/lit/ - Literature

what you are experiencing is a temporary distortion of reality, and *that's* the ticket laddy, that's what it's all about. what land's cathexis tells us about rogue capital is that it's *all* in the wrist, in the pipe, five by five. you nailed it. we're at *now* now. when will then be now? *soon.* and that's what it's really all about. wabi sabi, dude. in the pipe, five by five.

>>11896703
moar please

>>11896687
I found it years ago in the dumpster of a local library.
>I heard about Girard in high school, this must be pretty cool
>Too bad it's a doorstopper
>At least it's an interview, must be easy to read
>Not that easy, actually

If it's a little bit about everything (imitation, desire, scapegoat, religion, violence etc.) and it remains profound afterwards, I may try again

>>11896781
Yeah...

How far did you get in?

I picked it up and put it down a few times, without any real, strong desire to push on with it. Though like all apparently challenging things (reads especially), once you flow into the syntactical grooves it all begins to make sense.

I wouldn't call it a little about everything, but of course it is, its a building upwards really & he does have a lot to say

girard is a boss. i don't have my copy of TH on hand atm b/c it is on loan & i can't supply any money greentext atm. but he changed my life.
>and unfortunately now i shitpost on this board in clouds of unknowing ad nauseam ad infinitum
>sorry about that

i can't believe there isn't a PDF on libgen or monoskop or elsewhere.

>>11896822

Hoorah. Glad to find someone else who has enjoyed TH as much as I have.

Thoughts on why he seems to be so forgotten?

Even just as his basic concept of mimetic desire is a brilliant articulation of what we all already know - &more on the money than Nietzchian 'power'-underlying desire or Freudian sex-underlying desire.

thoughts on his critique of heidegger and the logos of heraclitus?

From Dostoevsky's essay on Don Quixote:
>Say you’ve come to cherish a certain dream, an idea, a theory, a conviction, or some external fact that struck you, or, at last, a woman who has enchanted you. You rush off in pursuit of the object of your love with all the intensity your soul can muster. It’s true that no matter how blinded you may be, no matter how well your heart bribes you, still, if in the object of your love there is a lie, a delusion, something that you yourself have exaggerated and distorted because of your passion and your initial rush of feeling – solely so that you can make it your idol and bow down to it – then, of course, you’re aware of it in the depths of your being; doubt weighs upon your mind and teases it, ranges through your soul and prevents you from living peaceably with your beloved dream. Now, don’t you remember, won’t you admit even to yourself what it was that suddenly set your mind at rest? Didn’t you invent a new dream, a new lie, even a terribly crude one, perhaps, but one that you were quick to embrace lovingly only because it resolved your initial doubt?

The last line is especially Girardian, but what is interesting to me here is that we're looking at a different take on Girard's thesis. That is, we're not talking about a frenzied mob which crucifies an innocent man, but in fact a single man (Don Quixote, for instance) who is trying to be Christ-like, who ends up looking more like a delusional priest ready to sacrifice humanity for an ideal (who therefore requires a mythos, a fantasy). And this solidifies Girard's notion that Christ was anti-religion, or even anti-ideal, that is, Christ himself was not aspiring to something else, but had actually vanquished in himself every ideal, so that he dealt only with the real. I am not even convinced that this is true (since Christ supposedly models himself after the Father) but let’s follow the reasoning: what makes Don Quixote, or even one of Dostoevsky's characters, a tragic character is precisely the existence of a gap between the real and the ideal. Don Quixote is mad because he has discarded reality for fantasy; Raskolnikov is teetering on the brink of madness for the same reason. It is not their idealizing and fantasizing which is the cause of their downfall, but specifically the violence they do to reality, to others in an attempt to attain that ideal.

>>11897507
(cont'd)

These aforementioned characters appear like children when compared to Christ, who was actually the living manifestation of what every man aspires to. But the critical point is that Christ seems to have been successful in bridging the gap; (which would certify his divinity, since he was no longer a dreamer, like man, but had totally embodied his ideal) for every man dreams and idolizes and fantasizes, but the great danger in doing so is that one risk's sending reality to the gallows. The reason for this, is that if a man cannot attain to his ideal, he must either change his ideal, which is impossible for him, because that would be to corrupt it and betray it (this is the topic of Dostoevsky's essay above quoted) or he must deal with reality in a Procrustean manner, that is, violently and spitefully (hence, Don Quixote) he must delude himself, deceive himself, (and this shows that violence against others is always preceded by violence against oneself) in order to believe that his ideal is real, or accessible, or attainable, or whatever. The danger of aspiring to an imitation of Christ, is that, if one fails to be realistic, that is, if one fails to profess or even to be aware of one's own insufficiency, one immediately enters into self-delusion, terrible pride, narcissism, and so forth. This is why monks err on the side of caution, and belittle themselves and downplay their own righteousness and so forth, even unto sainthood, even crushing the slightest self-esteem, in order to give birth to a real humanity in themselves, which alone is Christ-like, and not self-assertion.

>>11897512
(cont'd)

So the difference between a Don Quixote and a Christ is that the former has to do violence to reality in order to convince himself that he is doing good. But it is not his aspiration per say, only that as long as he is aspiring he professes his own imperfection. If Christ was perfect it is because he was a living manifestation of humanity, which means he did not have to do violence to the truth, but embraced it wholeheartedly and therefore did not need to sacrifice the real for the ideal. What is highly confounding about all of this is that one can actually find striking similarities between the tragic Don Quixote and the divine Christ, in that Christ, in his lifetime, is mocked, taken for what we would in this day and age call a LARPer, larping as the son of God, and so forth; how is this different from Don Quixote larping as a knight? If they are the same, then what makes Don Quixote a reprehensible self-deluder, a madman, and Christ a figure representing the highest ideal for all time? This is the central issue, and the answer, as I have said, is that what remained mere fantasy, mere ideal, for Don Quixote, at war with reality, was resolved in Christ, and this is necessary to justify Girard’s analysis of the Gospel, since if this had not occurred, Christ would indeed have been no better than a pagan priest, deluding himself and the masses with a mere ideal, a mere mythology which hid a terrible violence perpetrated against the truth. And this is why, for Dostoevsky, Don Quixote is not only a tragic character but also a comical one, for humor always needs some contradiction, some gap between idea and reality, whereas Christ on the other hand must be taken seriously, and cannot be interpreted comically, because we cannot discard him, downplay him like we could a madman, but rather we think that when we look at Christ we look at nothing less than embodied truth! Therefore, if we laugh, we laugh at our own expense, because what demands seriousness and sobriety more than truth itself?

>>11896930
>Thoughts on why he seems to be so forgotten?

he's a hedgehog. the fox knows many things, the hedgehog one big thing. he's a structuralist, in a sense, and this is the age of post-structuralism. but it is also the age in which the post-structuralists fundamentally reveal how ultimately structural they are in their sensibilities, and this is driving everyone in sane.

in the presence of scapegoating everywhere, the actual theory of the scapegoat itself gets overlooked. the forest and the trees. and because scapegoat theory rains on parades both on the political left and on the right. he's a downer for utopians. but it's also why he's so relevant.

>>11897507
>>11897512
>>11897516

Wow thanks anon this articulated really well something i've been struggling with recently

>>11898122
You might be interested in the essays which inspired the post(s):

>http://bookanista.com/lie-saved-lie/
>https://mds.marshall.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=1007&context=languages_faculty

>>11898803
>Taleb but nothing ancient
>Girard but not the New Testament itself
This is why people like Thiel cannot be taken seriously. Why you would put New Atlantis before a thousand other things seems stupid to me.