/lit/ - Literature

I wrote my thesis on Chardin, I'm glad there's other people out there keeping the flame alive

>>11165918
no kidding. what kind of stuff did you write about? i really like this guy.

ive always wanted to read this it sounds great.

whatchu like about it anon. I like the "cosmological Christianity" he's attempting to here. I have a sneaking suspicion the Second Coming is heat death, when we all return to the Source/the universe winds down into the "heavenly peace" of a zero energy state

>>11165927
there's a whole bunch of things i like about chardin. first of all, the noosphere. he's influenced in some sense by vernadsky, but w/e. he sees the internet and a great many other things coming. kind of like mcluhan, in a way.

but pic rel is another thing i like. this is from Human Energy and not Phenomenon of Man, but his writing is pretty much consistent throughout all of his books. what he talks about here echoes something i have read in bataille as well: that humans are *excessive* beings, the metaphysics of scarcity being something we necessarily do for pragmatic reasons. even if you want to get extra fucked-out, dark and bleak about it this was the essential theme of the matrix as well: that human beings could be converted into duracell batteries. but chardin would have dismissed those kinds of dystopic outcomes as being...well, pretty sad. but perhaps not inevitable.

and finally there's his idea of an omega point, which is like a really excellent version of nick land's teleoplexy, in a way. land spooks me for a great many reasons, but it's interesting to think that his burned-out visions of the end of space and time aren't necessarily the *only* possible readings for what may be yet to come.

i've read some of the criticisms that people have of this idea of the omega point and so on, but i'm not really so hung up on those to dismiss his work. he seems like a god-intoxicated man and tbqh as time goes on i find i have a lot more interest in people like that, as philosophy sometimes seems like a kind of a workaround for talking about god without going absolutely batshit crazy.

he's just got this beautiful optimism about things that doesn't seem naive or foolish. i really like the ideas of reconciling science and religion and i've always liked nondual and mystical stuff, transpersonal psychology and so on. so chardin just lights up about a dozen pinball lights for me like that. i really like works that talk about the general evolution of consciousness and things like this.

so, those are some things.

>>11165955
ah you're the hegelanon from the other thread. I like what you're saying. Stay sharp brother. We need more like you in this world

>>11166041
yep, that's me. more girardfag than hegelanon, i'm a very late-comer to hegel. that was really a fine conversation also!

so, onward for dialectics and based nondual mysticism. good luck out there to you too, anon, you really knew your stuff. thanks again for recommending logic and existence also.

>>11166099
it really was. enjoy it bud.

>>11165912
Isn't this guy like an absolute nutjob?

>>11166343
Everybody seems to disown him.
Scientists won't touch him and say he's a theologian. Theologians don't want him and say he's a philosopher. Philosophers laugh and say he was just a fraud-poet. Poets haven't heard of him.

>>11166343
contrarian enough to have his work suppressed and be labeled a heretic.

but who's to say who counts as a nutjob and who doesn't? the line between nutjob and philosopher is wafer-thin. or maybe that the philosopher is a sort of provisional exception to the general rule of nutjob.

it's a bad scene to open the doors to total relativism. i tend to think that those doors are more or less open anyways, whether we like it or not. i think it was the same thing with mcluhan.

but i mean look at the state of contemporary marxism. you can find capital or signifier X anywhere you like. all of this is so much grist for the technocommercial millstone that harnesses whatever sense-making apparatus can be made sense of. we eventually wind up forming ideospheres and having arguments about language and speech, what can be said and what can't be.

badiou talks about the need to distinguish the philosopher from the sophist for this reason. i wonder if there's another conversation to be had about distinguishing the philosopher from the inquisitor. whatever the philosopher is, they occupy a kind of mean between those extremes. either you make no sense, and destroy discourse, or you make too much sense and the result is the same.

but he says stuff like this too that kind of just registers with me on some deep level:

>The phenomenon [human collectivization] calls for no detailed description. It takes the form of the all encompassing ascent of the masses; the constant tightening of economic bonds; the spread of financial and intellectual associations; the totalization of political regimes; the closer physical contact of individuals as well as of nations; the increasing impossibility of being or acting or thinking alone-in short, the rise, in every form, of the Other around us. We are all constantly aware of these tentacles of a social condition that is rapidly evolving to the point of becoming monstrous. You feel them as I do, and probably you also resent them. If I were to ask your views you would doubtless reply that, menaced by this unleashing of blind forces, there is nothing we can do but evade them to the best of our ability, or else submit, since we are the victims of a sort of natural catastrophe against which we are powerless and in which there is no meaning to be discerned.

that to me touches on the mysterious push-pull weirdness of things that you can still see today. in the west, particularly, where historically we escaped more obvious forms of explicitly totalitarian collectivism elsewhere in the world, but are now enjoying the fruits of late capital and postmodernity implying that for all of our differences, we still all wind up beholden to dollars, facebook likes, memes, hot takes and eyeballs. and it becomes like a chinese finger-trap.

so i sort of crossed a kind of rubicon on this some time ago. since it's very hard to get outside of it, might as well try to see it from the inside.

>>11166348
this is beautiful. totally perfect.

>>11167352
that's a great quote. a lot of these books were written in the 60s/first half of the century, I'd really love to see what Heidegger or Evola or Chardin here would say if you took them on a stroll through Times Square. It's gotten so bad.

>>11167695
me too. and that's the fascinating part: despite their differences, they would almost certainly agree that something had gone disastrously wrong in ways that corresponded to predictions they had all made 3/4 of a century ago, give or take.

i'm a continentalfag and i've read lots of the big guys inspired by and derived from marxism. one of the most interesting recent bromances has been the deleuze-land one: in essence, that *capitalism itself is critique.* trying to figure out where deleuze was politically is like trying to figure out what kant thought about god. it's basically an enigma.

but you can pretty much feel this gathering force that is appearing now, the return of religion and religious sensibilities. it has gotten bad, insanely fucking bad. and i really don't think there's any way of dealing with a kind of atom-smashing sensibility that mobilizes or weaponizes every microwatt of human affect for capitalism in this way. in the end all it does is convert people into smooth glass panels for the transmission of memes. in the absence of a polis we wind up settling for a cozier habitrail equipped with wi-fi.

but that's why i find chardin, however kooky he seems sometimes, so much more cozy. hegel also. maybe these things *just have to happen* along the way to understanding ourselves better. economic unrest and psychological bewilderment were exactly what gave rise to the great modernist/totalitarian experiments in the 20C and i think some version of that is happening now. it's just that we don't see it because we are too close to it, and we are too close to it because we are doing it to ourselves. like being caught in some kind of diabolical perpetual-motion machine. it's like the matrix like that, except that we still think sheer irony or absolute misery will make it go away. but those are the things that drive it all.

picking heidegger, evola and chardin would be interesting as fuck, too. what a conversation they would have. three very different responses to the same phenomena: wouldn't it be great to just hear (or read about) a conversation between them? a while ago i kind of wondered what a conversation would look like if you put junger, evola and ellul together by some mysterious coincidence in a snowed-in chateau somewhere in northern italy during ww2. three guys with different perspectives, but then going their different ways afterwards. would be a good play.

>>11167695
since you liked that one, i'll supply another. i'm too lazy to greentext it all. but it's more in the same vein.

>de Chardin
>christian mysticism
He makes other Jesuits look like radical traditionalists.

>>11167806
hah, I was just going to post actually, like it's all just so fucking tiring how hard these people are trying to convince you a burrito or a buying new car is some ecstatic experience, like buddy your ceiling for what makes life worth it is just so low, but then again if you're spending all your time creating these things (at least automotive manufacturers or w/e, people who live to advertise food are p-zombies) you have to think in a box and live in a box and restrict your horizons to what allows you to survive in this shitshow. you have to purposely diminish yourself to play the game, because specialization is always diminishment: determination is negation.

I think we've conquered reality's "dead time" - all culture and art and escapism is a sublimation of dead time - but we found the circles are just accelerating, the ouroborous is getting tighter. it was dead time that bred great souls, and now look at it. don't you feel something's missing in just the way people speak and write and even in our films and media? there's a grit, a must of the Real in almost everything written pre-1950 that has vanished now. I cant really describe it I guess. as a culture we have a pathological fear of silence, maximalized as death.

>>11167842
>as a culture we have a pathological fear of silence, maximalized as death.

fuck. this one to the nth degree. *the fear of silence* is everything. and prior to doing some reading i used to be one of those people do, always sort of being the first one to anxiously supply some joke or absurdity to break nervous silences. but that was exactly the problem. it just wasn't until much later on that i could figure out why: *everybody's fucking nervous.* everybody's afraid. nobody knows what to do. and so there's this bizarre collective conspiracy to hide the fundamental weirdness of life behind memes, hot takes, jokes, and irony. i don't know where this came in, or started to come in, but i definitely think it happened around the 60s or with the boomers. one pet theory i have is just that it came out of this weird terror at having been given everything, absolutely everything, and having no idea what to do with it all. like dostoevsky by way of sam walton.

and so what was there to do? pursue wealth, or social status. why? i don't know, because it supplied its own centre of gravity. and now in the end we wind up thinking that there's nothing really cooler than just owning a bank. if you have enough money you will never be placed in a position of having to explain how utterly fucking shallow you are, or being in that terrible place of having to justify what can't be justified any longer: absolute narcissism and a cult of eudaimonia. the universities are no exception to this any longer either, since all you can do is compete in oppression olympics. or you can make a hard right turn and just claim the counter-victim status. but it's all just so much mimetics, reactivity, and ressentiment.

not only is happiness not a workable summum bonum, it's definitely not possible when the internet amplifies even more information overload than those same boomers got when tv brought the war into their living rooms. we know too fucking much now to be anything but in a state of perpetual horror, bewilderment, and frustration about all of it. nobody has the final ultimate hot take. the despair just grinds you down.

but it didn't seem to grind down chardin. he went on believing that everything was heading for a better place in spite of all mounting evidence to the contrary. and surely things have only gotten stronger for the Humanity Fuck No camp since then. but what else can you do? the race to the bottom inevitably disappoints in the end. you don't even know what it is that you're *supposed* to be miserable about. you're even wrong about that!

you have to just laugh sometimes.

>>11167894
and partly also because a gutenberg galaxy monetizes speech and communication. we are hyper-literate, chattering apes who cannot remain silent and are constantly being forced into production. even your *eyeballs* are being targeted, ffs. everything in our consumer society preys upon attention.

it's total madness. when i hear boomers talking about how they love to not take their cell phones with them, it's the most ridiculous thing. *of course* you like this. but we are heading into a future in which everyone is going to be required to be Signal On, all of the time, because if you aren't available to deliver a pizza, or whatever, somebody else surely will be. and on it goes. if you make everything *convenient* you make everything fungible and interchangeable.

it has to dry itself up at some point, i think. eventually. all we are doing is algorithmicizing ourselves. but the break, if a break is desired, isn't going to come through politics. maybe just from withdrawal.

mcluhan never said the global village would be a *cozy* place to be in. and if this is what the noosphere feels like, in its early stages, as a fucking kaleidoscope of advertisement and simulation, then maybe it just has to work itself out. but, i mean, how quickly did the internet become everything? things only accelerate from here.

>>11167894
>one pet theory i have is just that it came out of this weird terror at having been given everything, absolutely everything, and having no idea what to do with it all.

yeah the existentialists were right about this with their concept of the inherent anxiety of freedom, you know there was something comforting and altogether conducive to the spirit to have the choices of what you can be determined by your elders from on high, men and women with an innate understanding of human types who could peg you from the start, the same way we peg people left and fuckin' right today in our society and still deny difference and inequality. yeah yeah yeah, everybody's equal but lemme jack off to this Instagram model who embodies ideal femininity while treating every other girl who doesn't as invisible, not worth my time, or just as boring and gray and wingless as the rest of us. it's pathetic.

but then you'll have these clowns betray a kind of pseudo-Platonism trying to tell you what is truly equal is quote unquote the abstract "humanity" in which we all participate in, that has no reality beyond the common virtual identity of its members, and then watch them twist into pretzels trying to convince themselves why appeals to misty abstraction is good for egalitarianism and insipid neoliberal feel-goodisms but not for God and spirit and the universal human dignity we need to raise ourselves out of the muck and this almost demonic drive to flatten and horizontalize everything and anything about the human sphere.

it really is information overload. all this talk about the void of the subject is fucking true, you tear the ground under a nigga's feet and his entire self-concept is gonna get blown to the four corners like a fuckin dandelion, or else desperately try to grab a toehold in the virtual with the "objectivity" of quantified attraction/popularity. people addicted to their hits of digital dopamine.

everyone's just so fucking sad. i hate seeing those profile photos of girls at the mid or low range of attractiveness and that barely disguised woundedness you see in their smiles. it's like honey you don't belong in this shitshow. i don't either. no it's not the case we're misunderstood geniuses who were born in le wrong generation, all we're drawing attention to is a fundamental incompatibility between my type and the process I've been caught up in, and what's going on is that this process is such a way that it is rapidly only becoming compatible with those types that are always-already compatible with it. ill watch a documentary about farmers or peasants or industrial workers or lepers (The House is Black is beautiful if you want despair so raw it makes Camus feel like Blue's Clues) and they're in another universe compared to our ironic, hipster, disaffected mimetic universes where sincerity is the only sin and everyone says everything to say nothing.

>>11167979
i'm getting a kind of deja vu from that pic, i feel like i've seen some tumblr or something like that that is full of neon haloes.

few things seem to me more 'radical' or 'transgressive' than christianity. i was amazed to find out how many catholics there were on /lit/, i sort of thought everybody had fully digested the derridapill and was Over It. except that it's so much worse than that:
>over it?
>what do you mean, over it?
>how could anybody be over it?
>reeeeeee

and so on. *forgiveness* is this beautiful thing. it's there in hegel, in one of the later parts of the phenomenology, that the capacity for forgiveness marks the appearance of the absolute in the world. but that in turn only comes out of the section on *conviction* and *conscience.* people who believe in nothing can forgive nothing, but people who do believe in something actually have the capacity to understand each other in this way such that forgiveness, rather than punishment, becomes a possibility. my boy girard has put in some serious work on this subject, of what happens when the desire to have the last word escalates all out of proportion. i am 100% convinced that he was right about that.

>our ironic, hipster, disaffected mimetic universes where sincerity is the only sin and everyone says everything to say nothing

that's it. and, of course, you can't say nothing. but to say something is to enter into the infinite labyrinth.

there's kind of a choice made between Suffering and Emptiness. i really like these anime scenes, scenes of just empty rooms, the nirvana at the end of all of this stuff, those weird little moments that i think heidegger kind of helped me to understand.

maybe philosophy is just this kind of backwards journey towards the meaning of silence, where lacan and wittgenstein meet each other. we all have to work in this world and feed some furnace or another. that won't change, and i'm not into Hating On Capitalism. that's a meme and it's a played meme. it's just more about the cost of superabundance. like malcolm gladwell's story about the spaghetti sauce: back when, when you had two choices, you were satisfied. when you have two aisles full of artisan spaghetti sauce, it's your fault for not being satisfied.

but this is life at the tail-end of a gilded and unsustainable age. hellenistic. crazy how things work out.

>>11165912
The elderly priest in The Exorcist book/movie is based on him
so he will live on, at least that reflection of him

>>11165912
Where should I start with this guy?

>>11168040
>there's kind of a choice made between Suffering and Emptiness.

>maybe philosophy is just this kind of backwards journey towards the meaning of silence... we all have to work in this world and feed some furnace or another.

aw this is just fantastic dude. yeah that's exactly the dichotomy that underwrites evangelion, the choice between walking the rounds or nothing. you can't give up the game without also giving up the joy that only the game makes possible, because it's what defines the thinkable as such. being is such that the baby and bathwater really are the same, but our dumb monkey minds keep distinguishing between the two and thinking one is salvageable while the other isn't (or shouldn't be). when shinji dissolves into the One he doesn't find his happiness there because only individuation can be the condition of happiness. and he breaks the fuck down at the end because he realizes he both coincides as his hunger for the Real and its irreducible joys of belonging, love, and affection that can only take place in it and his flight from the howling void-winds of a Real that could very well possibly deny you this, because, uh, tough shit.

you know about furnaces, that's what it all comes down to. the best philosophy is self-negating. everyone feeds a mouth in this universe, it's a choice of what you want to be devoured by, I like how schuon puts it, everything is a vortex, everything is a circulation around a center, and life is the choice of which "suns" you want to orbit (and it's why beta orbiters, "thirst", is just so worthy of contempt, wanting to be devoured by the other, having so little sense of self you just want to make it kindling for someone else's fire, pathetic). remember that biblical parable about the master/God giving his servants some coins to invest while he goes on a business trip, some less, some more, and upon his return he only punishes the servant who was too afraid to risk what was given to him? God doesn't want you to throw away the self: everything consumes in this universe, to refuse to play the game is to make a mockery of this sacrifice, you HAVE to play it to make good on the investment of lives that have gone into maintaining you physical organism day in and day out. what did Nietzsche say? "Spirit is a stomach."

so you have to choose your sun. but that's exactly it: some suns are black. in fact, all suns are black, all determinate ends are black suns, only God's is the white sun, precisely because he is indeterminate. and that's what mysticism is. love of negation/love of the devourer. you don't fight this consumption, you sacralize it until it consumes itself (Thacker on mysticism: "the fulfillment of mediation can only be its negation"). and you're right it isn't about capitalism, capitalism isn't some eldritch alien power we're all in the clutches of, it's just the reality of humans intoxicated by the Too-Muchness of things that globalization just makes visible.

>>11168130
the more spectacle i see the more i think people are just ridiculous. but really good works walk that line between the religious commitment and that realm of public art. even jon stewart, the most trusted voice in news for years, actually gave a shit about *making people laugh.* i wonder if baudrillard would have worked on his show. maybe jean would have charmed everyone. JB was as nihilistic as anyone, a prescient observer of what irony becomes. he kept his head above water by mustering this incredible *disdain* for all of it, a love of criticism that came out in his work. his scorn makes him re-readable. this was a guy who proposed absolutely nothing except aristocratic fatalism, seduction. even if it was just an infinite love of self - at least he was capable of loving *that.* i don't know. but he's a great enigma.

>God doesn't want you to throw away the self: everything consumes in this universe, to refuse to play the game is to make a mockery of this sacrifice, you HAVE to play it to make good on the investment of lives that have gone into maintaining you physical organism day in and day out.

preach it

>"Spirit is a stomach."

our social problems are mainly decadent, of having been given a gigantically unearned and now-unwanted world. a total clusterfuck. guilt punishes you for being spoiled, but *nobody asked you to be spoiled in the first place.* you go along with the spoiling because you trust that the ship is going somewhere good, instead of what it is actually doing, which is running on auto-pilot because the captain is dead and everybody's afraid to open the cabin since the passengers would be terrified: "in the interests of not frightening you, we should probably all just calmly freeze here in the ocean. have a drink." kind of jg ballard.

>and that's what mysticism is.
it is. sometimes it leads to terrorist chic. i always say i want more movies about this stuff, like a highlander-ish story or with those kinds of themes. what happens when people are intoxicated by that Too-Muchness in a golden age. how awesome would that be? some fucking secret game played by 1%ers and homeless mystics alike in the undergrounds and boardrooms all over the world. no heroes or villains, just doomed players in impossible games. like atlas shrugged if it were written by Not Ayn Rand.

i go to film because i sometimes regard philosophy as a kind of failed poesis. my hope is always that if people can *see other people saying these things* then we don't suffer so much for thinking that they are unsayable (which, of course, they are). but art can do this, give us *more interesting paradoxes.* or just show the paradoxes as they are. we only ever solve our problems with bigger problems.

maybe we leave the theatres thinking, jesus, humans are even more fucked-up than i thought. but we are fucked-up! completely fucked-up. but there's no other option except to think the good and hope for the best.
>also shitposting
>always there is shitposting

>>11168130
it's weird tho, i feel sometimes like i'm talking to myself here. reasons why i love this board. i've really enjoyed reading your posts but a couple of times i've scrolled past them and thought they were actually mine. bizarre. but really cool.

>>11168086
that's an amazing bit of movie trivia.
>ywn see a space-age exorcism of capital in the 21C in which nick land plays karras
>feels inevitable man

>>11168088
he's really not that hard to read. internet archive has lots of his stuff. PoM is good and so is Human Energy, but really he's just sort of writing his own thoughts about things and they're all more or less consistent.

there's a website here that's very much influenced by his work also. fun for the sort of SMAC/Alpha Centauri IRL vibe that - who knows? - maybe doesn't sound so crazy when you consider the alternatives, which are vampire schizo-cannibal werewolves chewing each other to pieces in the ruins of western civilization. going to church and doing a nice STEM program, praising jesus and building bridges just seems to look better and better.

https://www.omegacenter.info/blog/

>>11168600
>you go along with the spoiling because you trust that the ship is going somewhere good, instead of what it is actually doing, which is running on auto-pilot because the captain is dead and everybody's afraid to open the cabin since the passengers would be terrified

because we threw the captain overboard. post-modernism was a mutiny against the logos. in my own life I notice the germ of their thought: if I have to impose a law, a discipline on myself, then that law is already de-legitimized for my having to impose it - i guess as a civilization we're still kinda reeling from the fact that things really aren't all okay deep down, that they were only ever okay because we made them, and when the dams burst does the 0 reminded us of who and what we really are. and i think land's philosophy revolves around this, that this unknowable boiling chaos is primary and the Law and God as the hypostasization of the synthetic unity that consciousness is and sees everywhere reflected back at itself (because it can't help but see it, because something must be a unity, intelligible, coherent to be perceived in the first place, thanks Kant) is just secondary, an epiphenomenon.

but here i think is where hegel's kinda reassuring: there just is this closure, this funhouse consciousness that sees and creates its oneness everywhere, because if there wasn't, there'd be nothing and no one to complain. it's almost like things are intrinsically guaranteed to be okay... because they're not. paradoxes all day.

and now we are kinda just floating through the ocean at night raiding all the liquor cabinets after "putting all fathers out to grass" as William Desmond puts it. this is why i think evola's right about the cyclicity of history, /and/ that nothing is guaranteed and everything's contingent: what is guaranteed is the hangover. the next golden age is just going to be the name for the Morning After, no divinities will come sailing down from the clouds, but we'll see the world and ourselves with eyes so fresh it all might as well be divine.

>but we are fucked-up! completely fucked-up. but there's no other option except to think the good and hope for the best.

in all my studies i think the last truth always comes down to the struggle for its own sake cause this is all there is. and that's that, and what's so terrible about it is the subconscious assumption that truth is supposed to save us from despair when here it's actually: no, despair is very fucking real, the only truth is being able to brush your shoulders off and the only thing worth fighting for is to keep being able to do it. something blessed us with love in the void, even though i know its just the void's love of itself.

>it's weird tho, i feel sometimes like i'm talking to myself here. reasons why i love this board. i've really enjoyed reading your posts but a couple of times i've scrolled past them and thought they were actually mine. bizarre. but really cool.

same this has been great

bump

greentext for the greentext god &c:

>Chardin is part and parcel with Post-War “leap in being” of self-consciousness before the sudden boom in cybernation and emerging information technologies. A perfect example of this is his formative influence on John Perry Barlow, a member of the first public internet, the WELL (Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link) in the 1980s and the man who created the myth of the internet as “electronic frontier” and popularised the term “cyberspace” (originally coined by cyberpunk writer William Gibson). Barlow is strongly indebted to Chardin and the notion that computer networks enable human beings to transcend egotism into a pacific anarchist realm of collective thinking. The Phenomenon of Man and its strange machine Christianity provided the basis for Barlow to move away from his strict Catholic upbringing, towards the LSD collective consciousness counter-culture of the influential Whole Earth Catalog magazine, and finally, the soterical power of the networked computer. This was in spite of the fact that he desired to resist becoming a “knowledge worker” at first, until his self-sufficiency ranch failed, and rationalising it as being “culturally doomed”, embraced the determinism of the holy “twenty-first century”.

>[Kevin Kelly] propounded the vision that with the coming of the World Wide Web the human race was on the verge of becoming a single anhierarchical global oneness by 2015 (!) Without Barlow and Kelly and their work as consultants for AOL and other major companies in the 1990s hardly anyone would have bought the central myth of the online community that the WELL developed. This was that the internet is a magical zone of free expression to “return isolated, post-industrial workers to a state of pre-industrial communion… members of the corporate sector thought such networks might bring isolated, post-industrial consumers into a state of post-modern economic communion.”

>Marshall McLuhan’s infamous “global village” philosophy about how text robbed us of community and television was destined to return it through “electronic circuitry [as an] extension of the nervous system”,[8] is heavily indebted to Chardin:

>“…externalisation of our senses creates what de Chardin calls the “noosphere” or a technological brain for the world. Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as in some infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside. So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence and super-imposed coexistence…terror is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all of the time.”

http://voegelinview.com/voegelin-among-machines-teilhard-de-chardin-olaf-stapledon-millenarian-kernel-transhumanism/

GIRARDFAG STOP MONOPOLIZING EVERY FUCKING THREAD WITH YOUR FUCKING NARCISSISTIC REPETITIVE REDUNDANT SHIT

>>11170258
i'm the op. this isn't somebody's else thread that i randomly busted into and monopolized.

also, much of it is a conversation between another anon and me. this other anon also uses lower-case.

>>11167842
>>11167979
>>11168130
>>11168772

is this other anon. sounds like me, not me.

>narcissistic repetitive redundant shit
no way man. no way. my posts are wonderful, fragile, evanescent gems of utterly stunning insight and evocative power. and the crazy thing is, on first glance you might think that they could only be crafted by a delicate, tormented neckbeard with the soul of a poet, but in real life i'm actually eight feet tall and almost four hundred pounds of bronzed muscle. i look like doc savage with the torn shirt. women can't get enough of me these days; i can barely hold them off by reminding them that all desire is triangular and mimetic.

the hardest part of posting here is actually typing these posts because my hands are so large...but nobody knows this pain, anon. nobody knows that even a bronzed giant can cry.

>>11170459
becoming a sub-kantbot gimmickposter

>>11167765
>heidegger, evola and chardin

I like heidegger. Hate evola. Am intrigued by chardin.

>>11170475
we are all sub-kantbot

>>11170502
you might find this interesting. it's a comparison of hegel, whitehead and chardin.

>Hegel and Whitehead share the notions of the universe as "organism," that only the Whole is real. Their vision of God is truly panentheistic. God is transcendent, but s/he is also the literal Universe. Unfortunately, Chardin cannot share this opinion: God is with and in the created, material Universe, the Universe is not literally him/her. Hegel and Whitehead also have a common emphasis on the temporal that is missing in Chardin, in that they both speak of individuals as "moments" in time.

>Chardin and Hegel, however, share several ideas that are exclusive to Whitehead. They both have notions of God in which s/he is Absolute and infinite, whereas Whitehead's God only seems infinite and absolute relative to the rest of the universe; Whitehead's God is powerful, but not all-powerful. Chardin and Hegel also see Creation as having an end-point, a telos/Omega-point, towards which we are being drawn by the Absolute/Omega. For Whitehead, though, according to Mellert, "there is no culminative point for the same reason that there is no beginning point. There is a cumulative effect as the process continues. The many become one and are increased by one."

>This is why Chardin speaks of evolution, while Whitehead of process--evolution implies culmination. While in Whitehead the future is open to as yet unconceived and eternal novelty, according to Cobb and Griffin, there is also "no assurance that the human species will move forward. It cannot stand still, but in the face of its massive dangers it may decay or even destroy itself.

http://www.apocryphile.org/jrm/articles/process.html

pretty gnarly. i guess i've always been too cynical in my own way to believe that such a One could be anything other than a black hole. but brooding on said black holes...just kind of leads to more black holes. learning about heidegger and lacan made life exponentially better for me just by helping me realize that in a lot of the conversations you are likely to have with anyone, there is an unsolvable question about Being going on, some inner sphinx that loves to bait and ask circular questions until it is recognized. once i learned to be able to just *wait* for people to be able to talk about whatever the fuck it was they actually wanted to talk about, even if it was only ever imperfectly talk-able, life got easier. because you just realize how much of everyday life is a kind of hysteria at low simmer.

so i find myself trying to detach from acceleration and maybe heading towards something more cheerful in a broader sense for sort of similar reasons. the future of human commercialization is undoubtedly bleak as fuck to think about. and yet somehow there are people like chardin (or hegel, or whitehead) who are capable of thinking about it without immediately plunging the nearest ball-point pen into their eyes. they must have known something.

>>11170587
>that pic

Wew. I like how Hegel says the serpent didn't lie to Adam and Eve about the Fall. he reveals his Boehmian influence there, who had a very powerful understanding of the Fall and human evil. He said the Fall was necessary so mankind could come out of its unknowing, embryonic unity with the divine in the garden and into a reflective, conscious unity. Even if you strip Hegel of his teleology it still works: if Spirit always arrives at the right choice after the wrong choice is made ('cause the right choice necessarily comes out of the wrong choice that has been dialectically digested and overcome), then the Fall was only "undergone" so we might return to a God qualified and enriched precisely by our having "tarried with the negative" and coming out the other side in one piece.

That picture though. You know Connor Cunningham accuses Plotinus of a kind of proto-nihilism for his vision of the universe as this circuit of going-forth and return to the non-being of the One. But doesn't Land say the same thing though? That death drive just is the return to the 0, and life doesn't so much assist entropy by optimizing the dissipation of energy but is that very optimization itself? I mean don't we feel the best after the gym or having sex or having killed it at something, ie having burned off our excess? And this ties into Bataille and Freud who calls life a "mazing" of death. Like I'm just fascinated by this topic. What are we returning to? The Void? Does it create us just to forcibly absorb us back again? Does it create us so we can know its unutterable peace and serenity, only possible for sapient beings who will experience it on that flickering event horizon of death? Isn't the whole mystico-spiritual striving for throwing off the fetters of the earth just this impulse, to return to the freedom of a primordial nescience (or without the grimdark, an unconditioned consciousness)? Is life the quantum void's One Weird Trick to love itself (as Crowley says, "the bliss of dissolution atones for life")? Is heat death the last orgasmic shudder of being?

Certainly Hegel thinks Mind is this spiraling in nothingness, that qualifies the nothing as/for that spiraling. We start with nothing, traverse the dialectical path, and arrive at absolute knowing as the knowledge of this nothing AS nothing (and consequently, the source of freedom, love, etc.). Is Land maybe just a little too fascinated with our grimdark origins and can't see the mountain we're climbing?

>>11170710
land is like the jump-off point for a lot of philosophy these days, and mostly because it involves the crafting of survival pods built to survive acceleration. the guys that he actually admires are people like thiel, satoshi nakamoto and cody wilson. the rest of us pretty much just have to figure out how we want to deal the rest of our lives under capital. meme ressentiment left or right won't do.

>life doesn't so much assist entropy by optimizing the dissipation of energy but is that very optimization itself?
i read something about this today. for land *capitalism is critique,* and vice versa. *something* is getting optimized under the sign of liberty. but i feel sometimes like i'm still not certain about that which is rendered unto cthulhu and that which is rendered unto skynet. i think that work will be up to the adherents and disciples and so on.

>What are we returning to? The Void? Does it create us just to forcibly absorb us back again?
yeah, it sometimes seems like this darkly alchemical process. something gets its due surplus out of you, mind and body and soul. it definitely all gets pretty weird. fortunately there's at least one 10/10 essay on this that i can post here.

https://www.urbanomic.com/document/poememenon/

def worth a read.

>Is Land maybe just a little too fascinated with our grimdark origins and can't see the mountain we're climbing?
the funny thing about land is that hegel has an elvis factor of 1 w/r/t land's own three biggest influences: kant, marx, and deleuze. all are closely related to hegel in these various ways. sometimes i wonder about one of the virtues of the dialectic being this reversal: that is to say, maybe we could say that once upon a time, marx and deleuze (and land) all wanted to escape the trap of dialectics. well - maybe that's mission accomplished now. but with pretty wild consequences, such that in order to survive the escape mechanism, some of us wind up wanting to go back to hegel again to process the results.

the idea of space-explorers basically getting fucked by their own escape mechanisms seems like a kind of perfectly allegorical idea for some of the acceleration stuff. no matter how much you try to improve things, they always get worse. even when you try and worsen them they get worse (and not necessarily even how you predicted it!). we are suffering in some way from good up-to-date cinematic descriptions of a lot of this stuff, but it will come, i think.

and in the end we can always, you know, try to just build a happy, stable, prosperous and other-than-bloodthirsty-chimpanzee civilization as well. it's sort of like socrates at the beginning of the republic: all you need are four guys. but oh no, we want fancy food, and jewelry, and all of the rest of it...

>>11170802
and zizek has his own way of crossing the wires here too.

>Capitalism and communism are not two different historical realizations, two species, of “instrumental reason”— instrumental reason as such is capitalist, grounded in capitalist relations, and “really existing socialism” failed because it was ultimately a subspecies of capitalism, an ideological attempt to “have one’s cake and eat it,” to break out of capitalism while retaining its key ingredient. Marx’s notion of the communist society is itself the inherent capitalist fantasy; that is, a fantasmatic scenario for resolving the capitalist antagonisms he so aptly described.

https://socialecologies.wordpress.com/

bold words from a venerable old communist!

apparently he might be tackling acceleration in his next book, which would be pretty cool. i think part of land's own enduring fame will have been presenting a pretty accurate description of the state of a pharmakon-world, how entrapped we are by our desires but updated for the 21C. capital itself is the kind of extinction event we actually have to reckon with, not some other kind of Other - the soviets, w/ev. this diabolical funhouse is one of our own devising. even the kind of sensationalist politics stuff you see on the news can only sort of tangentially deal with what's going on from his perspective.

>>11165912
How redpilled is he on the shitskin invasion of Europe and the ongoing global genocide of the White Race?

>>11170802
that articles fantastic

>Unlike the ‘primary’ religious era that has preceded it—marked by dogmatism, a drive towards unity, verticality, the need for transcendent regulation, and the symbol of the sun—the coming age will be lunar, secular, horizontal, multiple, and immanent: an ‘antithetical multiform influx’.11 The ‘rough beast’ of ‘The Second Coming’, Christ’s inverted double, sphinx-like (a creature of the threshold) with a ‘gaze blank and pitiless as the sun’, will bear the age forward into whatever twisted future the gyres have marked out for it.

fucking based, oi bruh fookin called it, what we're looking at is a progressive immanentization of thought and being (truly begun with Kant), a falling out of the sky to the ground, and what do falling bodies do? I know Evola makes the same point, he compares Kali Yuga to the acceleration of a falling body. Great stuff.

>Teilhard de Chardin thread on /lit/?!
>realize it's an excuse for Girardfag to samefag with his groupies

>>11171319

>>11172601
I ain't no nigga's groupie

>>11171319
not very

>>11172506
it makes me think of the katechon also, things carl schmitt talked about. the friend/enemy distinction isn't about the stupidest or most paranoiac possible interpretation imaginable of politics.

what i wonder is if the katechon preserves an order based on *tension* and in so doing restrains not only the impulse for all to make war upon all but for *all to make peace upon all.* it's not even some dimwit plea for World Peace Guys. it could be much more nuanced than that. to preserve distinctions is actually good. it's actually okay and arguably necessary to have enemies *provided that you don't dissolve and annihilate them into yourself.*

this is a counter-intuitive thought, but it's like saying the point of having a military is actually to prevent oneself from becoming disintegrated by the peace. a distinction between friend and enemy is preferable to that which unites and reconciles all differences in itself in a grotesque ecstasy of becoming.

this is a girardian notion as well, but going the other way. what produces a collapse of the breakdown of a cultural order isn't necessarily a single marginal being consciously picking away at the edges; it could just as well be a superabundance of significations, signs and signifiers that can no longer assimilate themselves into anything like a coherent whole. when we are *all friends,* when none of us are permitted to say we have any enemies, and all become absorbed into a kind of last man slush, inevitably anyone which distinguishes themselves is going to be accused of disruption. the way analysands will have hysterical, violent reactions to things that they are afraid, or furious, *inwardly resemble them*...not all wars are necessarily questions of scapegoating. they may even be, in some level, related to the *need to create proximity and distance from assimilating horror.*

the endgame of capital, in some sense, may well be nothing more than a reduction of mankind to a sort of soft human slurry like this. the peace can be just as destructive as the war. it could very well be that a structure of recognizable friend-enemy distinctions actually maintains a necessary equilibrium like that. capital erodes everything and reduces it to the reign of quantity, asphyxiates and smothers all difference. *one* cultural byproduct of this is virtuality, simulation, ironic difference. but the other may be horror, hatred, repugnance and revulsion. two sides of the same phenomenon, perhaps.

to keep it thematic, chardin was more okay with noospheric human unanimization in this way - *provided that christ was real.* if he wasn't, and far horizon of the noosphere was nothing but a cthuloid assimilization or a skynet-style algorithmiciziation, maybe he would have drawn the same conclusions that land and others do. but he didn't.

>>11172622
I agree there needs to be an other-directness that is competitive, antagonistic, hostile necessary for a healthy self-concept, but whats happened is this very primal urge to find an outlet for energy before it starts to mold has fallen from objectivity to the subject's struggle with himself. And i think Kant accomplished that, but still drew the line at "reality is an appearance of a transcendental subject" that tried to balance this need for a rationalistic understanding of nature that doesn't infringe on a brute "self-given" subjective dignity and freedom, but whats happened since is of course even this has been threatened.

So all thats left is everyone is your friend, the auto-insularization is accelerating we're seeing its effects realtime right here on 4chan. these men are like cultural excreta, but as such they're able to hold onto a minimal reflexive difference with their surroundings that the left can't think because they are the wallpaper. That's why the Left can't meme, and that's why these guys can. Because only by stepping outside the play does it become determinate, internal to it and you're its voicebox. Because they are on the cutting edge of the noosphere now. Because unlike their peers who've pledged themselves to the conventional Master-Signifiers they're onto something more erratic, but new Master-Signifiers all the same. Would it be fair to say the Master-Signifer, as the empty "quilting point" that ties the too-muchness all together, and as being nothing but a positivization of this impossibility (because we are here to discern it it and must see content), has been revealed as arbitrary? Contingent? And i think that's what we're still sick with. Zizek's curtain in the void: there's no picture behind the curtain, the curtain is the picture. So why do we still fall for the idealized "picture"? Is it a horror of the alterity this threatens? Or it because are just biologically primed to, and no knowledge of the nothingness of phenomena attenuates their power, and we're kinda just left stranded in a dark that hurts. Everything's this mediation around a very sore spot. If this pressure inherent to being isn't sublimated into positive healthy goal-oriented activity the whole thing goes absolutely to shit imo

>>11172622
At the end of the day you know we just dont have the strength to forgive reality, like there is no big bad, the big bads are the symptom of the thing itself, which means forgiving nobody at all

>>11172601
>be me
>be samefagging with groupies
>samefagging
>with groupies
>be one, and yet
>also be multiple

*mysticism intensifies*

>the Many, as One
>the One, as Many
>the one are as many, the many are as one
>the cosmic mind ever-returning to itself, a thousand faces, a thousand names, but a *single* fagging
>download_complete.jpeg
>tfw time backwards-compatibilizes itself on a friday afternoon on a sumatran bongo forum

just in awe of this gnosis lads

>>11172695
yup. paranoid despair seems inevitable when we fall in love with minimal trust assumptions, as if trust could be produced by anything other than a leap of faith. the same one that might have carried kafka's scholar over the threshold.

one of the wisest things i ever read i read here on /lit/: when everyone is Big Brother, then nobody is. this to me is the endgame lesson of psychoanalysis. that which tortures you is in reverse that which becomes the catalyst for a mutual recognition that allows for trust, the quilting-point between people, like the confucian concept of intellectual intuition: the way without a crossroads. hegel-lacan acrobatics are miracle of philosophy, but must be uncoupled from the critique of capital. capital is itself social critique, the far horizon for every civilization, and necessarily paranoid. space is *its* home and not ours. totalitarian systems work via mobilization around that quilting point, but reproduce the same catastrophic Answers when forced to explain themselves: orgies of cosmic maintenance.

democracy may be simply the exception to our own batshit demands for The Truth. but we don't need to be fatalistic or valorize democracy purely for itself. as societies grow in complexity, even though they may only reconfirm aspects of psychology hard-coded in us, nevertheless open up possibilities for mutually enriching coexistence that don't require the enigmas of violent reciprocity to continue themselves. maybe all of this is a sort of improvisational zoological experiment that we never get outside of.

chaos seems like a surfeit of options and panic a shortage of fungible time. our current mode of understanding has no way of processing civilizational restraint, and so one boring go-to is to blame somebody else for restricting possibilities that are already bad for us. the fantasy of marxism was of there being an Outside from which to criticize society, but what land shows is that this ultimately isn't even thinkable. even as we try to probe it from Home Base we find that Home Base was never what we thought it was originally.

if anything, /lit/ helpfully debunks private mythologies of becoming-snowflake. we're all pretty much enigmas like that, jewels in indra's net designed by mc escher. if the 21C brings to a close the 20C's preoccupations with (neo-victorian) Unspeakable Desires so much the better, i think. we are still an intriguingly literary species of chimpanzee, but we can do much better.

>>11172704
>At the end of the day you know we just dont have the strength to forgive reality
yeah. we'll never get there. and i don't think it's about christ-like forgiveness. it's more like forgiving people in the way that ordinary humans can: provisionally, by suspension of the law and not by revocation. christ can be imitated but not repeated. and that is the part that fucks us up, i think. he becomes the one guy about whom it is impossible to say, if he didn't exist, we would have to invent him.

The beginning bootstraps itself as the end, what looks like expansion and heat death on the outside is an autistic spiraling in on the inside, and it quickly becomes imperative to ask if this temporal attractor we call the One is going to be a being of pure intelligence and predation, onions slop, or a Christ-entity of love. And this tension of "getting on with it" you see in a lot of that classic Western disdain for the regressive oriental drive to "just be at home in the moment" with the birds and trees but some people can't be at home in the moment they want with the birds and trees they want to work and drive expensive cars and jerk off to chinese cartoons, anything but that, just that bare taking -in of being and fear of being played by the circle is the life-denying element. It's what Nietzsche diagnosed so well is about in his exaltation of the will to power, he was probably the first to understand the absolute as the acid bath of dissolution and overcoming. The game "really" does have to be played even though we know its a game, we are embedded in it to know it. And this knowledge itself bears on our selves in the world. This one Mind eternally digesting otherness. Death is love. End transmission

>>11173033
high-quality /lit/ darkness indeed.

posting some other variously interesting or thematic stuff re: chardin and noosphere. just sort of cosmic-historical greentext about technology, automation and so on. food for thought.

>What then is the relationship of this immense machine to the noosphere? In Teilhard's words:

>when Homo faber came into being the first rudimentary tool was born as an appendage of the human body. Today the tool has been transformed into a mechanized envelope (coherent within itself and immensely varied) appertaining to all mankind. From being somatic it has become 'noospheric.' And just as the individual at the outset was enabled by the tool to preserve and develop his first, elemental psychic potentialities, so today the noosphere, disgorging the machine from its innermost organic recesses, is capable of, and in process of, developing a brain of its own.

>Can you see how the Internet has been "disgorged," or come out of, "the innermost organic recesses" of the noosphere? What are the innermost organic resources of the noosphere if not humankind? Is it not we humans who are building the Internet? Could it be that the Internet is the noosphere's "brain of its own" he refers to? Teilhard goes on to say:

>But in addition to its protective role, how can we fail to see the machine as playing a constructive part in the creation of a truly collective consciousness? It is not merely a matter of the machine which liberates, relieving both individual and collective thought of the trammels which hinder its progress, but also of the machine which creates, helping to assemble, and to concentrate in the form of an ever more deeply penetrating organism, all the reflective elements upon earth.

from the conclusion:

>If, as Teilhard theorized:

>There is an envelope of thinking substance surrounding the Earth, and
>This thinking substance requires a mechanical infrastructure to support the universal impulse toward increasing complexity, then
>The mechanical framework for this sphere of thought, the noosphere, just may be the ever-evolving Internet.

>Does this mean that there is a parallel between our association of brain/mind and the association of Internet/noosphere? If we commonly understand the brain/mind combination to compose an individual human being, then what can we say about the Internet/noosphere combination? What kind of "being" will this combination give rise to?

https://www.matrixmasters.com/spirit/html/2a/2a.html

>>11173162
yes everything is a surpassing, everything is a repudiation in time of its substrate, it plays out with every argument between parents and children. its why I like Nietzsche's overman when properly radicalized, it's not a higher man, it's something higher than man. his whole thing is built on a distinction in telos. man isn't ontologically guaranteed, he isn't the passage to higher man he is only a passage proper, to what is higher than man. this thing had to bootstrap itself out of the future because we are its auto-affectivity. we are the gyrification of the absolute, spun so tight things will hopefully start to look flat and blank and pure again

>>11173305
oh man. that kind of picture gets me right in the feels, where neoplatonism crosses paths with the chakras &c. absolute hnng.

*insanity management:* the basic question of therapy, analysis, and much else. we are bonded in circles internally and perhaps civilizationally, but it absolutely could be a sort of an upward-heading gyre of positive growth. or, as ken wilber says, the atman project. an expanded and enlarged circle of concern that in the present age hits a deadlock because the axioms of a given plateau are called into question: what do you do about maximum pluralism, maximum inclusivity? you have to move things to a higher level, or else things begin a downward spiral. maybe, in some deep way, a necessary process of withdrawal, but it doesn't necessarily have a natural point of reversal either: the endgame of the process is feud and destruction. it's one of the things that i like about chardin as well: the possibility of a benevolent overman. the superman doesn't have to be a concept to which the final word always belongs to nietzsche. and a superhumanity > individual superman. but this kind of stuff throws people into a tizzy, and for good reason.

>man isn't ontologically guaranteed, he isn't the passage to higher man he is only a passage proper, to what is higher than man. this thing had to bootstrap itself out of the future because we are its auto-affectivity. we are the gyrification of the absolute, spun so tight things will hopefully start to look flat and blank and pure again

raaaaargh. preach that shit *all day long* mi amigo. all day long. this is exactly the kind of stuff i was hoping this thread would percolate. make me a fucking believer

>>11173377
>
As you say, metaphysical mediation/correlation is predicated on a lack constitutive of desire: ‘in metaphysical correlation, thought is a hunt’, it forms a loop without a boundary or an outside: it ‘is always after a response that it has already posited before it begins the task of thinking …. It has caught its prey before the hunt has begun’. Mystical mediation / correlation by contrast is predicated upon a loss, ‘thought is sacrifice’. As such it too forms a loop, one that circulates a void representing the unfathomable blackness/divine darkness of the Godhead. This is the ‘extimate’ excess around which the drive circulates, but which it cannot encounter or know. In Catren’s terms, metaphysical correlation takes the form of a ‘dermal’ loop, while mystical correlation has a loop characteristic of the drive. BTW: he likes to use Lacan’s term for the Trieb which is dérive, that is, a ‘drift that has become deflected from its aim’, rather like Ruusbroec’s ‘wayless way’, maybe. The example Catren gives comes from theoretical physics, however, that of ‘a star drifting around a black hole’.

>For you, ultimately, it is mystical thought that poses a ‘critical limit’ for metaphysical thought since the intrinsic relations of the metaphysical correlation can be ‘displaced or scaled up’ to the extrinsic relations of mystical correlation. Similarly, Catren argues that it is the role of the ‘Shrink’ to shrink all the (dermal) loops that can be shrunk until you get to the unshrinkable loops that disclose the death drive, the symptom of the fundamental Thing of enjoyment around which it circulates.

A self-unwinding circle: the spiral.

>>11173305
>neoplatonism
>not kabbalah

and hey i never said i was the sharpest knife in the drawer

anyways. stuff like this. part of a more nuanced argument for a philosophy of the future along the lines of guys that i like would probably include a thought in this direction: look, violence is for realsies. it *works.* unquestionably. and it always makes for great aesthesis. this we know.

so what are the alternatives to this? what's the *point* of this violence or its alternatives? it can only be a kind of evolution of consciousness, yes?

because these are things that i think about, terrorism and so on. fundamental problems for a kind of metaphysics that cannot in the final analysis differentiate the real from the fake and so on, but has to extricate itself from the slaughter-bench of history and a legacy of absolutely failed 20C political experimentation. the question about violence *always* interests us, and probably always will. but in the absence of anything like a civilizational project that is based on doing anything other than deferring a rapidly deteriorating Western project and handing itself over body and soul to a technological explosion that is going to raise questions we are not even remotely prepared to answer, wat do? make an argument for a better version of man, i think, or just a re-arguing for an older and more syncretic version who is not so hopelessly swayed by seduction or needs to be driven to the pasture by blows.

random schizo-posting. whatever. just wanted to throw some shine on that post anon.

>>11165912
>tfw your de chardin and blondel memeing is finally payoff

>>11172945
> maybe all of this is a sort of improvisational zoological experiment that we never get outside of.

>the fantasy of marxism was of there being an Outside from which to criticize society, but what land shows is that this ultimately isn't even thinkable.

right, the Hegelian paradigm, this eternal displacement of circles, of Outsides getting Outside on one another, until we learn to manufacture the Outside, but not before a little detour through the deterritorialized remnants of Western civilization

> if the 21C brings to a close the 20C's preoccupations with (neo-victorian) Unspeakable Desires so much the better, i think. we are still an intriguingly literary species of chimpanzee, but we can do much better.

yeah thought is just getting more and more claustrophobic, hungry for the Real, trying to break through to that Outside our very constructions expounding its impossibility create. no one wants to accept radical otherness is tearing the wall down, because they want to feel what the other side can only give them through the medium that is a wall. I like weil's metaxu, this image of God and man or just man and his soul as prisoners on either sides of wall in adjacent cells tapping through the bricks to communicate, and there is only this tapping

what a world m8

>>11173452
the christians and the mystics and the traditionalists have it going on bigly homeslice. somebody has to pick up the pieces and wander through the ruins like petrarch. and it won't be the fascists or the communists.

>blondel
updated my journal

>>11173415
yurp I think there will always be a horror of Mind's dark underbelly of its own activity, i mean what we're looking at today is fundamentally this denial or withdrawal from violence as a reality and violence as a principle. and that doesn't so much contradict today's demonization of traditional masculinity but subsume it. soiboys and shit in mind, behavior, fuckin' physiognomy, are completely inoculated from the violence that guarantees their existence. Mind's trying to disavow the blood the greases it, almost as if it's trying to get away, a reaction-formation internal to the schizotic absolute. we're looking at a generation of adults mentally unequipped for any conception of life that predates theirs. we're becoming increasingly efficient at assimilating everything to our own sense it's only our sense we have a stake in. we're trying to refuse our foundation, of what only violence can birth

heyo, girardfag here. i have to step out for a bit but i just wanted to say that for me at least this thread has been smashingly interesting. so, just a shout-out to anons making crypto-teilhardian mysticism great again. crazy fun. much appreciated lads, i'll catch up with all later

>>11173477
>no one wants to accept radical otherness is tearing the wall down, because they want to feel what the other side can only give them through the medium that is a wall. I like weil's metaxu, this image of God and man or just man and his soul as prisoners on either sides of wall in adjacent cells tapping through the bricks to communicate, and there is only this tapping

also this. this infinitely. like it's some kind of horrible fucking monstrosity, technologized time, the madness of production. i just keep feeling like civilization has lapsed into a fucking neverending wonderland Tea Party. everything is a joke comprehensible only to/by the insane, but if you're not insane you get to feel fucking *guilty* about it, for breaking Mysterious Rules that nobody can explain. the Tea Party never ends, the Tea Party never begins, it's Always Tea Time...deleuze finds interesting stuff in lewis carroll, but i don't know. death by in-joke. drives me mental just thinking about it.

>what a world m8
yup. who knows anon. maybe we'll meet someday as greybearded old men after all of this shit collapses and reflect on a cool conversation we had on /lit/ once back when there was hot water and wifi. man we had it good then

>>11173412
>a ‘drift that has become deflected from its aim’, rather like Ruusbroec’s ‘wayless way’, maybe.
oh man. why is this is so perfect?

>>11173522
that's it. we are built for excess in this way. violence in itself isn't bad; what's really destructive is in punishing a thing that we don't understand. it's probably not possible to inoculate a civilization against violence completely, we're just not wired that way. it's not the case that aestheticized political violence doesn't work, it's that it works entirely too well.

but i think back also to those first vikings who converted to christianity. kind of a weird phenomenon. these guys had it all, the whole heroic sea-reaver life. they must have seen something in christianity that appealed to them. true, it might have been just political stability. that's possible. but it's one of those things i wonder about, what would make anybody convert from Awesome Heroism to that. reactionary types tend to prefer catholicism because it has this time-honored tradition to order and governance: God, King, Country, Marriage, Mannerbund, all of this. it's obviously there. but it's interesting to think about, warriors and their philosophy, the Good Christian Knight and so on.

chardin even mentions this in Human Energy, that criticisms of christianity aim to show that christianity despises humanity. sometimes it feels like exactly the right way to *be* productively misanthropic! that is, if you *really* hate humanity, don't try to optimize it in terms of some utopia that will inevitably disappoint. feeling *really* revolted about the human condition? don't get mad, try jesus! how about *that* for perverse pleasure?