/lit/ - Literature

>>11877390
take le redpill xd

>>11877390

I have that very edition and it's quite workable.

>>11877390
The new edition with commentary by girardfag

the one by Éditions Galilée

>>11877390
Also, any other related rec's? Society of the Spectacle is important, of course, if you're viewing this from a sociological angle, and general epistemological stuff is important on the front of "what is real?"/"what is true?"/etc., but other or more specific rec's are welcome.

Baudrillard's America looks interesting.

bump

>>11877480
kek. me? i wouldn't have much to say, really, except a small tag that says 'don't start with this one.'

he was a pretty based guy tho. i would have liked it if sloterdijk had included a chapter about him in Philosophical Temperaments, i feel like those guys would have been duelling kindred spirits. two contrarian continental aesthetes with strong feels about nietzsche and modernity. JB even gives him a couple of shout-outs in one of his later books:

>Hence Sloterdijk's hypothesis that 'the reality of reality is the eternal return of violence' To which he opposes a 'pacifism that is in keeping with our most advanced theoretical intuitions, a deep-level pacifism, based on a radical analysis of the circularity of violence, deciphering the forces that determine its eternal return.' A radical analysis, then, to remedy the radical evil. But can a 'radical' analysis have a finality of whatever kind? Is it not itself part of the process of evil?

>But if we move from potential mutation to real projection (as Peter Sloterdijk does in his Menschenpark project), we lose all philosophical distance; and thought, in mingling with the real course of things, offers merely a false alternative to the operation of the system. Thought must refrain from instructing, or being instructed by, a future reality, for, in that game, it will always fall into the trap of a system that holds the monopoly of reality.

if i was to write a longer intro on The Meaning of Baudrillard it would probably begin with the need to take one of france's most arcane prophet-seers and ask him how he felt about the world in 2018. i would be very grateful if he deflated a few of my suspicions about acceleration, for one thing, by gracefully and wisely reminding us that hyperstitional speculation on the nature of capital still remains, perhaps, within one of the orders of simulation, and probably warrants a well-deserved kick in the pants accordingly. we kind of miss him now, as we miss most of these guys. even if in some sense the sheer potency of their thought got us into this mess in the first place.

i was also thinking about him today in another way, about the remark on the back of Agony of Power:

>Power itself must be abolished—and not solely because of a refusal to be dominated, which is at the heart of all traditional struggles—but also, just as violently, in the refusal to dominate. Intelligence cannot, can never be in power because intelligence consists of this double refusal.

the abolishment of power, the refusal to dominate: now there's a pretty fine message for you. i'll co-sign that one. that intelligence consists in the double refusal. i like that.

>>11877692
Read Baudrillard's Symbolic Exchange and Death. Then read Franco Berardi's "And...: Phenomenology of the End."

>>11879144
but maybe also that our fantasies have become fantasies of domination in this way, i think he would have taken that idea to the moon and back. the predominance of sexuality in advertisement, the disappearance of sex in reality, the ferocity with which sexual harrassment is treated in a completely hyper-sexualized age...he would have been able to write about some of these things, perhaps, in a way that rose above a kind of boilerplate moralism or finger-wagging politics, which is what most of us usually wind up doing. certainly the contestation of the prized moral high ground of being the Good, the Innocent, and the Pure. and perhaps he would have also connected this to our own deep-seated mingled paranoia and fascination with islam also.

he would not have written anything about the intellectual dark web, or peterson. funny also that peterson talks about derrida and foucault but rarely mentions baudrillard (and references to heidegger are rare, but i think i can understand why...he doesn't want to allow himself to be compared any more to a third reich apologist than he already has been), but baudrillard was as keen an observer of the fate of postmodernity as ever there was. he really was a kind of neo-marxist figure, but perhaps he would have noted that marxism has now permeated so deeply into the fabric of academic life that it becomes well and truly hyperreal. the search for the origins of the crime, the way in which people today hold each other hostage in the name of the Good...

maybe he would have been extra-shitty and said, congratulations, this is what the complete cultural reproduction of the world looks like. reality has been rubbed out of existence and replaced with total simulation: this is how it feels to live in the Magic Kingdom and be ruled by rollercoasters, talking mice and theme songs. maybe this is what you wanted all along, the perfect reunion of the sign to the signifier, Artificial Synthetic Walt Disney Time. like a crushing gravity well of weaponized nostalgia, with the dancing brooms sweeping everything along before them, much as he said they would.

there's a book by gilles chatelet called To Live And Think Like Pigs. chatelet mentions deleuze and guattari as two of a very few names who managed to avoid living and thinking like pigs. i think baudrillard deserves that honor as well.

>>11879191
Reading a few of S&S gave me the sense that Peterson would (reluctantly) agree with several points made by JB, particularly about the loss of meaning in media (which could easily be attributed to Peterson and the several pieces that were highly ideological in nature to discredit him, rather than actually debate) and the lack of realisation in universities

>>11877390
I've read this and some of his later stuff like The Perfect Crime. What of his earlier stuff should I read?

>>11879374
Symbolic Exchange and Death. Forget Foucault

>>11879282
i'll tell you my dream/fantasy for a JBP story, tell me what you think. it's basically peterson about to be sentenced to death via hemlock for having corrupted the youth of Neo-Athens, which is more or less what is happening now. and in the night before his execution he goes and prays before an open window, and pours his heart out to the stars, and asks the gods why he is being treated in this way. he's ready to die, of course, as stoically as ever, but, you know. there's something still not right about this.

but, on this night, the gods hear him, and they send him a champion, in the form of a ghostly apparition. and who do they send?

him. fucking him. this guy. pic rel. and what happens but Ghost Foucault arriving in the morning with a lectern and proceeding to unleash holy discursive hell on peterson's judges and accusers. he dismantles them, piece by piece, in a series of lectures that run for months. Ghost Foucault, who has been given a geas to spare the life of a modern academic heretic - the gods are like this - has been sent back to mount the greatest apologetics in modern academic history, and he rains down an ungodly shitstorm of critique across the entire landscape of modern academia.

because it's all there. it's all there. everything that peterson's judges are using on him, it's all there in foucault. he invented that stuff. and why has he returned? to right the cosmic balance, and only he can do this. he wields the Sword of Discipline and Punishment like no other ever has and no other ever will. and he basically sends entire departments fleeing into the night in abject terror.

then he and peterson make up, and foucault asks if he's available that evening for dinner and fisting. peterson declines but still, you know, he's learned something from this encounter.

and the Cosmic Balance of things is restored once again. and we all live happily ever after.

I've been interested in Baudrillard for a while now. What is the minimum amount of the canon you have to have read in order to get him?

>>11879690
i don't think you'll need to read much of the canon at all to appreciate this at least.

>>11879690
maybe saussure and then barthes but a functioning brain should be enough

>>11877692
Propaganda by Ellul, McLuhan's understanding media, Ghosts of my life by Mark Fisher, fucking Foucault's madness and civilization, and more baudrillard

hey would any of you want to start a group for the systematic study of baudrillard's thought?

>>11879775
Heh, I already have the new Moby Dick group and an empty/sekrit Pragmatism chat on Telegram, I could make a Baudy chat but I won't be properly free for a couple hours so keep this link open if you're interested.

I haven't even read S&S yet so I'd mainly be spectating.

>>11879805
i was thinking that the most appropriate could be easing our way into his thought via some curated pieces on technology and then grounding into a system his use of the term "virtual" in them. since they deal with stuff we see daily and are short it may be a nice introduction for everyone

bump

>>11879775
>>11879842
>>11880145
Link: https://t.me/joinchat/KR3KdBCqpx1xLxZgcBadLg

>>11880150
that's telegram, right?
give me a second

>>11880150
bump if anyone wants to join this

>>11879664
underrated

>>11881754
it's who he was! foucault was the ultimate academic lawyer and if you were being tried for heresy he would be the ultimate judicial champion. getting foucault to stand for your defense in an academic witch hunt would be like being gifted the Red Viper of Dorne at the eleventh hour.

winning academic arguments was what the Lords of Chaos created michel foucault to do. so successful was he at this that the US is shredding itself to pieces over What Did He Mean By This. peterson's true audience isn't academic, it's a sort of laity: he's much more of a preacher wielding jung to make his points, but he's also got a respectable amount of scientific evidence on his side (remember the lobster, buckos!).

but in terms of what he is up against now - an ideological commissariat committed to Woke Justice - he will never be able to defend himself on his own terms. he will always appear before his judges wearing the Invisible Mantle of Patriarchy. this is why Ghost Foucault is required. if you are going to have a debate about your academic social credit and you want the greatest postmodern intellectual lawyer of of the 20C to champion your cause, you want pic rel and only pic rel.

>>11881776
and i'm not the world's biggest foucault fan, and this is a baudrillard thread and not a foucault thread, but still. it is difficult to overstate foucault's impact on the way in which we understand the world, academia, politics today. in terms of Rectifying the Cosmic Balance, an undead Foucault summoned from beyond on behalf of peterson is kind of a beautiful thing. i would like to think that he would have championed peterson's cause just because he could do it, or because perhaps it might occur to him that the world in his absence had become every bit of a thought-control device as he had predicted it would have.

in less supernatural terms, peterson for his part is at least still alive, and perhaps it would be a net positive for him to actually read the man himself and understand where he was coming from. not so that he joins The Causes of the radical left, but to see that even within foucault's own writing is enough of an intimation that that every orthodoxy has within it the capacity to produce inquisitorial justice, which is exactly what peterson himself is up against.

peterson isn't foucault, but they are to me at least intriguingly parallel lives. in my fantasy scenario, of course, foucault is compelled not to critique peterson's argument but to champion his defense, and - because i think he would be successful - peterson comes round in the end to understanding what foucault's project in the end was aimed at. it wasn't about creating one power structure to replace another, it was about the fundamental illegitimacy and inescapability of power itself. it is *power itself* which is hegemonic, not politics. that is the key point. and once you understand this you can see why purity spirals and virtue signals are a cancerous outgrowth, a symptom, and not a sign that things are going well. power is *everywhere* and it is almost *always* illegitimate. that is why it has to be used wisely and well.

foucault would no doubt stop his own inquest long before this, and would probably chuckle at any notion that such a thing could be done. but that is peterson's own forte, and he has his own intellectual genealogy and sensibilities about this. but what a moment it would be for the stars to align in that way.

>>11881820
this is the thing that peterson always misses, whenever he launches into his tirades against the french critics. he thinks that to them the world was all about, and only about, power - and, in some sense, he's right.

but he woefully mischaracterizes not only how it was that they came to these conclusions, but also how deeply they understood power's own contradictory nature. here again is that quote from baudrillard i referenced earlier. this was JB's last work and could basically stand as one of his final wills and testaments. doesn't it seem like peterson would need to do at least a brief double-glance at this passage, that this wouldn't be something he would want to reflect on? i certainly do.

the marxists did understand, sadly, even despairingly, that life after religion really was just all about power. but the most interesting of them - and this is not the case with 99% of their neomarxist disciples, the ones who are constantly airhorning him - understood that power itself wasn't the final goal, it was something to be transcended and overcome, which is no doubt a recipe for long suffering, inner struggle, and the bearing of one's own burden. things peterson himself has uniquely positioned himself to be a brilliant speaker and writer about.

kind of interesting, is all.

bump

plump

>>11879144
>i would be very grateful if he deflated a few of my suspicions about acceleration
you are a more optimistic man than I

>>11879191
>funny also that peterson talks about derrida and foucault
he literally gets ALL his views from ONE book that is written by...

A FUCKING AYN RAND OBJECTIVIST

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHtvTGaPzF4

>>11879737
i disagree, im a beginner and Simulacra left me buttblasted, I did not understand a single thing, apart from a few simple analogies maybe

>>11884239
That book The Consumer Society is easier to understand than S&S. His earlier stuff and his much later stuff is easiest.

>>11884162
kek. i don't think i'm well-known for my optimism, that's for sure. and i'm not saying it would be easy, just that that might perhaps be the line of inquiry he would take. landian paranoia doesn't seem like baudrillard's bag, he seemed to prefer reveling in catastrophic waste and excess. they're both valid perspectives, imho
>we are so fucked

but baudrillard's approach to being fucked is different from land's also. baudrillard i think would have been an interesting foil for accelerationists. it's kind of why i miss him today. he belongs to the story, for sure, the saga of What Happened With Marxism after ww2. and one of the key things that would separate him from the accelerationists is that, like hubert dreyfus, he was highly skeptical about artificial intelligence. that we can nevertheless produce a society of artificial human beings, on the other hand...

>>11884221
yeah, i know. he doesn't seem to have read richard wolin's or mark lilla's books, both of which are better than hicks'. peterson's gonna do what he's gonna do.

>rand
honestly i could kinda-sorta talk myself into rand if she had just stuck with being a creative writing teacher who dabbled in philosophy. there are aspects of objectivism i'm okay with, but it's like hitchens says also, it can be too shrill. nobody needs to double down on championing selfishness any more. the virtue aspects of it and the romanticism, of course, it's quite nice. but the implications of the john galt speech are better drawn out by nietzsche in one way and land in another.

the objectivists are probably wondering when the party stopped for them (i'm thinking 2008). now it's passed on to the NRXers and other guys. the interesting stuff culturally is still for the time being all happening on the right end of the spectrum. who knows, maybe the objectivists will have their return to form again. you know, in about 200 years, when we are living in the world of Fallout.

>>11884239
that's why i said, don't start with S&S. it's his most famous book but it's also where he starts to really use his super-arcane style of writing. did you read TCS? >>11884267 seems to agree, it's much easier. baudrillard has a reputation for using a lot of crazy language but if you work your way through his earlier stuff you'll have a better sense of why he writes in such a weird way. read TCS or System of Objects first, they're both good and you won't find yourself in over your head (i think).

Hey Girard, someone from the 3x3 said I could find you here and they were right obviously. Looks like a few people are waiting for cosmotech 5.0's arrival here today!

>>11884972
kek, too funny. and please, it's girardfag and not Girard.

okay, so, a note on cosmotech. honestly i'm still kind of gassed-out atm from the last one. discovering lewis mumford was a true goldmine, and if you're interested in that stuff and you haven't read this (pic rel is volume 1, the second one is awesome also) then get on it pronto tonto.

in terms of acceleration stuff to read there's certainly plenty of that. and i should probably go and assemble a mega-folder of stuff on my PC that i think is relevant, but that's like a mega-project b/c my books aren't very well sorted and i'd want to have all of those guys and their complete works in there and formatted. it would take some doing. and then i'd have to go back and also put in other history and other things that were also germane. and that means going through a couple of years' worth of unsorted PDFs and other stuff.

the basic idea would be the same, if i'm reading something that is Relevant To Our Interests i'd put in the good stuff + some nice art. again, i can't speak highly enough of mumford at the moment, because of how he links the anthropological aspects of technology up with the modern parts of the story, and he really does repeat a lot of the same ideas that greenspan says about land's work - namely, the crucial moment of the benedictines. land's often hyberbolic remarks about the invention of capitalist time really aren't as crazy as they sound, although being who he is land tends to make otherwise ordinary history seem like black magic. he has a gift for that.

i was definitely starting to feel a little bit tired around #250 of chapter 4, because we had been brooding hermetically on acceleration &c for like a month straight. and while it is definitely awesome fun - there is for me at least nothing awesome-r - sometimes you need to regroup a little as well.

the good news is that i'll be traveling again a little bit next week after canadian thanksgiving, so i'll probably have some time in there to think about what might go into Cosmotech 5. it's honestly pretty cool just to have a clearer idea of what the general goal of this stuff is, after a couple of years of shitposting on /lit/ - it's White Hat Accelerationism. the history of technology is pretty cool stuff, but there has to be more to the story than just Nick Land's Wild Ride, because he makes you want to kill yourself, and it's not polite to kill yourself.

so fret not. Cosmotech will be back. and there's certainly no rule against firing one up in the meantime, it's not like it needs my help. some other anon created #3 and i just did what i usually do in there. #4 was initially about whitehead but invariably i wind up talking about land or whatever else, and so Cosmotech was sort of accidentally born. plus we stole the title from yuk hui (fufufu).

anyways. it will return. #4 was definitely one of my all-time favorite threads on here on /lit/. just have to take the Pause That Refreshes sometimes.

>>11885039
the thing is that i've kind of realized that Cosmotech is essentially what i'm all about and why i'm here. being unable to do anything in a cultural sense about the hysterical nature of social life on Planet Meme, i can at best become a kind of itinerant wasteland hermit-bard who sings the Song of Capitalism over and over again. as time goes on i realize that a) it's also the song of capitalism and technology and b) unless we find some remnant of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful in it we are literally all going to fucking kill ourselves because it's all so depressing.

so again, White Hat Acceleration is basically the theme. and it's not like given that this is what i spend most of my life poring over i'm going to be unable to shut up about it for long. shit, i even had a couple of thoughts percolate up today that i was so pleased with i basically had to commit /lit/ heresy and award myself a (you). they're here, scroll down and look for the usual rambling about girard (this time, it's Girard In Space).

>>11881832

so yeah. Cosmotech will return. because there really *is* a story to tell there and assemble, it's the story of technology from Plato to NATO and how it fucks us up and why we love it. and maybe even why we need a little more flaky nondual mysticism in there to balance it out. even if i was to go back and just dig up older stuff that i had read before - not even knew stuff (mumford was actually new, which is why i was so excited about him) - it would no doubt fill up a good chunk of another thread. things like peter russell's global brain and other things like this. there's lots.

but i was kind of pushing it a little bit in in the last one (which was, nevertheless, a great success). and it's not like i'm going to stop obsessively brooding on this story anytime soon. my goal was just to hit the bump limit and take a break for a bit, but Cosmotech will return again at some point. either by me, or by somebody else, if you guys want to start it up on your own. there are tons and tons of books to read referenced in those threads, all i'd want to do is greentext the cool parts...

so that's all for the first ever semi-update on literally anything i have ever written for anyone about anything philosophical that wasn't shitposting. i hope that makes sense.
>it does not make sense
>you're always like this inner self
>i am trapped in here with you girardfag. in here. with you. i literally live in you. i wouldn't wish this on my worst enemy
>but i am your worst enemy inner self. we're like that
>i know. i wish you'd get a life
>kek. no way good buddy. not gonna happen

Let me know if you have an eta on that Cosmotech 5? Thinking about waiting until then to drop some names for you that you might like to read.

Before anyone read anything by Baudrillard , he should read the Mirror of Production and his take-down on Foucault.

The forget Foucault article is so legendary and so sharp, its a must read. Baudrillard was right about everything, and there is a reason why Foucault is a modern day saint and authority in academia, and Baudrillard isn't.

>>11877390
Read his other stuff instead. It's more like a manifesto than a polemic

>>11885428
Where should I start with Baudrillard then?
>>11885077
Girardfag? any suggestions

>>11886511
i mean the baudrillard anthology is pretty good, you could have a look at this one. and again, i don't recall TCS being super jargon-heavy or arcane or so on.

or again, if you don't want to jump into JB directly, you can read any of his sources and influences: bataille, nietzsche, marx, mauss, mcluhan.

again, i'll shill for sadie plant's book on the situationists also, which is where i think baudrillard's heart was in many ways: super avant-garde marxism in the shadow of nietzsche.

aaah, he was so cool.

>>11886511
>>11886574
a kind of history of What Happened to Karl Marx, or a tarnas-style Passion of the Postmodern Mind would be something it be nice to have, i think. just chronicling and detailing all the divergent and overlapping paths between, say, nietzsche to derrida, or the wider and larger circuit, the one that (imho) leads from hegel to land.

and good old JB is a pretty cool Virgil-style figure in both of these narratives. if we are coming to the end of a certain era in some sense, and a major planetary relocation or transformation of Geist just a road map of how we got from there to here would be useful.

but of course, i would say that. such is one of the many various aims of Cosmotech, being the hermeneutics of time-travel. a sort of repair shop/garage for busted time machines and a flophouse for damaged time-travelers wondering how we got into this mess.

>>11886590
in the end it's still all about these guys and life after them.

>>11886600
meanwhile, in another land, far far away...

true, the West has been leading the dance for a long time. but it's a dance too crazy to keep up with. and it burns you out.

>kek that's because you're not hardcore enough girardfag. you can't keep up
>that is true inner self

>>11885322
i've got about twelve tabs open right now on various books, but they're all cosmotech-related things, so it will happen at some point. inasmuch as i have anything to do on this board it's basically to retrace the history of continental philosophy from hegel to land by way of technology and acceleration, but a diet of pure nick land is straight soul-death and the only way around it is by cryptic references to religion and other things.

so no firm or distinct ETA on part 5 atm but it will happen eventually. again, the model is pretty simple: all it is is the history of technology as told by continental philosophy. that's basically all there is to it. virtually everything land writes is worth reading, and it's all pretty much archived at r/theoryfiction. ireland's essay on the poememenon, murphy's interview, the greenspan and overy theses, and you're good to go. for the time being land is imho the most accomplished cosmonaut on earth w/r/t the theory of capitalism, and it doesn't look like anyone's going to take that belt from him anytime soon.

as such, what can be done in the meantime is to go back and retrace the steps of how we got to the point, and that story goes through doors over which are busts of nietzche, marx, and freud. those in turn open into gigantic, collapsing, subterranean archives full of outrageously interesting material. there the floors are crumbling away and beginning to flood, and there are mysterious and spectral voices in the corridors, and things resembling pteranodons have made their nests in the ceiling. the machinery there is old, quasi-victorian, but it still works, and there may be others, in fact, still Down There who have gone to deeper and stranger places yet...

but fundamentally we just have to get a grip on this whole process. the world seems to be in a state of cheerfully and enthusiastically melting down into anarchistic meme-tribes, and tribalism is a bad scene for the Cosmotechnician and astral engineer. we can do better than this. but how was it that gondor and mordor came in the end to resemble each other? that is the whole question.

we gotta hit those books.

>>11886672
and non-utopian/non-progressive/non-immanentizing-the-eschaton/non-rage-zombie producing/non-repeating-ad nauseam-ad infinitum the crusade of remorse and misery philosophy be like

>>11886708
i am also posting this Because Reasons.

so cosmotech shall return at some point, i just don't know when. it doesn't really need me, but if land is Horrorcore Marxism then perhaps we can call cosmotech Apocalyptic Girardian Marxism. i don't know. but this more or less captures the feel.

>what is the feel tho
>wild schizoposting, obv
>ok, just checking

>>11886749
that transcendent one/deleuzian BwO connection tho.

kind of makes you wonder if, you know, the artists intuit things or can illustrate them better than the philosophers can.

& this is still a legit question, by the way

stop fucking, duh

>The revolution has already taken place. Neither the bourgeois revolution nor the communist revolution: just the revolution. This means that an entire cycle is ending, and they have not noticed it. And they will play the game of linear revolution, whereas it has already curved upon itself to produce its simulacrum, like stucco angels whose extremities join in a curved mirror.

>All things come to an end in their redoubled simulation-a sign that a cycle is completed. When the reality effect, like the use less day-after Messiah, starts uselessly duplicating the course of things, it is the sign that a cycle is ending in an interplay of simulacra where everything is replayed before death, at which point everything falls over far behind the horizon of truth.

>It is useless therefore to run after power or to discourse about it ad infinitum since from now on it also partakes of the sacred horizon of appearances and is also there only to hide the fact that it no longer exists, or rather to indicate that since the apogee of the political has been crossed, the other side of the cycle is now starting in which power reverts into its own simulacrum.

>Power is no more held than a secret is extracted, for the secrecy of power is the same as that of the secret: it does not exist. On the other side of the cycle-the side of the decline of the real-only the mise-en-scene of the secret, or of power, is operational. But this is the sign that the substance of power, after a ceaseless expansion of several centuries, is brutally exploding and that the sphere of power is in the process of contracting from a star of first magnitude to a red dwarf, and then to a black hole absorbing all the substance of the real and all the surrounding energies, now transmuted at once into a single pure sign-the sign of the social whose density crushes us.

>Today the extremes finally come face to face, once the conservative obstacle of critical thought has been removed. Not only do social forces clash (however dominated by one single great model of socialization) , but forms come into opposition as well-the forms of capital and of sacrifice, of value and of challenge-with the death of the social at stake. The social itself must be considered a model of simulation and a form to be overthrown since it is a strategic form of value brutally positioned by capital and then idealized by critical thought. And we still do not know what it is that forever has fought against it and that irresistibly destroys it today.

it's a short walk to Nick Land's Wild Ride from here. baudrillardian skepticism about postmodernity or unironic anti-marxism lead to the same places. what land is doing is supplying an intelligenic process within capital itself - the Outside - to continue this line of thought. the meaning is technological, but it's not necessarily anthropological. abstraction never was.

>Fascist power is then the only form which was able to reenact the ritual prestige of death, but (and most importantly here) in an already posthumous and phony mode, a mode of one-upmanship and mise-en-scene, and in an aesthetic mode-as Benjamin clearly saw-that was no longer truly sacrificial. Fascism's politics is an aesthetics of death, one that already has the look of a nostalgia fad; and everything that has had this look since then must be inspired by fascism, understood as an already nostalgic obscenity and violence, as an already reactionary scenario of power and death which is already obsolete the very moment it appears in history. Again, an eternal shift in the advent of the Messiah, as Kafka says. An eternal inner simulation of power, which is never already (jamais deja) anything but the sign of what it was.

>Behind power, or at the very heart of power and of production, there is a void which gives them today a last glimmer of reality. Without that which reverses them, cancels them, and seduces them, they would never have attained reality.

>Even the death of God no doubt came before the stage in which he was everywhere. The same goes for power, and if one speaks about it so much and so well, that's because it is deceased, a ghost, a puppet; such is also the meaning of Kafka's words: the Messiah of the day after is only a God resuscitated from among the dead, a zombie.

>This universal fascination with power in its exercise and its theory is so intense because it is a fascination with a dead power characterized by a simultaneous "resurrection effect," in an obscene and parodic mode, of all the forms of power already seen-exactly like sex in pornography. The imminence of the death of all the great referents (religious, sexual, political, etc.) is expressed by exacerbating the forms of violence and representation that characterized them. There is no doubt that fascism, for example, is the first obscene and pornographic form of a desperate "revival" of political power. As the violent reactivation of a form of power that despairs of its rational foundations (the form of representation that was emptied of its meaning during the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries), as the violent reactivation of the social in a society that despairs of its own rational and contractual foundation, fascism is nevertheless the only fascinating modern form of power: it is the only one since Machiavelli to assert itself as such, as a challenge, by trifling with all forms of political "truth" and it is the only one to have taken up the challenge to assume power unto death (whether its own or that of others)

40K gets the praise that it does not because it is a critique of ideology, but because it illustrates so completely what philosophers like JB say that it intoxicates. it becomes the satire of a satire so perfect and all-encompassing that it becomes indistinguishable from a kind of truth in aesthetic reason.

>>11886986
and i guess the only interesting thing for me is that rather than attempting to dig out from under this some secret core of ideology i would simply prefer to take the products of 21C culture as being themselves emblematic of certain insights uncovered in philosophy but decoupled from anything like a militarized political movement that could either enact them or their opposites.

perhaps we could call the ludic arts 'the science of chance,' if that makes any sense.

40K really has the best lore ever. i'm less interested in mounting any kind of critique of it than i am in mining it for illustrations of what a small group of interesting writers in the 20C have been wrestling with: the intersections of power, desire, technology, politics, religion and so on. they're better illustrated here than elsehwere.

>>11877390
l'édition française enculé d'anglo

>>11887009
>21C
>not 20C

there seems to have been a kind of change of art direction too somewhere between the 1980s and the 2000s. this can be thought about forever, but it's not really the point. more interesting is asking whether or not it was around this time that a shift from deleuzian to landian sensibilities was taking place, as well as how illustrative the 40K lore is in terms of libidinal and psychic processes. that the game has been a smash hit is also one of those things that is not to be overlooked: when 20 million neckbeards are into a thing, something is going on there.

the more that academic stuff slowly morpsh into a private hermetic circle of literature unto itself, the more i think it will be useful to go back and take a more charitable look at the products of mass culture academics and the professionally disappointed are perpetually shitting on. excessive focus on The Message - which becomes, of course, a kind of ideological curation in the present day - prevents anything actually interesting from being expressed.

but 40K lore and art has it going on for miles and miles and miles. and it only becomes more interesting and not less so when you look at it from the perspective of the philosophers - not, however, purely to extract the ideological core and present it, but to see in the aesthetics more going on in the collective unconscious than it might appear.

bump

>>11877390
The ancient Greek version.

>>11889092
explain

>>11889099
The Sceptics mebbe

Thinking about just letting Cosmotech V rip even though I know I couldn't do the intro justice. It's just so fun to have Girardfag get started on his long winded post. This is all I have of him and most of what I have on lit. <3

>>11887051
Hey Girardfag, do you recall on page 67 in Yuga: An Anatomy of Our Fate, Glass mentions a book by George Morgan that has "apparently went unnoticed by the world (confirming, according to a Sufi master that it was 'kept in heaven'); I've haven't seen it mentioned in any bibliographies where it ought to have appeared." I tried to look for mentions of the book The Human Predicament: Dissolution and Wholeness online, and true to his word, I couldn't find any mention of it anywhere except for a couple Amazon reviews that vaguely describe the book at best. Out of curiosity, I bought a copy, which has been long out of print, and I finally received it in the mail. I'm not sure if George Morgan offers anything new to the discussion, but he argues the current mode of thinking in civilization is a "prosaic mentality."
>The prosaic mentality is characterized by a cluster of attitudes and interests that it raises to supremacy above others, which are ignored, denied, or suppressed. It is this suppression that constitutes the fallaciousness and perniciousness of the prosaic mentality, and it occurs the moment prosaic interests are given undue stress or brought to inappropriate places.
If you and other anons are interested in reading it, I won't mind scanning and uploading it (I hope my old printer still works). Though, it is something I have to find time to do, and I'll probably post it in the next cosmotech thread when you come back.

>>11889890
it's already started anon

>>11887728

>>11889992
well that would be mighty cool anon, and sounds like it might be a welcome contribution to the thread also.

that said, there's no need to go too far out of your way. if you have a hard copy of the text you can just, you know, type out a couple of key passages if you think they might lead to an interesting conversation. there's no need to go out and scan the whole text & upload &c.

if you were going to scan and UL it anyways, then of course, it would be nice to have a couple of excerpts. but there's no need to take on a big project if it would put you out.

thanks for reminding me about Yuga also, i think i will (or you can, if you wish) include some excerpts of that in our ongoing thread. that last chapter was like a book of its own.

>>11891047
Sure, I'll start us off with a small chapter as a sample.

>>11891969
2/7

>>11891977
3/7

>>11879144
Jesus Christ. I wish I Schopenhauer was still around to skewer all this pseudo philosophy. What a miserable decline

>>11891983
4/7

>>11891995
5/7

>>11892015
6/7

>>11892023
7/7

>>11891047
>if you were going to scan and UL it anyways, then of course, it would be nice to have a couple of excerpts. but there's no need to take on a big project if it would put you out.
If the book really was "kept in heaven," I think it's time for it to shine its illuminating rays light on the cold dark unreality of 1's and 0's for those who wish to read it.

Here's something more relevant to the thread.
1/3

>>11892359
2/3

>>11892366

>>11892359
>>11892366
>>11892385
Fuck off Pajeet

As someone who grew up through the 90's (born in 88') someone of these passages are hard hitting.
1/2

>>11892460
2/2
>>11892411
Fuck off, prosaic NPC!

>>11884892
>System of Objects
I tried to read this, and it was pretty arcance, I think I managed to draw a few basic points out (the shift from use value to sign value in commodities, the shift of focus away from production to consumption), but I didn't really grasp the main point/s, but I'm also a brainlet

bump

>>11891969
>>11891977
>>11891983
>>11891995
>>11892015
>>11892023
>>11892036
>>11892359
>>11892366
>>11892385
this book really was great, thanks for reminding me to go back and work my way through it again. i'm having fun reading lewis mumford atm but i think after i work through his stuff i'm going to go back and re-read Yuga again, it's on point and germane in terms of the stuff we talk about here, the disaster phase of this stuff. this book really is a special one. i also meant to get through his list of eighty questions on sophia perennis at some point too. marty glass is a really cool guy.

thanks for doing the scans also, i've saved copies of them all. i think yuga should be on that list of required reading for acceleration threads and the like, you really do get a kind of crash-course in a lot of this theory in one volume. a truly based book. and one of those i never would have found about if it weren't for this board. that last chapter is as heroic and heart-rending a shriek of rage as i have ever read about the modern world. he gets what's going on. the conflation of baudrillard and the hindus is powerful stuff.

>>11891994
to skewer baudrillard? are you really so sure they wouldn't have gotten along? schopenhauer was no marxist-situationist, but a world governed by largely blind will that reserves a role for seduction? schopenhauer liked those things. baudrillard could catch AS up to speed on nietzsche as well.

>>11892143
>If the book really was "kept in heaven," I think it's time for it to shine its illuminating rays light on the cold dark unreality of 1's and 0's for those who wish to read it.
i agree, but i don't want that anon to have to do more work than he needs to, unless he wants those mad prestige gains
>and there will be mad prestige gains

>>11892411
no u

>>11892901
>I think I managed to draw a few basic points out (the shift from use value to sign value in commodities, the shift of focus away from production to consumption), but I didn't really grasp the main point/s
those are some pretty main points for baudrillard, though: complicating the labor value/exchange value relationship with sign value, which he basically takes to the moon in his later writings. again, he's as responsible for the destruction of orthodox marxism as much as anyone, but it doesn't mean he wasn't on to some stuff as well.

>but I'm also a brainlet
you're reading one of the most infamously arcane writers of the 20C. give yourself some credit, man!

surprised this thread is still alive

>>11892901
>>11893909
Marty explains some of definitions pretty well.
1/3

>>11894621

>>11894627
3/3

>>11894621
whos Marty?

>>11894663
The author of Yuga. See >>11891047 and >>11893909

Bump