/lit/ - Literature

>just stop thinking and be yourself bro xD

>>11881832
High IQ Democrats like Hillary and Obama, with expert staff who have done painstaking research to conclude that, no, coal cannot come back, car manufacturing in America is noncompetitive, we will give you a grant to retrain and get a new job - all this - isn't enough to sway rural and suburban retards from engendering Drumpf and Kavanaugh

the holocaust was an example of instrumental rationality.

>>11881864
fascism is rational?

>>11881845
>Kavanaugh

you mean the target of the most obvious attempt at character assassination in recent history?

I'm not even a burger, but if you cannot take two steps back and realize this is a blatant instance of a political party weaponizing collective sentiment (#metoo) in order to attain power, you lack brainpower

just lol at america, your country is a fucking circus

>>11881866
not that guy, but yes. even a project of mass extermination requires bureaucracy, infrastructure, computers and so on. it requires a whole system of state authority which carries out even insane commands with professional and methodical precision. the reasons for the extermination are not rational, they belong to myth, but the tools of state are manifestly rational in their deployment and use.

every mass-populist doxa is at bottom commonsensical, it's just that what is universally believed to be reasonable can become unreasonably precisely by virtue of its universality.

>>11881885
sure bro

>>11881885
>the reasons for the extermination are not rational

how are eugenics and the extermination of political foes irrational processes?

>>11881923
because killing the Jews was never going to fix G*rmans

>>11881920
holocaust denial is loony tunes

>>11881923
>how are eugenics and the extermination of political foes irrational processes?

you mean, why/how is genocide irrational? mostly because life isn't a redpilled video game. i'm anti-genocide myself, it's one of my weird personality quirks. and also because the gas chambers are a black mark on western civilization.

spengler didn't need the nazis and neither did ernst junger.

>>11881961
You still didn't explain how it was irrational, you only pointed out how objectionable of an acti it is. Being wrong and being irrational are two very different things.
There was definitely a logic to the Holocaust. It's something that could only be conceived and perpetrated by the modern man

>>11881961
>le rational man calling for the dehumanisation of "looneys" and other people for not being rational enough

>>11881885
hmm makes me think about ordinary men by browning

>>11881845
Fuck off neoliberal

>>11881991
>You still didn't explain how it was irrational.
because that's the exactly what the greentext in the original post means. seen from within, or from the perspective of some ideological commissar, it wasn't irrational: it was obedience to the will of the state. seen from without, or historically, it was. this is the paradox of totalitarian modernist leadership: I Am The State.

the State, by virtue of being the State, can exercise a force or power that in being above the law simply supplies its own force of rationality through pure will. it fucks with human beings because we are like that. there's a good parable about this in kafka also. but this is why we continue to reflect on the phenomenon of nazism. it happened, and it didn't happen by accident. it was not short on reasons, purposes, arguments, or answers. and it was fully equipped with infrastructure and engineering from the bottom to the top.

>Being wrong and being irrational are two very different things.
sure. but in circumstances of total irrationalism - for instance, a frenzy of extermination - a totalizing sensibility inhibits better judgment. it becomes as wrong to go against the will when one is part of it and swept up in it as a model citizen as much as it is to not resist it when one is opposed to it, or outside of it, or within historical reflection after the fact.

you should read carl schmitt if you're interested in these things, he's a complex and fascinating philosopher.

>There was definitely a logic to the Holocaust. It's something that could only be conceived and perpetrated by the modern man.
no question. the holocast was in many ways peak modernity. and as a big fan of martin heidegger i've spent a fair bit of time reflecting on the meaning of this. i've come to the not particularly breathtaking conclusion that it was a bad idea, and moreover that heidegger's conflation of the gas chambers with the mechanized food industry was spectacularly silly, even though it makes a kind of philosophical sense. it's wrong, but it doesn't persuade me that heidegger as such should be thrown out completely. he shouldn't; he's an astoundingly important philosopher. and he's not wrong to say that under technology the true levelling-down of all things doesn't preclude the treatment of human beings as if they were any other sort of material stock.

but only a truly insane person would draw this conclusion or implement it statewide in real life. true, judging the relative sanity of other human beings is a complicated process: just ask foucault. but i think we can draw the line at state-subsidized mass extermination in the name of racial supremacy without too much reflection. that one's not a real head-scratcher for me.

>>11882004
>le rational man calling for the dehumanisation of "looneys" and other people for not being rational enough

also, i'm not calling for the dehumanisation of anyone or making a boilerplate argument for rationalism either. i don't think human beings are fundamentally rational, although we are capable of it. and i also don't know if the state can be governed in a purely rational form either. it probably should be, but it's complicated, as human beings are complicated. it's precisely because the holocaust is such a terrible conflation of the rational and the irrational that it warrants close study - which is to say, not beginning from a place of radical skepticism w/r/t it ever happening at all in the first place.

holocaust denial is just ridiculous. it's the same as believing in a flat earth or reptile conspiracies. it happened. to say that it didn't is silly.

but, again, the historical meaning of german nazism is an episode where peak rationalism - the tech, the infrastructure, the army, the entire interior mechanism of the German state - met up with peak irrationalism, that being the mythopoetics of nazi culture. these have deep, even primordial roots. and it resulted in war and an epochal shift in geopolitical power. had the germans not opted for the holocaust the war would, perhaps, have a different meaning; but they didn't, and moreover race theory was vitally necessary to state propaganda. there is no insoluble internal socialist clash between workers and capitalists if the state itself is enframed as being an organic unity, and with the revolution as such being exported abroad in the form of either war or internally in the form of purge. in order to sell large numbers of people on these programs you have to speak as if you know what you are talking about, but in the final analysis what you are doing is propagating a myth. and myths are powerful things, they always have been, since the beginning of time.

but people don't want myths to be rational, they want them to have a poetic power of explanation that resolves the contradictions inherent to thinking. aestheticized politics is the result.

>>11882109
for what it's worth, the question about political irrationalism and modernity isn't exclusively limited to the germans in the 20C either. the french had a very similar experience.

these are *human* and not exclusively national phenomena.

>>11882109
you read too much heidegger

>>11882152
he's one of my all-time favorite philosophers. Being and Time was one of those life-changing books for me. everything he says about language, poetry, the metaphysics of production &c are things i unironically agree with. i think he hit upon something essentially true about human nature and in the reading i have done since then not much has changed my mind. i love me some heidegger but ofc he's a complicated man, and german history in the 20C is complicated stuff also.

i like land too, and it's not easy championing him either. but both are offering up fascinating discourses on the nature of time, technology and modernity - and their relation to politics - that don't end with anything like easy answers. usually whenever easy answers are presupposed they end in disaster.

so i spend a lot of time thinking about that stuff.

>>11882168
and imho the only guy who ranks those two is pic rel. b/c in terms of political theory, in the end for me scapegoat theory > everything.

>>11882168
can you expand more on what you like about heidegger's teachings? examples and such

>>11881835
i absolutely believe that this is what you got from that. fucking brainlets on this site.

>>11881832
Common 20th century sentiment, doesn't make sense too far before that and it's been falling apart for years now.

But basically, some axioms of the typical modernist worldview lead to unwanted conclusions in all sorts of directions, and at times it's been popular to blame not the axioms, but the decision to make deductions from them.

better robespierre/revolution image here.

and out of this came napoleon. first the execution of the sun king, and then the execution of robespierre, and then taking the show on the road. wheels of craziness and reasons. bonaparte, being the military savant that he was, set the tone for everything that hitler would do later on: when in doubt, show people the golden eagle and they will march to the end of creation and back for it. perhaps alexander before him.

the same power of nostalgia and aesthetics got trump elected as well, i think. but in his case that wasn't so much vigilant and insomniac rationality on his part, but the moral vigilance being forced on the american people by the opposing side, which engendered this incredible victory for the least qualified man in the history of american politics over quite possibly the most qualified one, or at least one the american people had been groomed for for a decade. the same 'vigilant and insomniac rationality' of left moral puritanism is what produced the blowback of trump, as much as napoleon himself was produced out of the revolution, and hitler out of the calamitous ruin of of the first world war.

>>11882289
it was what he said about the nature of language, of the difference between the ontic and the ontological, of language as being disclosure and unconcealment instead of the production of certainty. Being and Time just finally cracked my thick skull. true, some things had sort of happened around that time that primed me, in a way, for a massive Ego Realignment, but in the aftermath of that what heidegger was saying really clarified the nature of a lot of things i was struggling with: namely, the hysterical nature of talking itself, the need to produce speech, produce meaning, talk, and talk, and talk...and, mainly, about nothing. or rather, not about nothing, but in the way that humans talk about things infinitely when they can't grasp the ultimate meaning of them, so they have to keep going and going...it's his connection to existential psychotherapy i really like, for this reason. and his compatibility with eastern and nondual thought, which i am also very fond of.

language doesn't pattern onto reality, but this isn't - contra a more cynical kind of postmodernism - a recipe for infinite playfulness. that happens, and is necessary (read korzybski, or barthes, or any number of others) - but when the bloom comes off the rose of irony, heidegger is your man. the piety of thought is another phrase by him i like.

in general, he's just good for reminding you that forcing the limits of language is the wrong way to go. humans just may not be wired like that. technology is a product of thinking, but we don't have to be relentlessly driven by the metaphysics of production. we do, and we are, and the result is technocapital, among other things. but it's not the whole of the human experience, which is ultimately profoundly mysterious and radically temporal.

>>11881884
We’re so fucked. Our country is fucked. It’s over. There’s no salvaging this. The only solution is to burn it all to the ground and begin again.

>>11882326
>sun king

derp. obviously it wasn't the sun king, it was louis xvi. sorry.

>>11882189
can someone explain that quote by Girard?

>>11882346
again, double-shame for this one. i know it wasn't the sun king who was executed.

>>11882326
fundamentally the issue is about language and its capacity of *bending reality to our will.* this is an issue that haunted heidegger because he thought nietzsche had completed metaphysics in getting to this point.

so here we are, near a century since B&T, and confronted with this double whammy: on the one hand, a technological system so powerful that it can create illusions and simulations not only indistinguishable from reality, but which actually create reality itself. and this is twinned to a second question, which is the culture of postmodernity, which has within it no internal checks or balances on how far the artistic impulse can go or ought to go. deleuze, who takes nietzsche in a different direction, obviously argues that any such attempt to check this process is only so much oedipal nostalgia. but these are two philosophers who are both talking about life after a linguistic (or semiotic) turn. and with land ofc you get a guy saying, not only is capital not even remotely what you think it is, the horizons of it massively exceed human desires. so go on, please talking, the machines love the raw intel...

heidegger is complicated because his own version of Revolt Against the Modern World became in the end wrapped up once and forever with the history of german nazism. but this to me is a shame, because heidegger's theory of language - his philosophy in general - only becomes more and more prescient with each year, as we continue to explore these increasingly bizarre and extreme forms of cultural life divorced from anything like reality. and you can see, when you watch the news, that people turn in the end back ever more fiercely *towards* master-signifiers, in order to bind reality again and give it a core or central principle. but in the end it's all just so much rage and bewilderment and confusion. for me at least heidegger helped me to understand some of these things, and at least to pay a little bit closer attention to my own constant needs to force reality to conform to language and vice versa. i've become, i hope, a slightly better listener since then.
>sometimes

nietzsche is a true rock star and one of the great ethical teachers of humanity since the greeks. but his conclusions unsettled heidegger and they unsettle me also.

>>11882427
aestheticizing violence in a tomb hides the essential violence necessary for mythopoetic political legitimation. political-religious metanarratives usually mean somebody's face had to get smashed in at some point, which is a ugly and brutal truth about state politics. the core of political unity is that violence, but the violence is unbearable. but scapegoating creates communal unity, which is good for organizing people in states of crisis. the enemy, however, can never be exterminated fully or completely. and so a monument is erected in place which tells the glorious part of the story.

>>11882427
girard's thought on the meaning of the tomb and the role it has played anthropologically in human culture is told more fully in Things Hidden, my copy of which is currently on loan, and so i am atm unable to provide any money greentext. but you can read more about his work elsewhere.

the essential theme is the anthropological, literary, cultural and political meaning of *sacrifice,* and of which there is no more theologically potent form than human sacrifice. this is in a sense how war has always been constructed. heroic, mythical wars - the kinds of wars that mobilize hearts and minds most fully - need heroic, mythical reasons. but girard is acutely aware of the power of the imagination in this regard and the role that scapegoating and Because Reasons plays in the construction of the meaning of war. for him what makes the gospels important is that they reveal something essentially true about the nature of political scapegoating by taking the side of the victim, which he believes is occluded by most earlier forms of religious devotion. it's a conclusion i also agree with, and in the case of the holocaust there is arguably no clearer or more archetypal example in history.

even for hitler it's not like the menace of the jews or bolshevism would ever have ultimately gone away. it would have been an eternal crusade, not unlike - although in a substantially less militarized form, though with the same degree of puritanical fanaticism - the modern quest for absolute moral parity in consumer society. it leads in the end to things that keep peterson awake at night and sweating and growing his ulcer.

the key aspect here is *unanimity.* the scapegoat arranges a disparate collection of individuals and unites them around a common purpose: Destroy The Enemy, the one who has poisoned the wells, taken from us our homeland, and so on. it's witch-burning, for lack of a better word. and state-sanctioned or otherwise officialized witch-burning receives monuments thereafter.

the scapegoat is the key figure in creating unanimity and collectivity where there was none before, and binding people together around a common cause or purpose. but in the end you have do *do* something with their destruction: so you memorialize it, and tell a story about it, so as to maintain the Cosmic Narrative of Things. it's the archetypal phenomenology of war, the relationship of war to the divine, and the relationship of the divine to historical and cultural process. things hidden since the foundation of the world. and for girard there is only one substantive commentary on this, which is in the gospels. well, not only one. he actually does reserve some positive praise for hindu thought elsewhere, i can't remember where exactly.

if you're interested in reading further, i made a thread some time ago that had a bunch of excerpts from a pretty good handbook on girardian stuff.

>>/lit/thread/S11659130

>>11882548
and any use of 40K art or aesthetics in general that i might use isn't really there to critique either 40K or girardian thought; if anything, the aesthetic of 40K is a kind of satire raised to such an exquisite degree that it becomes a kind of high art in itself.

the Emprah himself is purest freudian death-wish, but the science-fiction component of that world goes directly to the nerve-cluster of what makes this stuff interesting in both a literary and a philosophical capacity. the Emprah is both dead and not-dead, and his throne is both throne and tomb. the more awesome the aesthetics become, the more horrifying is the reality of what lies within it, and vice-versa. the whole balance of the universe of 40K hangs on this distinction, the sense in which the Emperor is both living and unliving, physically located in a single place and yet psychically present everywhere. his presence sustains the entire cosmology, but the fundamental lore is predicated on there being no substantially new plot developments either. were it so the whole thing would collapse.

40K - Catholic Space Nazis - are probably the supreme aesthetic example of girardian stuff, and it is what i would run and not walk to deploy if i were trying to get people unfamiliar with his ideas interested in his thinking and why he matters. the Eternal Crusade founded on the tomb of an undying god-king has been fascinating for decades and will continue to do so. and in the case of culture and aesthetics, it is worlds upon worlds of fun.

but IRL it's different. IRL we do not actually have the Emprah, and there are no orks, tyranids or genestealer cults. it doesn't mean we still can't have war, and we will. it's that there will be *profound confusion* as to who the good guys and the bad guys are. all that we will know - or be told - is that There Can Only Be One. and who knows, theologically this may be true; politically, not so much.

>>11881866
>itt people can't tell the difference between reason and instrumental rationality

>>11881832
>The fuck did they mean by this?

The fuck did they mean by every sentence in the book, you mean. And the truth is probably not even the authors themselves knew what they were talking about. It wouldn't surprise me if the true purpose of the book was to mistify naive readers and further muddy the waters of Western intellectual discourse.

>>11882493
>>11882548
>>11882600

fuck it, i'm giving myself a (you) for these posts.

>also a cringe, yes?
>yes, that too

>>11881832
>it's not that simple;

>>11882616
>mistify naive readers and further muddy the waters
Deleuze is French so this is just in his blood

>>11881961
>>11881991
I'd be surprised if either of you can come up with an actual non-trivial definition not of the concept at the core of your disagreement, i.e. reason/rationality

>>11881832
The future is uncertain, and therefore requires on the clock maintenance and surveillance to pull off anything of a grand scale successfully.

Wars would end as soon as the soldiers stopped being angry were it begin and continued by emotion.

>>11881832
A madman is not someone who has lost his reason but someone who has lost everything but his reason.

>>11881832
>vigilant and insomniac rationality
This is an unsustainable state, and eventually the neurotic frustration that this builds up leads to violence.

>>11883220
>I'd be surprised if either of you can come up with an actual non-trivial definition not of the concept at the core of your disagreement, i.e. reason/rationality

a definition of reason and rationality? i don't even know if i can. reason to me just means sanity among or between human beings. philosophical charity. the capacity to tolerate ambiguity in abstraction. how about, 'a conspicuous and consistence absence of barbarism, ignorance, brutality, violence and superstition?'

there are things that confucius would have said ultimately couldn't be defined. and it wasn't, i think, because they were undefinable or to be incorrigibly nit-picky or obtuse, but because they got in the way of a more interesting conversation about what actually mattered, which was enlightenment, compassion, and humanity. and one of the reasons i like confucius is because this is a rather non-postmodern approach to these things, where two parties have their exchange on a mutually unstable ground.

so yeah. i don't know if i can offer a definition of those terms. are they really required? are we really going to disagree that nazism was both rational in its implementation and irrational in its romanticism? they were. fascism is aestheticized politics and communism is politicized aesthetics. what's the problem here?

>>11883513
based GK

>>11881864
the holocaust never happened and there is 0 credible proof that six million jews were killed

>>11882331
>The only solution is to burn it all to the ground and begin again.
Oddly, that's the same philosophy that got us to where we are.

>>11881845
Can you imagine being this dumb. Hahahahha

>>11881832
if you struggle with this quote you are way too underread to be reading deleuze. literally just a neat reference to goya and a traditional Nietzschean critique of Wissenchaft. But even that aside this is some basic critique of the Enlghtenment shit. Reason unchecked is 1). dumb lmao and 2). leads to some fucked up shit (see: Modernity).

>>11883944
>(see: Modernity)
yeah it's pretty good

Halp! The Cartesian grid is slicing me into cubes!

>>11884011
wah lah!

fly and deterritorialise yourself AI!

I don't like him but he explains himself pretty clearly here.
http://www.generation-online.org/p/fpdeleuze7.htm
>GILLES DELEUZE: We do not use the terms 'normal' or 'abnormal'. All societies are rational and irrational at the same time. They are perforce rational in their mechanisms, their cogs and wheels, their connecting systems, and even by the place they assign to the irrational. Yet all this presupposes codes or axioms which are not the products of chance, but which are not intrinsically rational either. It's like theology: everything about it is rational if you accept sin, immaculate conception, incarnation. Reason is always a region cut out of the irrational -- not sheltered from the irrational at all, but a region traversed by the irrational and defined only by a certain type of relation between irrational factors. Underneath all reason lies delirium, drift. Everything is rational in capitalism, except capital or capitalism itself. The stock market is certainly rational; one can understand it, study it, the capitalists know how to use it, and yet it is completely delirious, it's mad. It is in this sense that we say: the rational is always the rationality of an irrational. Something that hasn't been adequately discussed about Marx's *Capital* is the extent to which he is fascinated by capitalists mechanisms, precisely because the system is demented, yet works very well at the same time. So what is rational in a society? It is -- the interests being defined in the framework of this society -- the way people pursue those interests, their realisation. But down below, there are desires, investments of desire that cannot be confused with the investments of interest, and on which interests depend in their determination and distribution: an enormous flux, all kinds of libidinal-unconscious flows that make up the delirium of this society. The true story is the history of desire. A capitalist, or today's technocrat, does not desire in the same way as a slave merchant or official of the ancient Chinese empire would. That people in a society desire repression, both for others and *for themselves*, that there are always people who want to bug others and who have the opportunity to do so, the 'right' to do so, it is this that reveals the problem of a deep link between libidinal desire and the social domain. A 'disinterested' love for the oppressive machine: Nietzsche said some beautiful things about this permanent triumph of slaves, on how the embittered, the depressed and the weak, impose their mode of life upon us all.
Basically, he's not the insane one, society is.

>>11884041
Holy fuck something insightful and clearly written by Deleuze? I had no idea.