/lit/ - Literature

>structuralism

>>8861739
can you give a more specific reason why I should care about him

>>8861739

>Bloom
>people who read for a living are valid critics of books by people who did other things in their life and just happened to write

>>8861778
He's not an sctructuralist at all, albeit Levi-Strauss being a clear influence.

>>8861787
Well, because he's right about almost everything? Even if you don't agree with him, you'll get great insights on literature and religion.

>>8861799
what?

>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9_Girard
>Notable students
>Peter Thiel
lol

>>8861811
>rating writers through wikipedia articles
I think you're the joke here.

>>8861818
just thought it was funny someone felt that worth putting in the article, fiend

>>8861799
critics dont read for a living, they write for a living

/lit/ doenst talk about him because /lit/ is a board full of pseuds who can only circlejerk about the same 5 authors over and over

>>8861821
*friend

sorry i do not think you are a fiend

>>8861826
Thanks you are also not a fiend

>>8861825
You can meme him if you want

Who are some worthwhile writers who haven't been memed on /lit/ yet?

>>8861842
John Kennedy Toole.
Ernesto Sabato.
László Krasznahorkai.
Alfred Döblin.

cause he requires actual effort.

>>8861842
G. K. Chesterton
Valter Hugo Mãe
Michael Chabon
Italo Calvino

>>8861850
Confederacy of Dunces is certainly memed. I see people talking about Sabato and Krasznahorkai sometimes. Haven't seen Doblin mentioned much, so maybe we can meme him.

>his work and his influence on disciplines such as literary criticism, critical theory, anthropology, theology, psychology, mythology, sociology, economics, cultural studies, and philosophy
All of that, and it's just mimetic desire and scapegoating like they're some kind of theory of everything?

Maybe that's why /lit/ goes with Bloom.

>>8861857
>Valter Hugo Mãe
Never heard of this guy. Let's turn him into a meme.

>>8861860
Well he just says kabbalah, SHakespeare and agon are the theory of everything.

>>8861858
Das ist richtig. Then:
Bioy Casares.
Rodolfo Fogwill.
RK Narayan.
Thomas Ligotti.
Juan Carlos Onetti.

>>8861860
It pretty much is the theory of everything actually. At least for the humanities. It's very interesting.

>>8861873
Never heard of Fogwill. Let's meme him.

>>8861865
>>8861879
Are the one guy who's been creating /lit/'s meme all along?

>>8861857
These are memed, especially Chesterton supposedly shaming Nietzsche and Calvino's Invisible Cities.
Mãe is not really mentioned though.

>>8861887
Missed an Oxford comma there.

>>8861860
The mimetic theory is a theory of human behaviour, so it HAS to drink from all of those fountains.

>Bloom's theory is not a theory of everything
Yeah right

>>8861879
I like his short stories. Otra muerte del arte is wonderful.

>>8861857
L U S O ?
U
S
O
?

>>8861897
Brazilian.

>>8861887
I've never seen Chesterton mentioned here. I've seen someone talk about Calvino's Cosmicomics once and very plebishly.

>>8861802
Does he have good meme potential?

>>8861910
Calvino's Invisible Cities is always in the yearly Top 100 books of /lit/.

holy shit i never thought i'd see the day

>>8861988
What day?

>>8861988
Explain.

>>8862033
>>8861998
>literature board discusses a particular critic he thought it would never discuss

It's pretty self-explanatory, autismos.

>>8862059
That's retarded though

>>8861825
>>8861739

Are you the fag who sperg'd about Girard in that asian thread a few days ago?

>>8861842
Michel de Montaigne and Moliere. They even appear next to each other in Bloom's Big Book of Memes

>>8861998
>>8862033
see
>>8862059

Because that's the answer. The day in which somebody other than me would bring up Girard.

>>8862071
This is also true.

So I'm not OP but I am the fag who spergs about Girard as >>8862085 has said. I sperg about RG here: >>/lit/thread/S8727128

And as that anon has indicated I go well and truly beyond all norms of decency and restraint here:
>>8825554

Anyways that's all. I'm notablog-anon. And Girard is my homeboy. Hence the surprise at seeing a thread appear here.

>>8862216
why do you feel the need to shit on the rest of the board just because they don't read your pet author? I don't get pissed when I don't see daily de Maupassant threads

>>8862222

I'm not shitting on the board at all! That's the last thing I would do. The fact is I in that Asian thread I was feeling that I was turning /lit/ into my own blog and I didn't want to do that. Nor do I want to score any points by beating up on other people /lit/ likes. That's the wrong way to go.

>never thought i'd see the day

It's more surprise. That's all I meant. I'm not shitting on the board. You fuckers are all right with me. Just surprise is all. I could have phrased it differently, sure. But it is 100% not intending to shit on the board. Not when cool anons respond to my occasionally self-indulgent threads with thoughtful questions and such.

>>8862222
also, dem quads

>>8862236
my mistake, I thought you were >>8861825
sorry about that anondog

>>8862256

all good fella

>>8862216
That's a good discussion you got going on there. As a Girardfag myself, I don't know if I agree with you 100% though.

It's pretty clear that Girard thinks Christianity is the way to break violence's mimetic chain.

>>8862629

I'm >>8862216 &c. Glad you enjoyed the thread. I certainly did. But it was those another anons who really made it valuable.

I mean, I don't even agree with myself 100% of the time. It's why I come to /lit/, to sort of find out what I think. In both those threads I got pretty lucky and there were some very thoughtful anons asking good questions: a Hegel guy in the first one and several sharp cookies in the second one.

I *am* convinced that the way beyond postmodern tail-chasing lies through some kind of enlightened nondualism. Girard offers one way, and Confucius/Laozi offer another. East and West meet in other ways too: there's also a lot of correspondence between Nietzsche/Sloterdijk and Musashi/Ono. Ono's not a philosopher (or is he?) but he might be a *sage* and the product of a highly philosophical life: it's just not one we in the West would call philosophical, because we (read: me) are messed-up decadent Greece-channeling pomo aesthete fucktards who view everything through the perspective of capital and we (that is, me) disdain *practice.* So RG is my boy but the Asians keep saying stuff also that I really really love, and somewhere in there I think there are some interesting connections to be made.

Basically I see the whole world and all the humans in it like gumballs in a gumball machine. Everyone is a little mimetic gumball, and they're all rattling around with the other gumballs. Most are horrified to admit that they are gumballs. And everyone's all crammed in together in the one big jar. From that jar there is no escape, no revolution, no nothing. But maybe there is awareness of the condition. And that to me would be nondual.

Anyways, talk about Girard, anon, I'd be delighted to hear it. And if you've read to the bottom of those threads you know what I think now anyways.

>>8863237

Not like the homebrew gumball theory of a filthy casual like me is an especially interesting or original thought, granted. I'm not crazy about Leibniz but he seemed to have had a similar view. I just happen to think that the natural state of things has nothing to do with God and everything to do with mimetics. But what we might *do* about that - that is, if we want to "de-gumball" ourselves at least in part, or at least come to some terms with gumball-being - is going to involve close reading of some rather old literature. Because at some point we're going to hurt the machine (or it's going to hurt us). Perhaps someday we will be gumballs in space...

http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/leibniz1714b.pdf

>>8863298
>le sigh as I forget things

Warrants mentioning that this guy is also presenting a similar case.

Anyways, this is a Girard thread and this time I will try to keep it on topic.

>>8863298
>I just happen to think that the natural state of things has nothing to do with God and everything to do with mimetics
You failed to noticed tho that is through Christ only that we can perceive our own gumballiness.

I think you like the Asians so much that you're projecting the solution to the mimetic problem onto them when they're certainly not the solution at all (if they were, they would've gave birth to a system of victim-spairing, like the West did). They may have great, deep, influential thoughts on the nature of peace and violence, but they're still stoic in a sense. Confucionism is a philosophy of the life-renouncing consciousness of imitation, while Christianity is the philosophy of the life-embracing consciousness of imitation.

>>8864649

>Confucianism is a philosophy of the life-renouncing consciousness of imitation, while Christianity is the philosophy of the life-embracing consciousness of imitation.

This is one of the most interesting things I've read in a while. I think it's more Taoism than Confucianism in this case - Confucius is more the reason why over there you have theatre troupes beaten into shape with sticks. But this thread is about Girard and his thought and I won't go crazy with that stuff here.

I do think, however, that you are on to something very big there, about the life-creating and life-renouncing powers of imitation. I can talk about Romantic stuff like Frankenstein, Dracula or zombies all day, how horror films and the grotesque make sense in these ways, and how closely bound up they are with modernity and guilt, the decline of religion, the rise of the modern subject: Prometheus is always the artist-creator-hero, and things soon get out of hand. Conjurers of dead labor and all that...the monster brought back to life sees more about his creators than the creator can. Monsters sprung suddenly into life suffer existential crises that seem weirdly familiar. This all teaches us something about guilt and the powers of life-creation, self and other, and so on...

Anyways, top-shelf stuff anon.

>>8864795

...I think the point is that monsters - including horrifying beings like Judge Holden - remind us that our sense of originality is grounded in nothing but mimesis. To realize that one is the Same is frightening, because our egos are predicated on difference and individualism. And this is what frightens us about monsters, that our original sense of ourselves as original beings - that is, that we can create more originality, even in oblique and seductive ways, such as irony (or capital) - is ultimately founded on nothingness. Nietzsche obviously has his answers for this: but beyond a certain horizon I think we ultimately become conscious of our inability, and this may be a forgivable inability, to create new values sui generis. Confucius does this, as does the Tao; so also does Christ. And not, as you have said, in the same ways.

Now we will receive no forgiveness from Nietzsche for this, which is what makes him part of who he is: his incredible consistency. There is much more in Deleuze to this effect as well, the sense of life itself being an infinitely reifying process of copies engendering copies without originals rhizomatically. And the consciousness of this is what leads me back into a feeling that if Life is really all this one giant, overwhelming, kaleidoscopic process, we insulate ourselves *and necessarily* by becoming gumballs. But we know that this does not work. This I think is what is so unsatisfying about irony: it cannot account for a larger picture that is always beyond language and arguably even representation. It's not that the joke isn't funny, it's that it's so shallow.

So, as you've said, we come to terms with our own imitative-mimetic life, but this is at least to my mind to surrender the sense of ourselves as being creators, which is to go against our tragic master-thinker. And part of the reason why I dislike this is that it seems to hand the victory to all of those philosophers who complain that Nietzsche was wrong all the way through, but they don't have any fucking reasons or answers either. To simply dismiss Nietzsche is to valorize a world that you can only ever see one half of. Even though to see the whole of the thing might well drive you mad.

This is what I find most attractive about religious thought: the necessary sense of humility. It's coming to terms with gumball-being. Not for any reason, because there are no reasons. But because increasingly I find that not having a reason is not reason enough. We are never as alone, or as together, as we would like to think, and this makes us restless.

An enlightened life, to me, has to involve some kind of consistency: the commitment to be the same person. It's there in the eternal recurrence, it's there in Sisyphus, and it's there in Confucian ritual as well; but it is also there in Christianity. Once you've gotten over being a special gumball, it seems necessary to commit yourself to being a particular gumball, and not necessarily the ubergumball.

>>8864949

In the end what is troublesome is not giving up the sense of originality but the sense of *vengeance,* of the righteous reciprocity that Girard himself warns against, the logic of the duel. Channeling Nietzsche, we could say that people perhaps would rather have *a mutually-destructive logic rather than no logic at all.* The ending of The Dark Knight nailed this point exactly. The criminals surrender the need to punish, and it's that unthinkable thought that refutes the Joker's great scheme.

We have to surrender the urge to punish that - even though Nietzsche warned clearly about those in whom the urge to punish is strong - nevertheless always has this utopian dimension. If we can't create or discover a reason for the purpose of life, we can at least destroy those who are getting in the way, find someone to blame, do the will of divine beings, such as pic related - and maybe *that* will make us feel better.

Aeschylus knew all of this stuff too, it's all in the Oresteia: the infinite cycle of vengeance. So did Herman Melville: that's what Moby-Dick is, this need to be reunited with that which was wounded you, but it leads to the apocalypse in the end.

It would be nice to punish somebody else for that which is lacking in ourselves. But this is the dilemma with Zizek, too: if everything is ideology, then nothing is. And I don't believe that communism is the answer either.

Sorry about the textwalls. I'll get a blog for this someday.

^^^ pleb who took too much amphetamines

>>8864986

I think it would be interesting to imagine history or theory of apocalypses, an eschatology, how Worlds End in film and literature. They're always satisfying. And it's why I like Girard, or the Christians in general: they understand this concept of apocalypse so well. The Chinese don't really do eschatology, since The End is just not an interesting concept to them. It's not part of the way that they think. For us, it's all we think about.

>tfw not your blog

>>8864998

Buddy it's this stuff. Total rocket fuel.

>>8861850
>toole
>worthwhile
>not already memed by /r/books

>>8861873
>ligotti
>not meme'd
kek, what?

>>8861910
Lurk more newfag

>>8862216
Amerifag learning French here. I'd like to read Girard in the original--we read a few articles by him on Stendhal in class but otherwise I don't know shit about him. What would you say are the prereqs to this guy? Apart from Lévi-Strauss.

>>8865549

I'm that guy. I'd like to respond to this in much greater detail and I'm tempted to make something in pastebin that has my own canon. Because I'm not a scholar, all I can really do is sort of say how I got to the place where I am now, which feels internally consistent enough for my own arcane purposes (fufufu...) and I'm delighted to think it might be helpful to someone else. It's been something I've been meaning to do for a while anyways but in this case you might find it helpful. I got to Girard after a fair bit of reading, and he sort of supplied a missing puzzle-piece that I had been thinking about for a while. So maybe putting together a sharable document would shed some more light on this.

The long and the short of it is that Girard kind of became a missing puzzle piece in a lot of other stuff that I have been thinking about for a while, which is what you are asking about. In a word, mimetics. To me it's the next step after postmodernism. And I have a sort of wonky personal grudge against deconstruction that really isn't that interesting, but what the hell.

So the tl;dr version, to answer your question, would be a high holy shitload of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Lacan, Baudrillard, Sloterdijk and various others. The Chinese are in another box because they to me supply the way of responding to the Sorcerer's Apprentice world that the Neetch et al create. I'd like to supply something a little more specific but I've been thinking about this question since you asked it and I didn't want the thread to get archived before I responded. But I'll return to this thread later if it's still here.

>>8866184
*also Deleuze

>>8866189
Thanks! That's helpful. I appreciate you taking the time to write all that, anon.

>>8866312

No problem!

>>8866312

Hey, I just wanted to say that compilation of a reading list is going to take a while. I'm pretty sure nobody is really going to care too much, but just in case you/anyone was wondering. I'll be back to this thread whenever it's done or I'll start a new one at some point. Maybe it's on the way to the blog anons in the last thread were saying I should make. I don't really know.

It's still a good idea for me to do it as a part of assembling Gumball Theory, but anyways. So just for what it's worth.