/lit/ - Literature

left is complete garbage so right has to be too

>>22090821
Babby’s first french theory

>>22081666
>>22090832
What should I read then? I'm clearly past the babby phase now. It better be some eye-opening, or else I'll laugh at you.

>>22090849
Pascal and end there

>>22090821
Cesarano, Manuel de survie

What are these books about?

>>22090946
when the sign matters more than what is signified.

>>22090946
They are hard to summarize, but I will give my personal takeaways from them. Simulacres et Simulation is about how our shared cultural experience has slowly devolved into abstract symbols and concepts (simulacra) and that we live in a hyperreality comprised of images and ideas that is basically an upside-down reflection of real concepts (simulation). It then suggests that we aren't even simulating anything that exists anymore, and that our shared cultural experience is made of representations of ideas that have evolved so much beyond real reality that they have no identifiable real-world equivalent anymore, and are essentially copies of nothing.
La Societe du Spectacle expands a similar it into a sociopolitical criticism, and suggests that our social experience has devolved into a fake representation of itself. So instead of having real values and associating with real ideas, we as a culture associate with made-up simulations of those things, all of which are permitted to exist as commodities under consumer capitalism. So that means our values never actually change anything, because the causes we value are actually just the feelings and ideas of those values, and we only care about them as a means of socially orienting ourselves in a society that fetishizes ideas as commodities.

>>22091010
It might be seducing that current society is unique and unprecedented, but a more detailed analysis of the facts reveals that Western society dates itself to the fall of the Roman Empire, when the rise of the Franks, of the Germans, of the Britons, of the Goths in Spain and of many other European nations began. What current society has the most in common with are the Greek and Roman societies when they were experiencing their decline.

>>22091033
So what? These books can apply to older societies too, they just examine our current society. It doesn't matter if we aren't unique, the examinations can still be valid. But maybe I am missing your point.

>>22091010
Baudrillard (1981) explicitely ripped off Debord (1967) which was himself a marxist/hegelian

-->read Marx if you want a deeper comprehension about the foundations of the Spectacle (which is to be found in a adequate comprehension of our actual mode of production), skip the manifesto and go directly to the Capital vol.1, the 1844 manuscripts or the German ideology (easier and more historical)

>>22091042
Well the points you brought above might be interesting to think about but are they really true? Is democracy, capitalist mode of production, cars, grocery stores a simulacron? To me they seem very real. Why not admit that it's fallacies are symptoms of decay?

>>22091058
BLM, LGBT, etc. aren't real.

>>22091067
Gay faggotry also existed during the late Roman Empire and bourgeoise Greece. Also naked women in the theatre for everyone to watch them. I see no difference with nowadays except maybe the medium through wich such degeneracy is propagated.

>>22090821
Debord deserved his fate

>>22091091
A guy fucking another guy in the butt isn't the same thing as the complete deconstruction of gender and identity.

>>22091099
I think it was tragic. Poor dude struggled all his life against spectacular society and ultimately all he could do was copy Jacques Rigaut's suicide.

>>22091108
Honestly a good example desu, with the act of anal sex being the reality being mimicked, and the whole of the LGBT culture wars being the simulacra that only serve to give people a side to align with (or against), that ultimately have little to nothing to do with the actual act of performing anal sex.

From wikipedia:
>Simulacra and Simulation delineates the sign-order into four stages:
>The first stage is a faithful image/copy, where we believe, and may even be correct to believe, that a sign is a "reflection of a profound reality" (pg 6), this is a good appearance, in what Baudrillard called "the sacramental order".
i.e. fucking a guy in the ass is fucking a guy in the ass. It doesn't mean anything complicated, it's just ass-fucking.
>The second stage is perversion of reality, where we come to believe the sign to be an unfaithful copy, which "masks and denatures" reality as an "evil appearance—it is of the order of maleficence". Here, signs and images do not faithfully reveal reality to us, but can hint at the existence of an obscure reality which the sign itself is incapable of encapsulating.
Fucking a guy in the ass is an act of gayness. If you fuck a guy in the ass, it means you are doing something that is gay in nature.
>The third stage masks the absence of a profound reality, where the sign pretends to be a faithful copy, but it is a copy with no original. Signs and images claim to represent something real, but no representation is taking place and arbitrary images are merely suggested as things which they have no relationship to. Baudrillard calls this the "order of sorcery", a regime of semantic algebra where all human meaning is conjured artificially to appear as a reference to the (increasingly) hermetic truth.
If you fuck a guy in the ass, it makes you gay.
>The fourth stage is pure simulacrum, in which the simulacrum has no relationship to any reality whatsoever. Here, signs merely reflect other signs and any claim to reality on the part of images or signs is only of the order of other such claims. This is a regime of total equivalency, where cultural products need no longer even pretend to be real in a naïve sense, because the experiences of consumers' lives are so predominantly artificial that even claims to reality are expected to be phrased in artificial, "hyperreal" terms. Any naïve pretension to reality as such is perceived as bereft of critical self-awareness, and thus as oversentimental.
You can be gay without fucking anyone in the ass.

>>22090821
Postwar Frenchmen knew too much.

>>22091179
From wikipedia of "Simulacra and Simulation":
>The first stage is a faithful image/copy, where we believe, and may even be correct to believe, that a sign is a "reflection of a profound reality" (pg 6), this is a good appearance, in what Baudrillard called "the sacramental order".
i.e. fucking a guy in the ass is just to fuck a guy in the ass.
>The second stage is perversion of reality, where we come to believe the sign to be an unfaithful copy, which "masks and denatures" reality as an "evil appearance—it is of the order of maleficence". Here, signs and images do not faithfully reveal reality to us, but can hint at the existence of an obscure reality which the sign itself is incapable of encapsulating.
i.e. fucking a guy in the ass is an act of gayness. If you fuck a guy in the ass, it means you are doing something that is gay in nature.
>The third stage masks the absence of a profound reality, where the sign pretends to be a faithful copy, but it is a copy with no original. Signs and images claim to represent something real, but no representation is taking place and arbitrary images are merely suggested as things which they have no relationship to. Baudrillard calls this the "order of sorcery", a regime of semantic algebra where all human meaning is conjured artificially to appear as a reference to the (increasingly) hermetic truth.
i.e. having feelings makes you gay, talking about a guy's ass makes you gay.
>The fourth stage is pure simulacrum, in which the simulacrum has no relationship to any reality whatsoever. Here, signs merely reflect other signs and any claim to reality on the part of images or signs is only of the order of other such claims. This is a regime of total equivalency, where cultural products need no longer even pretend to be real in a naïve sense, because the experiences of consumers' lives are so predominantly artificial that even claims to reality are expected to be phrased in artificial, "hyperreal" terms. Any naïve pretension to reality as such is perceived as bereft of critical self-awareness, and thus as oversentimental.
i.e. you can be gay without fucking anyone in the ass, and you can be ten other things too. You can be in a monogamous relationship with a woman and you are a still gay if you want. Also you can be a genderqueer demisexual transbian.

>>22090849
>I'm clearly past the babby phase now.
No, you are not. You need to read Difference and Repetition, Anti-Oedipus, Libidinal Economy, Symbolic Exchange and Death, Of Grammatology, Discipline and Punish, History of Sexuality, and Forget Foucault to advance to the next stage (dilettante), and that's supposing you have a solid philosophical background to understand them.

>>22091289
I'm not reading all that. Give me 1 of them to read, that's all you get. Choose wisely or screw off.

>>22091306
>I'm not reading all that
The state of /lit/.

>>22090821
If Society of the Spectacle is the diagnosis, then Revolution of Everyday Life is the prescription. Ken Knabb's Anthology on SI is pretty nice too. Might wanna check out Debord's comments on Society as well.

Baudrillard considered Symbolic Exchange and Death more important than Simulacra IIRC. It's more "serious". Fleshes out his main ideas better.

Have you heard of Lyotard's Libidinal Economy? It's a nuclear blackpill

Have you read Marx? Have you read Freud? Have you read Nietzsche? Hegel? Kant? Leibniz? Berkeley? Hume? Descartes? Spinoza? Aristotle? Plato? If so, you might be ready for Deleuze; read in this order: Difference and Repetition, Logic of Sense, Anti-Oedipus, and A Thousand Plateaus. Afterward, read Nick Land's Fanged Noumena as a cautionary exercise.

Watch Zizek's Pervert Guides if ya haven't yet if ya need a break.

Derrida documentary is pretty funny too actually.

Deleuze's ABC is on youtube I think.

Theory of the Subject (Badiou) is worth a check.

Reminds me! Lacan... ecrits and seminars. Borch-Jacobsen has a good philosophical summary. Called Absolute Master.

For Foucault just do Archaeology of Knowledge.

>t. Old scumbag leftoid

>>22091595
Thanks for the reading list, wise leftyanon. Unfortunately this will keep me occupied for several years (assuming I make it that far).

>>22090821
>Does it get any deeper?
TRY WORKING FOR A LIVING AND CONDUCTING COMMUNIST PRAXIS IN THE WORKPLACE.

>>22091289
>no agamben

dilettante detected

>>22090821
The final redpill is when you realize that you know nothing, retire to the suburbs and live a typical normie life.

>>22092164
I am the Knower. I will read until I know about all of society's problems. This is the purpose of my life.

>>22090946
I'm pretty sure the left one inspired The Matrix (1999). The Matrix is Plato's cave, basically.

>>22090821
Baudouin de Bodinat, La vie sur Terre and Au fond de la couche gazeuse

>>22092166
You could start with not reading trash literature like OP's picrel.

>>22092245
Why is it trash

>>22092367
Why isn't

>>22092190
It did (Neo hides something in an edition of Simulacra and Simulation where the insides have been cut out (a neat little commentary)), but Baudrillard disowned it, because to him, it is exactly not like the Matrix, there is no possible escape to a more primordial reality.

>>22090821
Deeper? Not sure but you have to delve into practical techniques that were developed by spectacle pilled villains if you want to understand the current state of society.

Propaganda, Bernays
Libido Dominandi

>>22090821
You're not ready.

>>22092152
He's Italian, you dunce.

>>22091851
>>22091595
you guys completely fail to grasp that the products of the entertain industry of the bourgeois revolutions have zero substance. It's pathetic how after 250 years of humanism the NPC atheists still want sot read about the intellectual bourgeois who keep alive the propaganda of some revolution against their own republic

>>22091151
Well I tend to lack empathy so you do you

>>22092655
He just discovered Agamben. He’ll find a new theorist to base his identity around in two weeks

>>22091010
Sounds like a bunch of commie gobbledygook

>>22092688
>/lit/ - Literature

>>22091595
>t. Old scumbag leftoid
We could tell thanks to your Reddit spacing.

>>22091007
No. Other way.

>>22094504
No, he had it right the first time.

>>22091289
Like Foucault isn't more introductory than Debord or even Baudrillard

>>22094540
>more introductory
That’s not how this works

>>22094513
No, (You) didn’t

>>22091010
>La Societe du Spectacle expands a similar it into a sociopolitical criticism, and suggests that our social experience has devolved into a fake representation of itself. So instead of having real values and associating with real ideas, we as a culture associate with made-up simulations of those things, all of which are permitted to exist as commodities under consumer capitalism. So that means our values never actually change anything, because the causes we value are actually just the feelings and ideas of those values, and we only care about them as a means of socially orienting ourselves in a society that fetishizes ideas as commodities.
this is why women and bourgeois thrive in democracy and the facsimile of experience

first i was..., then I was...

>>22092688
t. Amerimutt

>>22091851
that anon provided a spot on college level syllabus yes and while they are certainly eye opening there is a point of diminishing returns. eventually you must answer for yourself 'ok, how will I choose to respond in my life concretely based on this information and perspective' but these texts are primarily descriptive and analytical and the last 60 years or so has been trying to answer that question in the face of impotent political activism. They might make you question parts of your identity or notions of authenticity, creativity, or self but they cannot answer for you how you will live or how to love