune.

>>11130875
and on sacrifice and eros:

>I would like to return to the literal, human, sacrificial rites themselves, the sacrifices to the Great Mother. For the fact that these sacrifices were rendered literally and not symbolically means several things. First and foremost: when a living being was actually sacrificed, especially if against his will, we can assume that this literal rendition was serving the masses in a substitute function. That is, it involved not a mystical acceptance and therefore transcendence of death, but a magical at tempt to deny death by promising a new and fertile future, a fertile field of blood-soaked crops, a fertile promise of self-survival. It was a magical at tempt to secure a future by appeasing death in the present, and in this logic, the more somebody else’s blood flows, the less chance yours will.

>In other words, we are seeing here the birth of an entirely new form of substitute sacrifice—not true self-sacrifice, but brutal victim-sacrifice. That is, murder. Nowhere in history, before this time, do we find murder, calculated cold-blooded murder, on any sort of large scale. It is almost unanimously agreed that in typhonic cultures murder was almost totally nonexistent; war as we know it just did not exist. The most violent substitute sacrifices, as we saw, were of finger joints. But from fingers to whole human beings, and from whole human beings to whole nations—such has been the history of substitute sacrifices, all willingly and bloodily dashed to hell as mankind, driven by its Atman project, began the attempted purchase of an immortal future at somebody else’s bloody expense.

>>11130880
>Arising as a function of this boundary are, as we have seen, two major dynamic factors: Eros and Thanatos. Eros ultimately is the desire to re capture that prior Wholeness which was “lost” when the boundary be tween self and other was constructed. But to actually gain a true reunion of subject and object, self and other, requires the death and dissolution of the exclusively separate-self sense—and this is precisely what is resisted. Thus Eros cannot find true union, real Wholeness, but is instead driven to find symbolic substitutes for the lost Whole.

>Eros, then, is the undying power of seeking, grasping, wishing, desiring, perpetuating, loving, living, willing, and so on. And it is never satisfied because it finds only substitutes. Eros is ontological hunger.

>Wherever there is boundary, the Thanatos of one’s deeper Nature acts, moment to moment, to remove it. As long as there is boundary, there is Thanatos. And one will either submit to Thanatos and transcendence, or one will have to find something else to do with that “death wish.” One will have, that is, to find substitute sacrifices. For Thanatos arises moment to moment—and it must be handled.

whether we choose as our starting point the life-drive or the death-wish the points inevitably seem to converge on one form of sacrifice or another in the end. war defers the meaning of this through sacrifice, can be externalized or internalized, but the end result is the same: purity through bloodshed and magical deferral of what really bothers us: confusion about the gods.

>>11130933
enter into this way into some of carl schmitt's own existential headaches: sovereign is he who decides upon the exception. but this is why the sovereign ultimately implodes under his own weight of responsibility, perhaps out of a necessity that we can only dimly intuit in this way.

of course, we also now have a wonderfully planetarized universal system of cannibalism that preys upon our magical instincts, a media system which amplifies all our paranoia, and a university system so hopelessly bloated so as to be all but incapable of addressing these questions, so, i'm sure everything will turn out all right in the end.

it's probably all just the wind.

>>11130963
but that's kind of heavy tho. and /lit/ as we know is a cheerful place, whether or not we are condemned to be wasteland theologians for forgotten gods or not. we desire to live and be a light unto ourselves on this board. so, we shall remind ourselves of this peculiar and paradoxical goal by sharing further selections from the girardian-accelerationist cosmic-sacrifical megamix.

bringing flowers to the apocalypse seems like a counter-productive idea, but what else are you going to do? be miserable?

monster magnet: space lord
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MbrIgaLHxnA

renegade soundwave: renegade soundwave
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QLjQRgBuN9M

fluke: atom bomb
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHMzCpy0fXc

massive attack: splitting the atom
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zH9HA9AI_RI

evil twin tho he may have been, girard was just so much more interesting than derrida. eschatology as first philosophy and cultural hermetic imperative: can into.

>>11131036
and hey, it's the odds instead of MM. my bad dawgs. fixed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dscfeQOMuGw

bump

thanks for everything girardposter

>>11132327
no, thank *you* for letting me vent. i only say the same things over and over again and it gets out of control sometimes. but if there was something in all of that that clarifies then it isn't all for nothing.

good luck anon. i hope it's peaceful, wherever you are.

>>11132383
<3

>>11132383
You are welcome. Keep going please.

Bump

Bump

>>11133995
onward then for unified feels theory.

1/3

so we've talked about terrorism and the polis, the joker and so on. but what about pic rel? i'm not a horror fan, but the saw films seem almost emblematic of a pattern that girard would have had an absolute field day with. torture porn seems like paradigmatic violence *without* the sacred, and yet what drives kramer is truth-as-confession.

superficially, the films are long and repeated set-pieces in which the various characters, all guilty parties, wind up in mimetic death-traps: do you want to play a game? the question is cynical, but jigsaw always has this particular ethos: the games must be fair, and the truth, as confession, always contains a potential for emancipation. it was no accident that lacan was fascinated by both kant and the marquis de sade.

when we look at christianity we can see that, in many ways, this really is a religion of torture. dostoevsky will say this as well, in karamazov: the grand inquisitor’s anger at christ stems from christ's having sacrificed himself to people who were wholly unworthy of this sacrifice, and which condemns them all to an eternal guilt. the GI, knowing this, makes a pact with the devil that promises an eternal wheel of bread and forgiveness which is nevertheless an ultimately cynical one: he knows people will sin again, because that is what they are. the molten gold can only be carried in the crucible of cold iron.

we do not lack for crucibles of cold iron in the saw films, we have an abundance of them. what's interesting is the ethos of the film, which has this very dim view of the human condition - that people are just relentlessly greedy, self-interested egoists, and condemned to betray each other.

but is this terrorism? kramer is a perfect figure of a modern grand inquisitor. to capture people and subject them to hellish torture is the worst kind of thing we can imagine doing. but there is this mysterious rule at work behind it: that the truth will set you free. a true work of torture porn, i think, would not necessarily include this. there *is* ideology, unquestionably, in the saw films, but i actually think that that ideology is almost transparently christian.

the fact that there are eight of these films tells us something about ourselves: that, for mysterious reasons, we want this, or that we have some strange and very dark connection to these themes. jigsaw does not bless, he does not forgive, he does not say, go with god, he does not have any love. but is this even required? if he did any of those things, it would no doubt strike the viewer as being mawkish, or even off-color. if jigsaw *did* something as outrageous as that, it might even turn the players of his game against him: they might even be united in their common allegiance against christianity and as such work together to find a way out of their traps to thwart him purely because of that! man, fuck these christians!

>>11135385
2/3

so there is often an *opportunity* for the players of the games to work together, but it’s also like a *forced trust fall:* trust each other, or pay the consequences. the traps atomize the (always-already) socially atomized for this reason. so in one sense it's pure sadomasochism: the labyrinth-machines grind on inextricably, and yet, the players often have some key aspect of control. they can refuse to push the vengeance button, or offer up some form of sacrifice - of their bodies, of the truth, and so on. in one of the films, i forget which, some apprentice is castigated for building a trap with no escape from it. jigsaw has a code like this.

in the dark knight, the joker's ultimate trap is this trap of mimesis - he's counting on people's innate tendency towards betrayal, deception, and defection to make his ultimate argument against the polis and subsequently about batman himself and the holy lie which sustains him: that people are good, or at least *capable of good.* true, this *itself is the paradox*: because *i believe that you could be better than you are, i license myself in advance to punish you in the name of the Big Other.* again, we can go back to dostoevsky: after the great speech, christ kisses the inquisitor, and the inquisitor lets him go. in the case of jigsaw, no such thing is possible. who could possibly *forgive* him for doing this? who could *love* this man? the very fact that we show up to watch these films tells us that, in some layer of our unconscious, we are still more on his side. we endorse that paradox, we endorse both sides of the guilt-trap.

again, the walter benjamin quote: in the technological era man experiences his own self-destruction as an aesthetic spectacle of the first order. this is one of the all-time great 20C philosophical statements. and yet maybe it goes too far: the greeks, we might say, also "enjoyed" the self-destruction of other greeks on stage. one obvious and crucial distinction here to be made is between the concept of the noble figure who is destroyed in tragedy as a result of their own actions, and a sort of ritual or ceremonial punishment of lesser beings. nobody in the saw films are noble, and this is everything. we are in our ordinary lives required to make all kinds of small betrayals, to tell lies, and other things. but what these films tell us is that nevertheless, in some deep way, we know that what we are doing is wrong. the real tragedy is not that it happens, it's that we cannot stop doing it to ourselves. no christ is really necessary, no final or absolute forgiveness is desired or even possible.

this is not terrorism against the polis itself and its laws, but against the beings who make it up.

>>11135393
3/3

so i think it would be unwise to dismiss a series like this as being merely torture porn. in one sense, yes, it is pure spectacle. but every spectacle is sustained by a hidden logic, and the logic of the saw films might actually be more subtle than it appears on first glance.

mel gibson's film excepted, if you pitched the actual story of the passion - a gentle nondual mystic preaches about love and tolerance, and then is subjected to a brutal torture ending in his death - it would probably seem like a hard sell for some studio exec. the *meaning* of this comes later. nietzsche and other commentators are not wrong to find in christianity the peculiar symbology of torture. but even in a stridently non-christian era we find ourselves taking a mysterious pleasure in watching ourselves being tortured *anyways* and, on some deep unconscious level, *even agreeing that this is just, that this is all that we can know of justice.* maybe this isn't all done in the shadow of christ at all. maybe the christians just intuited something about torture and guilt that was always just there in us from the start.

the truth doesn't set any of the people in jigsaw's traps free *forever.* they are free to do what they do again. in one of the films, i forget which, jigsaw says, the sin is not understanding your life as a blessing, taking things for granted. maybe that is how the bloody-handed work of enlightenment is done.

we fall into our own traps. the superman is nowhere to be found in john kramer's universe, there is no affirmation of suffering here, neither in the victims or in kramer himself. he takes no joy in this, finds no pleasure in it. nor do we, really.

of course, for an even earlier take on this we can look back to a source even older than dostoevsky: dante himself, who arranges all of florence's sinners in the inferno, where punishments are always perfectly matched to their crimes. the difference is that the divine comedy at least included a paradiso. in the saw films, purgatorio is what you are hoping for, *at best.*

so who is the hero in the saw films? it’s certainly not none of the sufferers. nor is it jigsaw himself, he barely even qualifies for anti-hero status. the hero, we might say, is that one being who *really,* and genuinely radically, stands outside of this system, and who is the original model for the sacrifice which in its complete incomprehensibility undermines this seemingly totalized symbolic order. the imitation of christ may always be perfectly imperfect, and this i think is what really haunts us. the imitation of the grand inquisitor, by contrast, is imperfectly perfect. nothing is lacking: that’s how pornography works. we see it all. no mystery.

>>11135401
bonus shitposting!
1/2

the task of the hero - if campbell et al are to be our guides here- is the redemption of fallen worlds, palingenesis. in hero myths a warrior-shaman battles with the forces of darkness and redeems the world. the *nature* of these forces of darkness, what is implied by them, how they are construed, belongs to ideology. it matters, in other words, if the body snatchers come from within or from without. are we - "we," that is, in the sense of being a kind of idealized spectator-participant - on the side of the angels, or on the side of the devil? are we guilty or innocent? if guilty, can we be redeemed? if so, how? by fire or by persuasion? these aren't absolutely soluble questions, they belong to the work of art itself. this was john gardner's point, but it applies to criticism as well: every work of art - and theory - presupposes its own set of rules, spoken or unspoken. what gives a given work a kind of fidelity is whether or not it obeys its own rules. it is for this reason that absurdity or deus ex machina in storytelling strikes us as an offense to the internal logic of a narrative. it's *cheating.*

what separates spectacle from literature is that in the former viewers and authors are basically implicated from the start in the same set of assumptions. works that set themselves up to be deconstructed in advance and do little more than reify our own desires fall into this category. better works fundamentally bring into question the truths on which culture is founded, and among those, excellent ones go much further than provocation or subversion for the sake of irony alone. they hit a plateau or peak which, as girard suggests, tells us something about the nature of desires *overcome* and transmitted to the human sciences. that's a high-water mark for all stories, regardless of the content. girard is a structuralist in this, but he's of a wholly different nature than your usual critic. he is himself a very gentle inquisitor of literary form.

it is possible that the mimetic, or reciprocal, corrective to fascism may indeed be communism, and communism, fascism. this would describe an oscillation between totalitarian extremes, a cycle of spectacle-drenched narco-heroism, the invocation of one hero to save us from another with whom we have become disappointed, with whom we have become *bored.* but this is a question about a *decadent* society that adores the matrix too much for its own good. *knowing* a thing is enslaving you doesn't amount to liberation from it. ironic detachment is not transcendence but perhaps only a very refined and disaffected fatalism.

the appeal of sacrificing oneself to save a fallen world is, for some, perhaps an irresistable. but there may be a puzzle here: that christ may be imitated but not repeated. a fallen world *stays* fallen but is not restored through theopolitical acts of violence, reciprocity, or revolution.

gotham is a *polis,* but the *polis* is not the *world.*

>>11135910
2/2

hence the ff6 love, in which we cannot really find a hero at the centre. there is, undoubtedly, a villain, one with world-altering powers. in his destruction of the world kefka reveals the *chaos* on which it all rests. the World of Ruin is a sort of mirror image of what he himself is, inwardly. he is produced for absolutely modern reasons, is himself this final product of imperial-planetary technocommerce. his “error” is to expose the ugly lie at the core of it: that there is no final meaning in power but aesthesis. the empire is hollow, and the conversion of espers into magicite is a doomed attempt to convert that which belongs to aion into chronos, completing itself in him. the fruit of this is planetary catastrophe. it is at once nietzsche and heidegger’s response to nietzsche.

this is why *nothing* can prevent this catastrophe, but a kind of enlightened nothingness arrives in its place. ff6 has no *one* hero to oppose kefka, and the party members you meet along the way don’t really have an absolute centre, even terra. she symbolizes a duality between human and esper, but it’s a duality that doesn’t have an essential metaphysical core. when the tower crumbles, it crumbles. the ending credits suggest that just this survival, just this collective escape from the collapsing tower, is perhaps enough. we see a few birds flying and perhaps have some intimation of an earth restoring itself to balance, but we can imagine that, for the most part, the heroic aspects of these characters’ lives are mainly over.

the far east doesn’t have the same metaphysics as the occident, and *thank god for that.* it’s kind of an interesting thing to think about. for a long time perhaps we really were kind of doomed to a kind of fundamentally euro/western-centric view of things. maybe we really just couldn’t see things any other way. more than any other thinker, heidegger opens the doors to a lot of ideas better expressed by zen. girardian structuralism works because it operates as a kind of commentary on psychoanalytic criticism derived from hegel, marx and freud, and which seem to be in a kind of dead end. i’ve never been able to reconcile deconstruction with terrorism if in the end justice becomes indistinguishable from vengeance. because, if that’s the case, the final victory, if you can call it that, is only the victory of irony, spectacle, and simulation over the real, and in which we wind up forever haunted and haunting, like mark fisher’s ghosts.

the idea of saving history, redeeming history - it can’t be really be done, i think, however attractive. this is girard’s argument. but even the apocalypse, he says, does not just end the world. it also creates hope. hope is the first step on the road to disappointment, but irony and cynicism lead in the end to no other places. seeing it coming in advance changes nothing except to confirm that if you didn’t want the ride, you wouldn’t have bought the ticket.

>>11135921
and the hardest thing in the universe may be the a refusal of spectacle which does not repeat it. if the current era tells us anything, it's that libidinal desire itself is not even required to continue to keep the spice flowing. hatred and ressentiment work just as well. the mutual desire for the *last word* is what traps us in the matrix.

it's why the japanese - and heidegger also - are so utterly based on this point. *evanescence* and *dissipation* are better. this is wabi-sabi: the pathos of things, the transience of life. heidegger uses a famously difficult phrase for this that enraged no small number of his opponents: the nothingness itself nothings. you wind up saying these kinds of things if you are trying to beat the far east at a game it mastered thousands of years ago.

so leave out girard for a second. what happens when you put lacan and wittgenstein together? maybe you get pic rel. you can *say* this to someone, cruelly, of course. we all know about the Silent Treatment and so on, that you can really fucking wound someone by not saying anything, in no small number of other ways. but there is also this other most mysterious of human phenomena: the shared silence. gives me the shivers.

and so, on that note, that's all for me today. and, tbqhwy famalamadingdongs, probably pretty damn close to everything you need to know about girardfaggery on the old melanesian tapdancing board. so i'm gonna shut this yap of mine for a bit then and pour one out for the shared silence.

Try this.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07CV2DRGD

>>11136015
Bravo

Bump

Yo, can someone please post a list of books or a guide to really get into this shit? Asking for a pleb (me)

Bump

>>11137380
>tfw breaking the shared silence

for 20C stuff get to know these guys and a lot of the other stuff will begin to fall into place. a lot connects back to them in one way or the other. it doesn't mean you have to agree with them, or even like them. but they set the tone for a lot of discussion and created a lot of adherents and critics.

and hegel too, he's no meme. if you want to plunge directly into the Fire and Blood of 20C continental theory kojeve's introduction to the reading of hegel is pretty wild, although very much of its time.

for more general histories, i definitely recommend richard tarnas' passion of the western mind and jacques barzun's from dawn to decadence. both are both nice single-volume histories of culture and philosophy that aren't too heavy and cover a lot of ground. tarnas covers basically everything, from the presocratics all the way to postmodernity, and barzun just does the west from martin luther to now. both good.