René Girard

[Anonymous No.10969703]

Was he right?

[Anonymous No.10969711]

>>10969703
Mostly not, but he was interesting overall.

[Anonymous No.10969718]

>>10969703
I'm not sold on the Christianity but
>Human beings are puny and envious creatures
is essentially correct.

[Anonymous No.10969719]

>My preparation for this Lent was excellent, of that I can assure you, and the ensuing fast was also exemplary, for I was so full of worry that I endured sleepless nights until the day these worries, as suddenly as they began, disappeared from the world during a final visit to my medical oracle. After all the necessary tests had been carried out, the good man declared me healed, precisely on the Wednesday of Holy Week, which precedes the Passion—properly speaking—and Easter, the official conclusion of penitence.
>Never before had I experienced a celebration that could be compared with this deliverance. I saw myself as already dead, and, all of a sudden, I was resurrected. The most miraculous part for me was that my intellectual and spiritual conviction, my true conversion, had occurred before this great fear during Lent. If it had come thereafter, I would have never truly believed. My natural skepticism would have persuaded me that my faith was the result of fear. This fear, however, could never have been the result of faith. The duration of my dark night coincided exactly with the period prescribed by the Church for the penitence of sinners, with three days of
grace left over—the most important of all—perhaps to allow me to reconcile with the Church in peace before Easter.
he believes in the sky dude because of a lame coincidence. I wouldn't trust anything this man claims

[Anonymous No.10969733]

>>10969711
>>10969718
>>10969719

Have you guys actually read him or are you dismissing him out of hand?
You know he was right, you just can't see past the Christianity.

[Anonymous No.10969737]

>>10969733
Not those anons, but where should i start? I remember wanting to get into him when Girardfag was still posting in this board, he was quite an interesting fellow.

[Anonymous No.10969757]

>>10969733
I'm not dismissing him and have read La Violence et le Sacré. But apologetics of any kind will only convince those who were willing to believe and just needed a little push. Girard is a profound thinker, but he hasn't convinced me to go to Latin mass and pray the rosary before I go to bed.

[Anonymous No.10969810]

>>10969703
Of course he was right. He is right. And he will continue to BE right.

[Anonymous No.10969819]

>Next come the clowns, nostalgic for the final solution (to re-use this expression typical of German scientism) to the problem of coherence. Their procedure is even more twisted: hail Goedel as the greatest logician of all time, mount the absurdities of Goedel numbering on a pin, and make it a sort of super-puzzle. This burying-under-flowers is characteristic of that monument of vulgarity, "Goedel, Escher, Bach". The implicit message is clear: Goedel's theorem is an artificial, unnatural result, which cannot alter the triumphant march of positive science.

>But it's a simple matter, this theorem. It says that Parliament cannot grant itself an amnesty by the vote of one of its sub-committees, nor by itself: it must at least bring in some members from the outside. Isn't that just common sense? Or, alternatively, that you can't fix your glasses while keeping them on your nose.

really did me a thinken

[Anonymous No.10969838]

>>10969733
Nah, I'm not dismissing him, he's great. I'm just becoming disconcerted seeing how people like Girard or MacIntyre just gave in at some point and became Christian. If these guys didn't ultimately manage to make sense of shit without resorting to that then it seems to me like I shouldn't even bother trying and might as well kill myself right now.

[Anonymous No.10969947]

>>10969838
>can't be a smarty smart man
>can't live as a normie either
it's not easy being a pseud

[Anonymous No.10970302]

>>10969819
>Next come the clowns, nostalgic for the final solution (to re-use this expression typical of German scientism) to the problem of coherence.

i'm pretty sure that quote is from jean-yves girard, not rene girard.

>>10969838
the psychology of victimization is pretty complicated stuff. but things like the idea of the creation of group identity out of the destruction of the scapegoat in the crisis situation that convinced me.

we tend to think about religions as being things that modern rationalism necessarily displaced. which is true, to some degree. but just look at your news feed today: it's unbridled mimesis set free in all directions. this was baudrillard's point as well. modernity both sows and reaps its own whirlwind, which is fundamentally a question about the nature of reality itself. i get a little glassy-eyed myself when zizek tries to use lacan and hegel to talk about quantum physics, but there's no need for that. just look at the social aspects of things, about what happens to the completely semantically liberated modern or virtual being: the being produced by a conception of the individual as being wholly anterior to society. the being for whom a matrix would be absolutely justifiable.

hell, even just acknowledging the possibility of a gradual shift from myth to tragedy to religion is eye-opening enough.

ofc people can just meditate instead. look at sam harris, secular humanist supremo. he's a cool guy. but even he struggles against the concept of slander, to keep a high ground against a rising tide of victim politics everywhere.

what girard intuited was that there was something much, much more profound in the bizarre human tendency to worship that which we are obligated to destroy for the sake of social order and stability. bataille reached many of the same conclusions, in his own way. the two of them together present a very difficult challenge for sweeping forms of modernist political experimentation that depends on in-groups and out-groups and their relative positions vis-a-vis the Right Side of History and all. you can get to these places with lacan as well, sure.

life really has no off switch. it may require mythology to ground and order it. but *war* - internal or external - is a puzzle that is going to remain worth thinking about for a long time. the most odious forms of totalitarianism humanity has ever produced are derived from economic rationalism that, imho, seem much more antiquated than anything girard talks about w/r/t religion.

[Anonymous No.10970346]

>>10969703
Scapegoat theory is right, memetic desire isn't.

[Anonymous No.10970349]

>>10970302
just to follow up on this -

it's interesting to think how much Star Trek: TNG was raising questions about the world we live in today. the holodeck was always interesting, and data was a key figure in a lot of puzzles the crew encountered. i know i talk about the matrix a lot, but the same things go on there: anxiety about robots, and the perennial question of how it is that we distinguish truth from illusion.

roddenberry was expressly opposed to any mention of religion or mysticism in the world of Trek, which really was his own complete vision of how it was that he wanted the world to be. and it was a monument to tolerance - there's the black guy, the chinese guy, the russian guy, all working together on the ship to explore space, and all this at the height of cold war tension.

here we are today, 50 years or so after the original one, and apparently totally unable to live with each other, hyperaware of difference, and conscentious to the point of telepathy (or madness). we fear that we are *never* getting off this earth, for various reasons.

i cannot help but feel sometimes that this is how it feels to live through an axial age, when all of the ideas that once belonged to the country now all come in and join the urban polis. except that our polis isn't exclusively geographical, it's now virtual as well: it's the internet. we're all here, all the time, doing business, rubbing shoulders, and having our tiny heads turned inside-out by multiplicities upon multiplicities of difference. historically this led to the appearance of the great wisdom traditions, that is, forms of *advanced psychology* derived from mythology, but made useful for modern living.

what's the best way for people to get along in these circumstances? limit and restrain the natural impetus to violence as transcendental problem-solver. true, one way to do this is to sanction destruction and mobilize the polis completely. this will always be an option. but there are other ways of bridging the gap between Self and Other and girard had some interesting thoughts about that too.

anyways.

[Anonymous No.10970425]

>>10970349
>black guy
whoops. sorry.

>>10970346
it's certainly worth thinking about. in literature it makes sense, but IRL? yeah, maybe not. whatever it is that we call Desire may for the time being involve too many unknowns in terms of subjectivity to be able to nail down too concretely. i agree that it can be a little too cut and dried, but so is oedipus, sometimes.

one thing i wonder about too: why oedipus? why sophocles? you have equally god-tier tragedians on either side of sophocles with equally compelling tragic-poetic visions of what it means to want to be a problem-solving proto-modern Greek. *all* attempts to Regulate The Gods fail. in aeschylus, athena thoughtfully intervenes, and in euripides we see what happens when you try and keep dionysus in a box. but tragedy is more than just a downer, ofc. it's a *cosmic* downer.

modern totalitarianism is, well, a *modernist* response to tragic circumstances. it doesn't have a sense of the outside. it's why someone like oswald spengler is more interesting than any number of fascist intellectuals that he shared weimar with. in crisis or emergency situations, there are always larger forces are at work than those which can be neatly squeezed into an ideology, and where the ideological rubber meets the road is in the apportioning out of sanctioned violence and the need to *pragmatically* resolve situations that are irreducibly philosophical in nature...

[Anonymous No.10970437]

>>10969737
He posted a thread this week, take it as a sign and start with thr French.

[Anonymous No.10970485]

>>10970437
and it got deleted! i had to view a ban-notice to be able to ramblepost in this thread.

i was a little disappointed that the thread got pruned before it could become interesting, but i guess it's fair. life is chaotic enough. but i struggle with the double-bind of posting here sometimes. it's because i'm not quite sure what it is that i want to talk about exactly that i come here, and that gets threads i create labeled as terminally off-topic or fan fiction. which, admittedly, they sometimes are...

probably one of my few actual contributions to this board was the day i spent writing the total pseud's guide to RG, which was actually really hard to do. it forced to me to think rather than just go bananas and vent opinions in all directions like a goofball. i may try to do write a similar guide someday to other thinkers that i like, if only because it reminded me of how difficult it actually is to try to write focused, clarifying stuff about another person's thought. my current obsession is all about the meaning of post-apocalyptica in games, movies and literature, which was related to deep ecology and other stuff. cold war...or just war in general. and girard per as usual. same old same old.

anyways, cool thread gents and thanks opie. big ups to this place as always.

[Anonymous No.10970494]

fuckin girardfag i missed him. I MISS YOU GIRARDFAG. I enjoy your rambles!

It's okay, you don't have to reply. I'm just a fellow girardfag saying hello and a christfag as well. Good tidings to you my man.

[Anonymous No.10970511]

>>10970494
*blush*

back at you fella. i do very much enjoy rambling here with the many fine anons of /lit/.

good tidings to you as well and best of luck in your adventures on planet meme.

[Anonymous No.10970527]

>>10970425
In literature it makes less sense, really. Speaking of desire within literature kinda stands at the horizon of the text, we have the character's actions and the character saying 'I want', 'I wish for'.
So we kinda reconstruct from the text conscious desires like that, and the character himself reconstructs conscious desires of other characters in the same fashion. But immitation is a sort of unconscious process, and so is the interpretation on which such immitation is based on, and ultimately desires manifest themselves as either conscious or unconscious, or even conscious desires unconsciously interpreted in a different manner from which they consciously are, so what we have is this huge fucking incomprehensible self-defeating mess of copying that kinda reminds me of that child game, 'broken telephone' or something.
Also, it's best when you don't namefag, we can kind of recognize you by the way you write at this point.

[Anonymous No.10970587]

>>10970527
>Also, it's best when you don't namefag, we can kind of recognize you by the way you write at this point.
yeah, i know. fwiw, it was just *so fucking strange* to encounter another anon on this board who sounded *exactly* like me. it was downright eerie. so i started using the name just so that...well...i don't even know why. but then, weirdly, i started seeing other anons making posts with that name who weren't me, and it got out of hand.

it was also a gobsmackingly wonderful thing, warrants mentioning, to encounter other people who were already thinking, in even more interesting ways, what you already were thinking about...but yeah. no more namefagging required.

>so what we have is this huge fucking incomprehensible self-defeating mess of copying that kinda reminds me of that child game, 'broken telephone' or something.

and this indeed is the thing. i mean think about modern cinema (or advertising): the reason why i can't dismiss mimetic desire out of hand too quickly is that in a consumer society it's not hard to think that cinema (or ads) structure the way we think about ourselves: as zizek says, the camera not only tells us *what* to desire, but *how* to desire it. we may not innately have desires that correspond 1-1 to how we desire in literature, but we do live in a society which mediates itself in quasi-literary ways.

i tend to get my marxist stuff and baudrillard influences tangled up with my mad feels for girard at this point, but i think there's something going on there. that huge mess you are describing is *relentlessly good for business,* because once you can get people agitated - by fear or desire - what stiegler calls libidinal investment...then you're halfway towards the sale of pharmakon #98273 or w/ev. little in the consumer society mitigates against consumption, and this is why bakker thinks we're on the road to akrasia...and the accelerationist in me does indeed see nothing at the end of the line but a sort of fucked-out libertarian paradise indistinguishable from wasteland. which are those places suggested by borges in pic rel.

i still have some latent grudge against derrida left over from childhood and always getting one-upped by the smart derrida guy i have alluded to. i have Issues with deconstruction for this reason (even though i like heidegger). but it's partly related also to a good essay by peter galison about postmodernism's relation to cybernetics: that, mainly, we are fooling ourselves if we think that we can outfox cybernetics by ever-greater appeals to the mysteries of subjectivity.

it's also why i think yuk hui is a boss today for talking about the need for *inter-objective* relations in a world of technics.

but all of it seems to me to bespeak a need to cross a kind of rubicon of mimesis - maybe the same traversal of symbolic landscapes girard argues for. that our whole thing is about the dangerous power contained within our natural capacity to *copy* and *imitate* and what this means.

[Anonymous No.10970595]

>>10969703
I think it is entirely plain that he was 100% correct. The world cries out for meaning, for us to understand each other.

[Anonymous No.10970611]

>>10970587
>symbolic landscapes girard argues for
should read lacan, not girard.

>so rusty
>and so many typs
>need coffee
>or maybe less coffee
>sigh

as much as listening to more hip-hop during my marxist phase would probably have helped me to figure out that the tragic excesses of capitalism were just as well-known to kanye west and jay-z as they were to bataille, post-apoc genre stuff has or alludes to a lot of things about the girardian worldview, i find.

it doesn't hurt either that the fallout games are super-clever, either. advertising and the concept of irony in a post-apocalyptic wasteland means something different than it does in the time of a sloterdijk crystal palace.

[Anonymous No.10970846]

Where does one start with Girard?

[Anonymous No.10970868]

>>10970846
some another anon capped this from a thread a year or so ago. it holds up reasonably well.

[Anonymous No.10970935]

>>10970868
thanks anon

[Anonymous No.10971248]

>>10970587
Writing like you write isn't particularly hard, yannow. It's just kind of a bad style to immitate. A charming one, but a bad one nonetheless.

[Anonymous No.10971354]

>>10970587
Thanks for sticking around GF, you're one of the good ones on this board.

I've long appreciated brightanons like yourself who recognize the value of variance in your choice of public forum- or that diamonds and shit go hand-in-hand. In other words, thanks for not bailing on 4chan for Reddit.

Fallout >>10970611 also has the wonderfully tragic quality of so many iconic sci-fi series born in the 90s and subsumed in the 21st century.

It starts in the fringe with a real philosophical stance. Fallout 2 is edgy in the best (despicable) way. You're blowing children apart with your choice of AR15, raygun or sledgehammer, but you're also an Evolamythic technotribal pornstar who shits on the American deep state by blowing up their oil rig White House and killing their anthropomorphized nuclear bomb/X CIA goon hybrid.

Now Fallout 4: Capitalism Arrived. You play a sexless predator drone policeman saving voiceless NPCs from their own emasculated inability to raise arms against Invaders. Spend $50 to get a "Black Lives Matter" DLC skin for your mag-accelerated dildogun- which is fully customizable, unlike your character's personality.

[Anonymous No.10971374]

>>10969733
I don't agree with his mimetic desire arguments.

[Anonymous No.10971459]

>>10969703
yep

[Anonymous No.10971484]

>>10970935
np

>>10971248
can't even disagree with you. as i mentioned earlier, just sort of blasting opinions is pretty sloppy. when i had to go back and actually re-read a bunch of someone's works - in that case, girard's - and actually really try and wrestle with what he was *actually* saying, rather than just firing from the hip with hot schizo-takes or whatever...well, it took some work. to accurately represent someone else's argument is harder than just shitposting.

>A charming one, but a bad one nonetheless.
so i'm okay with this.

>>10971354
thanks fella! i agree completely. /lit/ is just more my kind of place. philosophy on reddit turns up some fun stuff sometimes but i prefer the general tone here by far.

you pretty much crushed it with your fallout analysis too. i'm replaying F2 now and it holds up so, so well. as in so fucking well. just in all kinds of ways.

splitting off games from literature and cinema is a kind of thing that gets my noggin' floggin' bigly. i mean for one thing you can just appreciate how much is there in a setting even though you know the plot inside and out.

but on top of this there is the whole meaning of *irony in a wasteland.* that is how, perhaps, we process the idea of it. or that post-apoc politics, because the world has ended, in a sense, take much of the romantic edge off of far-right politics. there's not as much charm in larping hitler after the bomb. survival and civilization is a better look. lots of other stuff also.

i haven't played fallout 4 although i dig the franchise. your analysis seems dispiritingly on-point and i suspect that that is how i will feel also. the franchise got bethesdized and that has its charms (or should we say perks?) but something else more valuable gets lost in the shuffle.

i also find the Enclave - especially in the form of John Henry Eden - an especially compelling vilain. not only because it channels a kind of wintermute vibe, but that the whole idea of the utopia is that of reality infinitely deferred in favor of the illusion. the real meaning of 50s americana as this golden age just seems to require the post-apoc frame to be understood.

and there's also the russian take on this as well, w/STALKER and other games. i know this is all /v/ talk but still. capitalist realism already works as future deferred, and then post-apoc stuff does this time-warp aesthetic twist that folds fantasy and sci-fi into each other. so fucking interesting. just so many interesting things to think about.

[Anonymous No.10971553]

>>10971484
>to accurately represent someone else's argument
is harder than just shitposting.
I cannot comprehend what the fuck you mean with doing this with Girard, but for a bit I wholly convinced myself Hegel's basic thrust was that knowledge is necessarily constructed around a simple movement from false or a lack of knowledge into true knowledge (or, quite obviously, backwards) so this knowledge structure proved itself by its own argument and the whole of the Phenomenology drew from it effortlessly.

[Anonymous No.10971563]

>>10971484
here's an image to think about. it kind of feels like what a whole generation is collectively walking into. at least those who, like myself, seem to be relentlessly hung up on the idea of the past, some kind of failed-romantic sense of a return to collective sanity, since The Future feels like a place that has already disappeared, sometimes.

maybe it felt like this to previous generations as well. i don't know. my grandparents basically went from a world just after the great depression all the way through the 60s and into CNN and the internet. they had no idea what any of it meant. neither do we.

and so i've spent a fair bit of time trying to figure out how it is - or why - that we keep up with the joneses, the meaning of consumer culture and all of that, and post-apoc stuff seems these days to hint at this, or to be a kind of fiction that expresses the weird incongruities and paradoxes that lie at the heart of consumer culture. if i want to get really continentalfaggy with it, i would say that it feels like a culture that insists on abolishing itself, because it keeps opening up more freedom and more choices all around, but the more that it does so, the less and less people are able to make sense of it all. and then into the world of cultural politics today, which...are generally a fucking dumpster fire all around.

i'm not actually triggered by stuff myself, i'm triggered by other people getting triggered. maybe this is the same thing that happened before: for a previous generation, the television came into their house and brought with it the vietnam war. for us, it's the same thing with higher intensity - the internet, mobile devices, and all of it.

or the curious paradox of the fact that after the 90s we were supposedly all so jaded and ironic, so flooded with porn or violent video games and whatever, and all of that has now morphed into this incredibly puritanical virtue-signaling era in which we live, trolling the libs, punching the nazis, all of this.

post-apoc stuff just kind of intimates that space was and remains the final frontier...but that totalitarianism may not be the way to get there. the cold war, much as girard suggests, is all very logical.

in dune, there's the butlerian jihad, herbert's workaround for questions about AI. AI doesn't seem to come up at all in star wars, or in star trek. it's there all day in cyberpunk, of course. but post-apoc has its own way of presenting technological questions that i find enormously interesting to think about.

[Anonymous No.10971637]

>>10971484
>there's not as much charm in larping hitler after the bomb

A point the alt-right has perhaps missed.

Although as a counterpoint take Miyazaki's Nausicaa. The fashy/folksy monarchical micronation succeeds in it's Romanticism BECAUSE of the post-apocalypse. Thevpast becomes myth, ruins become neoclassical inspiration, nature regains her place as Alpha. History doesn't End, it commits suicide and the clean slate gives religion another chance. I guess these things depend on what the apocalypse looks like.

At any rate, I also recommend you give Planescape: Torment a playthrough if you haven't already (and give it another if you have). It's more universal than FO2 but just as relevant because every faction represents a meta-ideology.

Was brought to mind by your mention of separating games out from lit and cinema as their own kind of text. Planescape requires it. The mechanics, "narrative", and world blend together like no other. Only Morrowind comes close in scope

[Anonymous No.10971646]

>>10971553
>I cannot comprehend what the fuck you mean with doing this with Girard

just that some time ago somebody asked for a Quick Rundown on girard and it took me an entire day to produce about 20 pages of notes that were then compressed down into about five posts. and this was to talk about a guy who i thought i had a fairly good grasp on. but i find i usually think i have a better understanding of what a person means than i really do, and also a sense that i can articulate another person's thoughts better than i actually possess. to actually communicate another person's thoughts clearly, as objectively as possible, with a minimum of editorial comment, is harder than i think.

and indeed this is a problem for me, but a worthwhile one. i sometimes have a tendency to overemphasize the *idea* of the reader more than prioritizing a more important obligation to accuracy (and brevity). it's forgiveable, i guess, but...well, it's sort of like saying that the journey is as important as, if not more so, than the destination. when you write about another person's thoughts - especially if they're more interesting than your own! - you want to keep your thumb out of the frame. such is my advice to myself.

i think if i had read hegel earlier in my own adventure i might reference him more than i do. heidegger got there first for me and he's kind of in the dna of a lot of my posts. i keep a copy of the phenomenology on hand but for whatever reason i've yet to have that Oh Fuck Holy Shit moment with him that i've had with heidegger, deleuze, lacan, girard, or whoever.

probably it's just me. but i think this is sort of a cool thing you can do on a place like /lit/ though: de-soapbox yourself. how do you know you are not standing on a soapbox? by having a very good sense of what it *would* mean if you were standing on a soapbox and shilling.

trying to see the world through the eyes of a great critic is kind of interesting. not just stealing their ideas and adding them to the gigantic slush pile that makes us who we are, trying to understand them without appropriating them...and then laying out the basic principles of their ideas in a way that they might not disagree with.

to some degree i find it means you have to consciously take a step back from being seductive, which is also hard to do. it's nice to be agreeable and charming, but you can just wind up going around and around in circles.

but maybe the PoS will hit me hard one of these days. we'll see. zizek's book on hegel and lacan floored me pretty good. i subscribe to that old saw that advances are made in the end not by proving anyone wrong, but proving everyone right. so whatever the next iteration of Truth is, it will no doubt have room for dialectics in there somewhere.

pic rel is from korzybski, fwiw. general semantics is kind of interesting too, and is going on right in that 20s-50s sweet spot of 20c philosophy.

[Anonymous No.10971683]

>>10971637
>At any rate, I also recommend you give Planescape: Torment a playthrough if you haven't already (and give it another if you have). It's more universal than FO2 but just as relevant because every faction represents a meta-ideology.

*my fucking man.* i picked up the Enhanced Edition just yesterday with that very aim in mind. thinking about the Transcendent One and the fortress of regrets...*hnng*
>and also hnng
>some hnng in there

and so you've hit on this thing i was hoping would come up. the factions in PST aren't actually trying to *control* that world, are they? they can't, because the Lady of Pain is this absolute sovereign, and that changes everything. most of the story *is* this response to nihilism, that begins with this immediate - and enormously interesting idea - that what happens when you can't die?

of course, Groundhog Day talks about this theme as well, as does Edge of Tomorrow/AYNIK, but planescape absolutely got the bat on the ball and then some. the enemy - spoilers? - ah, fuck it, you already know what i'm going to say.

so yes. yes yes. yes and then some for PS:T. 11/10 all round for that game. true, fallout 2 is maybe a little more fun as a game, but in terms of story that makes you go, wow, what the fuck am i doing with myself...class by itself. when the fallout 2 playthrough is done that's next on the list. it's been many years.

>A point the alt-right has perhaps missed.
and will miss again, i suspect.

>Although as a counterpoint take Miyazaki's Nausicaa. The fashy/folksy monarchical micronation succeeds in it's Romanticism BECAUSE of the post-apocalypse. Thevpast becomes myth, ruins become neoclassical inspiration, nature regains her place as Alpha. History doesn't End, it commits suicide and the clean slate gives religion another chance. I guess these things depend on what the apocalypse looks like.

there it is. the matrix reloaded. or barzun

>After a time, estimated at a little over a century, the western mind was set upon by a blight: it was Boredom. The attack was so severe that the over-entertained people, led by a handful of restless men and women from the upper orders, demanded Reform and finally imposed it in the usual way, by repeating one idea. These radicals had begun to study the old neglected literary and photographic texts and maintained that they were the record of a fuller life. They urged looking with a fresh eye at the monuments still standing about; they reopened the collections of works or art that had long seemed so uniformly dull that nobody went near them. They distinguished styles and the different ages of their emergence—in short, they found a past and used it to create a new present. Fortunately, they were bad imitators (except for a few pedants), and their twisted view of their sources laid the foundation of our nascent—or perhaps one should say, renascent—culture. It has resurrected enthusiasm in the young and talented, who keep exclaiming what a joy it is to be alive.

[Anonymous No.10971731]

>>10971563
>ai doesn't seem to come up at all in star trek

this is a dumb thing to say, by the way. i said it and it was a dumb thing to say. i say dumb things, &c, &c.

the fact that data was a crucial character in lots of those storylines...
>i mentioned i was dumb, right?

anyways.

[Anonymous No.10971974]

>mfw I enter to learn about GF and what's on their mind and maybe question if I should become religious, or at least attempt to hold a value for more than a day
>leave wanting to replay old videogames and rewatch scifi shows

my cross to bear. grrrrrr.

[Anonymous No.10972515]

>>10971974
Know the feel.

First we must discard the games. Return to them as texts only when they aren't a compulsion

[Anonymous No.10972554]

>>10971974
i always had problems with the whole 'lead us not into temptation' part.

but people are interesting like that. we love stories and need them. movies are in decline today, i'd say, partly because we've made so many, partly because CGI is just so prevalent, but also because of a migration of writers from hollywood to game writing, where you can do a lot more stuff. i'll shill for richard garriott here, my favorite example of Why Video Games Are Good For You. you wouldn't think being a paragon of moral virtue would be an attractive game, but surprise surprise. and it also required a *sandbox.*

but garriott was not only an auteur, he was an auteur having an *existential crisis* when this game was made, b/c he was struggling with the possibility that all he was making was violence simulators. out of that came the greatest crpg franchise of the 80s (and maybe ever). i mean it's not a super-replayable game today, maybe, but the point remains.

aaaaaand i just fucking glitched my fallout 2 playthrough too by screwing up a questline in san francisco. i don't know if i want to bother going back to an earlier save and burning another hour on that or if i just want to get with torment now. we'll see.

that's basically what's on my mind.

[Anonymous No.10973055]

>>10972554
Planescapeanon from earlier.

When you talk about Ultimate like that, I'm back to thinking you're a romantic... or maybe a cyber-romantic. If the VR is good enough, is that where you'll want to live?

[Anonymous No.10973142]

>>10971484
Not the anon you were speaking to but can we just get in the tub and soak up the warm irony of a robot president named John Henry, an artificial intelligence ruling over a dead republic, in contrast with the legend of the real John Henry who died competing with a machine and the unstoppable march of progress?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hI0D44zYP-Q

Also Fallout 4 isn't that bad. I mean it's pretty good the first time around, but it's no Fallout 3 or New Vegas. Never played F2 myself.

[Anonymous No.10973188]

>>10973055
planescapeanon is a cool anon.

i mean you've asked a pretty fucking interesting question: what game world would you want to live in? and, honestly, ultima really wouldn't be that bad of a pick, for a couple of reasons.

1. the whole idea of the ultima setting is that you have this cult of the avatar spread out over different cities dedicated to the virtues. i absolutely could see the appeal in living in the new magincia of ultima 5 and learning Into Potato. and when you feel you have figured something out, you move to the next city...
>ofc, the city you actually *think you might belong to* wouldn't necessarily be the city you actually would belong to...and so on.

i find britannia in general a pretty agreeable setting. garriott just had the right attitude in general, i think. aristotelian without being too cozy about the golden mean, and maybe neoplatonic without getting too preachy. and u5 showed that he understood very well that a dystopian society is just one that interprets virtues too literally - but, nevertheless, *remains entirely habitable for many.* it's a pretty goddamn fabulous world.

2. i have to say, i'd be pretty good with sigil too. not even sure which of the factions speak the most to me, but it stands to reason that *that is kind of the point* also. when you are in a nihilistic place, don't stop moving too soon just for the sake of having your ducks in a row. keep suffering! yay!

3. ff6 WoR i'm probably okay with. this setting absolutely works for me. i would 100% live in a zone eater and be a weird mimic. my character arc is entirely self-explanatory: how do i effectively copy you for the Greater Good?

or, perhaps to be slightly more original, maybe i'd be one of those goofy cultists in the tower of kefka and hoping someone would notice that i am a joinable character if you talk to me. powers TBD. maybe 'chant.'

these are all vidya settings and not literary worlds, mind. i might have to go back and re-read the Divine Comedy soon. purgatory is a concept on my mind atm.

i'm assuming that living in the world of Toejam and Earl is out of the question here. i could perhaps make a quiet living as the carrot guy there, i think.

[Anonymous No.10973242]

>mfw other anons gathered nightshade and mandrake from north of skara brae, or adopted the principles of the gargoyles, or moved house into darkest dungeons

[Anonymous No.10973250]

[Anonymous No.10973263]

>>10973055
>>10973188

You both are fucking legends. This conversation is the best shit I've seen on /lit/ in ages. Can we have a weekly thread where Girardfag and Planescapeanon talk philosophy, lit, video games, and what it means to live in the 21st century?

[Anonymous No.10973269]

>>10973142
>but can we just get in the tub and soak up the warm irony of a robot president named John Henry, an artificial intelligence ruling over a dead republic, in contrast with the legend of the real John Henry who died competing with a machine and the unstoppable march of progress?

we can sure as hell do that now, based anon. this kind of stuff is exactly what makes the reading worth it. what is the machine? what does it want with us? how come we keep making it? why can't we stop?

be interested to get some takes on New Vegas in thread. when it came out i was on a long hiatus from games, not sure if i want to pull the trigger on it now. i've heard some say that it's the best in the series.

fallout 2 is worth your time. just be sure to keep a bunch of backup saves, there's some irritating Once Only questline stuff near the ending that is irksome. but i've played through the whole thing 3-4 times now and it always delivers.

thanks for sharing the johnny cash too. i used to like to put this on while i was playing MAME bullet hell shmups and raising hell and LARPing the man on the white horse. good times.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9IfHDi-2EA

>>10973242
i legit tried to build a house in ultima 6 in the sewers under britannia. you know the little house with the skeletons in it? there. i furnished it and everything. unfortunately the skeletons kept reanimating and it was just spoiling the ambience. i would have left them in there as servants except that they always attacked me whenever i came 'home.'

such a fucking great game. such a great world.

[Anonymous No.10973319]

>>10971374
It's not an "argument", retard.

[Anonymous No.10973322]

>>10973263
>fist-bumps for planescapeanon
>fist-bumps for this anon
>fist-bumps all round

yeehaw! we're blowing minds up in here again...and gonna party like it's...uh...2016...or something...
>if by party you mean quietly streaming greentext from the failing wi-fi of a donut stand in the post-apoc wasteland twilight
>implying that that is not somehow a perfectly legitimate place to party from

ah, /lit/. you're such a great place.

[Anonymous No.10973372]

>>10973269
>living among the skellies
yes, i know exactly the house. i used to take the house of pirates or maybe it was evil mages, down by an underground river. bury all the moonstones in the same spot of soft earth et voila, tony stark's mansion or as kirkbride would call it the provisional house. that or just build out in the wilderness. i especially loved the choice of bad guy in the game. gargoyles, who performed a sort of ancestor worship on villains the avatar had defeated in the past. the revelations given to you in that game are still some of the best in vidya imo, ESPECIALLY because pre-U7:SI and pre-U8, you were still the Unsullied Avatar at that point. you were a paragon of virtue, and now you are told you were also long responsible for a genocide.

>what is the machine?
You need to play Fallout 4 my guy. I won't spoil it but the questline and factions fit rather well with the questions raised in Fallout 3 that we are discussing now.

>New Vegas takes
Best of the series imo, but I'm a sucker for westerns and Vegas seediness. The most compelling stories (The Burned Man's and Chief Hanlon's) don't get enough screen time though. DO IT.

[Anonymous No.10973407]

>>10973322
Cheers to that!

>>10973263
Homie, I'm always down to chat with girardfag.

Don't frequent /lit/ as often as I used to, but still generally on here a couple times a week. Throw up the bat signal, or just pictures of dank 90s anime in the OP (cyber city oedo anyone) and I'm there. And by there I mean talking about the apocalypse and falling short of finding transcendence.

By the way girardfag, you ever read Heavy Metal or other French comics? As I was considering your thoughts on the fictional world to inhabit, the universe of "Metabarons" came to mind.

If you're not familiar; basically Jodorowsky took Dune, added more acid and schizophrenia and landed in some sort of death fetish zen buddhism

[Anonymous No.10974137]

>>10973372
>gargoyles

sometime last year i was reflecting on how brilliant the idea of the gargoyles were handled in U6 w/r/t our hyper-outraged world of Diversity Politics. like in so many other things, garriott was just so smart:

so the gargoyles have a culture which is predicated on virtues that are the *obverse* but not the *opposite* of those of the Avatar. this was the brilliance of that game: that you could *absolutely* have gargish virtues based on concepts like hierarchy, order, discipline, and so on...and *not* make them A People In Need of Salvation. quite the contrary, in fact: that which was coming to save them was the False Prophet...just such a brilliant alternative to the brain-dead idpol horseshit going on today. the gargoyles were Others, but they weren't reducible to the paradigm of the virtues - they were just seeing the same things, through different lenses...

still tho. and then garriott went straight on from that to U7, where a mysterious group of guys somehow took *all that was mysterious about the virtues and translated it into ready-to-hand evangelism* and nearly brought in a gigantic extradimensional totalitarian nightmare into the frame. before peterson was peterson, richard garriott was seeing everything. and that glorious mother turned it all into a charming rpg. genius.

moping about intellectual politics: extra-boring.

knowing that cool creative types always have a better perspective: much less so.

>f4
it's a good rec. games seem to finding their own these days, in the world of multiple endings and so on. can't really do it in blockbuster cinema, it skews with the tension or makes it too meta. but in games? no problemo.

and new vegas too, hey? sounds about right. i figure i should get through torment first but that's a solid contender for the next one. westerns are eternal.

>>10973407
>And by there I mean talking about the apocalypse and falling short of finding transcendence.
one of the best definitions of Being There i've read here.

>heavy metal
i was in france for a short time and marveled at the sheer awesomeness of their hardcover, 120-page, wickedly illustrated comics, on sale in every carrefour. they are indeed the jam. my french sucks and i lost the ones i picked up since then but yeah. they are dope as fuck.

>If you're not familiar; basically Jodorowsky took Dune, added more acid and schizophrenia and landed in some sort of death fetish zen buddhism

be still my beating heart.

[Anonymous No.10974336]

i wonder if ultima's time in general is just going to come again. and to keep this girardian - it was one of those aspects of U4, iirc, that the violence was there (and the combat was pretty neat) but that if an enemy was fleeing, you were supposed to let them flee...as this was how you acquired valor. would have made it tough to grind for gold and exp, if that was all there was to do...but the idea, of course, was to become the avatar, not an unstoppable killing machine. and of course the de-escalation of the human-gargoyle war is the whole deal of U6.
>just so we keep it girardian

i mean in terms of introductions to philosophy it's pretty hard to beat that. and even the shadowlords weren't boilerplate evil villains, just personifications of the perversion of the principles of truth, love and courage. it's why 5 is so good, the best in an excellent series of games. the ethics are not the virtues, and *holy moses* is that a subtle point to make. the ethics make for the laws, but the virtues make for the *kingdom.* and then some.

we see this with plato as well. plato the author of the Republic is not the same man that he is as the author of the Laws. and why would he be? he watches Socrates killed by the city they are driving themselves both out of their wits to try and understand philosophically. this understandably takes its toll on the man.

i could go on and on, of course, about how the world is set up from a design perspective to give you as the player something to do and a map to explore, but it's interesting to think also that, in terms of britannia's culture, the shrines are all out there to be visited, and aren't *withdrawn into the cities and fortified...*

how and why peterson gets so amped up about pinocchio i will never understand. ultima is a text and then some. it's a whole goddamn vision. i like and admire the man quite a lot. he has the world's most unenviable job and clearly thrives in the pocket. but ultima, yo. what's not to like?

>9. 9 is not to like
>fortunately 9 does not count

the gygaxian alignment system is a lovable, venerable and well-memed old beast, but the virtues were a whole other thing. kind of amazing that final fantasy is into its 342nd iteration and ultima barely saw the clinton administration.

but at least there's fallout and planescape.
>and then the yawning void

[Anonymous No.10974372]

>Girardfag shows up
>Thread derails to anons masturbating over vidya

[Anonymous No.10974465]

>>10974372
girardfag worries me because becoming a kantbot miniature e-celeb is one of the great counter-initiatiory cul-de-sacs of this pivotal world-historical moment

i think all the girardfags and proto-girardfags out there, even the kantbots, should take a step back and ask "is what i'm writing right now actually pushing me or others toward qualitatively higher knowledge? or am i spinning my wheels as a consolation prize for there being nothing else to do, no reward for all my seeking up until this point, except to come down off the mountain and do parlour tricks for the plebs?"

kantbot is all speed with no acceleration, he's falling back into the reign of quantity by ceasing to be novel and generative, and becoming merely explicable, by a formula like "i guess one of these alt right faggots was eventually going to be a real grad student with some talent and authenticity instead of just some fag watching evola youtube videos. it makes sense taht there would eventually be A Kantbot"

if kantbot wants to be more than A Kantbot and girardfag wants to be more than A Girardfag they shouldn't fall into the same trap all the french niggers did by becoming so good at weaving metaphors and associative complexes together and such "erudits" that they don't do anything fucking else, again all speed with no acceleration. the better you get at this shit, the more garbage articles you can churn out for upstart faggot twitter magazines, and you just plateau, as a little gay sorcerer who can do some magic sparkles for the rubes. faust is supposed to get bored of his parlour tricks and strike out again on a new homoerotic shaman quest, not accept the parlour tricks and the trickle of dopamine he gets for showing them off as his fag reward for a lifetime of failures.

i hate these niggers. i don't like these big jerkoff threads. i don't like the fucking french and the academic bigwigs and zizek wannabes who hit the wall of What Can Be Done With Philosophy So Far As We Know It, get a single drop of authentic initiation from their journey, and immediately go "Well I guess taht's it then" and start writing IRONIC!!! HEGELIAN ANIME ANALYSES. i'm a 60th level heidegger mage, dual classed into all kinds of weird GIRARD shit.. i'd better impress rubes by showing how effortlessly i can see girardishly while looking at th emovie "Johnny Mnemonic".... isn't it cool that i can be both an amazing philosophy sorcerer while also being so laid back and casual about it?

the entire 1960s was a mind parasite invasion counter initiation psychic trap for the species, and the french were its hollowed-out zombie servitors. in fact they did the same thing with the enlightenment. the french have to be stopped. they set this whole gay pussy trend of being counter-cultural while also being a master philosopher. i want german angst back. adorno saw some tits and died of fright. where are the adornos? everyone's jerking themselves off on twitter.

[Anonymous No.10974487]

>>10974465
>girardfag worries me because becoming a kantbot miniature e-celeb is one of the great counter-initiatiory cul-de-sacs of this pivotal world-historical moment

lmao even tho it sucks /lit/ is the only good place on the internet

[Anonymous No.10974526]

>>10974336
>remembering ultima 4's valor mechanic
>not slaying the fleeing monsters for their valuables which you as the cynical vidya player would covet
>a mechanic which keeps you from being a murderhobo and which 20+ years later i remember fondly
I think you're right about Ultima's time having come again.

[Anonymous No.10974566]

>>10974526
why the fuck isn't richard garriot making anymore games? he's not that old and he has tons of capital, shouldn't all the new interest in retro shit should pull him back into the game game?

[Anonymous No.10974584]

>>10974465
>wherein a spirit wails, and gnashes its teeth: the post
have faith, anon. ideas are made every day, and some of these posts are more than masturbation, they're digging up bits of the forgotten past that could inspire the kingdom of tomorrow. engage with it usefully, or don't, but being an uninspired critic helps no one. and incidentally nobody owes you anything.

> they shouldn't fall into the same trap all the french niggers did by becoming so good at weaving metaphors and associative complexes together and such "erudits" that they don't do anything fucking else
>isn't it cool that i can be both an amazing philosophy sorcerer while also being so laid back and casual about it?
you broke my ressentiment-meter.

[Anonymous No.10974597]

>>10974566
i don't know. i remember reading a piece about Origin when they disbanded. A bonfire on the beach for company employees. T-shirts that read "We Create Worlds." It was a very bittersweet and melancholy time. I think LB was seriously wounded by the way the cookie crumbled, and I don't blame him. Someone ought to raise him up and make a pitch.

[Anonymous No.10974608]

>>10974597
where did u read about that? i got a copy of that "online game pioneers at work" which has a relatively (2015) interview with him, is that the one?

btw they are doing a reboot of ultima underworld there is a prerelese page on steam, the engine obviously isnt going to be as groundbreaking as the original uw was at the time, but it could still be p gud

also, system shock 1 source code just got posted on github if u wanna read some crusty 90s c source code and see how the oh gees of this shit made it happen

[Anonymous No.10974609]

>>10974372
vidya is cool, tho. esp great vidya. and it's not like post-apoc stuff is so far away from girard's own thought. or that planescape and its setting isn't an outrageously interesting commentary on the idea of religion and sacrifice. if you had to write a paper on violence and the sacred you could do a lot worse than that for a reference. and ultima is fucking *ultima*, it's a dope af series with a cool neoplatonic vision made by a god-tier designer who was having an existential crisis and fucking smashed it out of the park. for a whole number of reasons.

>>10974526
right? incredible stuff. don't even get me started on the cloth maps and the feelies and the rest. or the music:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XzFsgg_nh0g

come on now. Don't Be A Murderhobo is actually a pretty novel idea. he didn't have to give us a whole sandbox world to go along with it. or supply half of the DNA of every dragon quest game ever made.

*pours one out*

>>10974465
i'm famous! i'm fucking famous! oh shit!

yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeaaaahhhh

oh man

so hyped right now

i love this place

brb going to kill myself while the rush is still there

take this picture of freud's office and remember meeeeeeeee

[Anonymous No.10974614]

>>10974608
unintentional reddit space, it looked like it was turning into paragraphs in the little reply box my bad

[Anonymous No.10974616]

>>10974608
I don't remember, it was 20 years ago. 1999 or something. Online article iirc, posted on Slashdot probably. It was a brief interview and an invitation to the goodbye party.

And yeh I just looked him up on twitter. It kinda looks like it's a project that sold out to the MMO meme? I dunno. I trust LB can do better.

[Anonymous No.10974642]

>>10974616
i just remember ultima 9 was buggy as shit because they optimized it for 3dfx cards but by the time they finally shipped at all the hardcore gamer kids had switched to nvidia, so it was slow as hell and thrashed the shit out of your harddrive, i hope that isnt what sank him, probably it was something with ultima online instead

what happened to d.w. bradley who did wizardry? those were equal to ultima, i think he did some small post-wizardry rpg but i remember it was annoying as hell because when it was night it got too fucking dark to see anything and there was no way to fucking sleep or do anything to speed up time, so you spent half the fucking game in near pitch blackness and completely miserable, or maybe i was a dumbass and missed a way to like use a torch or something but i really dont think so, anyway he should try again he was garriot tier

[Anonymous No.10974644]

>>10974584
>have faith, anon. ideas are made every day, and some of these posts are more than masturbation, they're digging up bits of the forgotten past that could inspire the kingdom of tomorrow. engage with it usefully, or don't, but being an uninspired critic helps no one. and incidentally nobody owes you anything

ideas are fine but you don't need to be a preening faux modest e-celeb to do it. we used to call these "gimmick posters."

i don't like your faggy ending about how no one "owes" me anything. i never said anyone owed me anything, i said you are gay if you allow people blowing smoke up your ass on an internet forum to go to your head and become a fucking godawful post-ironic meme writer like kantbot.

it just sucks. the only thing worse than an internet full of arid nothing is an internet full of seeds no one knows how to cultivate. all of these sad fucks (like me) are slowly turning 30, then 40 and then what, then you are just old man. it's like when THE COOLEST NIGGER ON FYAD would appear in some IRL video and you'd realise it's just some fat guy with a sheepish smile who is scared to make eye contact and realises he badly miscalculated by allowing his cool internet persona to crash back into the reality of Fat Sad Man, Difficult Relationship With Mom.

FYAD is counter-initiation. girardfag is counter-initiation. no one cool (like me) reads kantbot because i realise what he is, he's girardfag with a twitter account. the only people reading kantbot are sub-kantbots and aspirant kantbots who want to be twitter queers.

i don't like how everything curls back into itself and becomes stagnant and pathological. i don't like reading stylised faggot posts on /lit/, it reminds me of revleft or some other douche forum that looks gay from a distance but i'm sure if you were "in on" the slow encroachment of the faggot gimmick poster culture you wouldn't have been able to see how gay it was until it's too late. the alt right has become gay or is becoming gay because it has an audience now. an audience is the worst thing that can happen to a thinker.

[Anonymous No.10974683]

>>10974644
>i don't like your faggy ending about how no one "owes" me anything
I don't like your faggy fucking face whining about other people's posting habits. Are you the 4chan community police? Am i being epically trolled? I would assume so but you seem just autistic enough to be serious.

I don't give a fuck about Kantbot, I don't read him or follow him on twitter and t.b.h. I find 99.9% of named internet personalities offensive. I only read /lit/ and /k/ and one professional subreddit. girardfag is a fine poster who i enjoy speaking to when he's around because we have similar interests in philosophy and vidya and especially how the two intersect. i don't think he's anything super special (sorry girardfag), aside from being another human who is actually investing himself honestly in a dialogue.

if you can't handle other people having conversations maybe you should check yourself in to a mental hospital or something.

[Anonymous No.10974707]

>>10974642
yeh U9 was a Titanic-level mistake. I don't remember what the story was, but I'm pretty sure it was rushed out by the publisher. The game shipped in broken condition, with game-killing quest bugs. I played the game twice and never finished it, but my brother did somehow. It was pretty good for the time all that aside.

>D.W. Bradley
NO idea. I enjoyed Wiz 7 as a teenager, but the switch to 3D threw me. I found the world's immersive but in the end ultimately kind of shallow, like a typical SF/FG novel.

[Anonymous No.10974776]

>>10974644
this post is what happens when you are a feral child raised by the internet.

[Anonymous No.10976268]

>>10974644
Then why be on this public forum. You're telling us that 'initiation' requires no audience. It's quiet contemplation, reading, generation, etc. Like, duh...

Sure the sycophants and wannabes suck, nothing new there. But the Kantbots of the world are doing something more interesting by taking the platforms and turning them against themselves.

There's more to this than your French school "say profound shit to get laid" equivalence.

[Anonymous No.10976412]

>>10974465
>>10974644

so which philosophers matter to you anon? 100% not baiting. if you're concerned with counter-initiation - should we understand that you're thinking about guenon? the traditionalist school?

>the only thing worse than an internet full of arid nothing is an internet full of seeds no one knows how to cultivate

>an audience is the worst thing that can happen to a thinker

i mean stuff like this is genuinely interesting. even though you've labeled me as a counter-initiation and the symptom of some kind of decline (which is probably true, in some sense), i'm honestly more interested in what you think than i am in having a shit-flinging memefest. obviously i have no way to defend myself w/r/t preening faux modesty. if that is how i seem to you then it is what it is.

or maybe i should try this another way. is how i sound irritating because i'm basically intellectualizing stuff that's supposed to remain un-intellectualized? watering down the sauce? you wrote:

>i don't like how everything curls back into itself and becomes stagnant and pathological

if so, it's not like this isn't something i feel myself, sometimes. it's why i think about irony so much, why i've alluded to the dark knight in the past and the genius of the characterization of the joker. it's why i think baudrillard was such a prophet and why modernity is a phenomenon worth thinking about. and it's even connected to why i'm thinking so much about fallout and the post-apoc these days. it definitely connects to girard, lacan, and much else: the loss of the real and the replacement with illusion, even the ways in which people can still fight to the death over illusions and ideologies. it's why girard is the boy for me: mimetic rivalry works just as well whether or not the stakes are physical or metaphysical. stuff like this.

so i don't want to get too ahead of myself here. but you've raised some interesting stuff and i'd hate for you to feel disappointed or as if none of the things you are thinking had been completely unthought by others in the thread.

of course, i could be completely off-track here as well. but i figured it was worth at least raising the possibility. just to try the unusual thing ('how do i know i'm not repeating the wrong thing again here?') rather than the expected thing ('i'm triggered! fuck you! [insert meme joke here].)

for what it's worth.

[Anonymous No.10977280]

What are your thoughts on Nick Land

[Anonymous No.10977321]

I am sorry I got confused, is this a thread about the anthropologist René Girard or about a tripfag?

If the first, I am interested if there is some deeper philosophical attunement or connection of Girard with Bataille, apart from the fact that both draw from Marcel Maus book for their social theory.

[Anonymous No.10977366]

>>10977280
prophet. and a warning sign. maybe the most important british philosopher of the last 20 years. teleoplexy is worth reading.

https://track5.mixtape.moe/zphjim.pdf

i've been obsessing about nick land for probably five or six years now, basically ever since i found his xenosystems page. he was the next guy i read and thought about continually after heidegger, because i thought heidegger had the answers to everything. in some aspects i still do, but they're mostly those related to existential humanism and psychotherapy.

in 2016 and 2017 i couldn't shut up about land at all and most of my posts on /lit/ were about him in one form or another. it was all about acceleration, especially as the 2016 election unfolded and nobody knew what the fuck was happening w/r/t trump and bannon.

it's interesting that since the election land seems to have slowed down a fair bit. i check his twitter pretty much every day but he's not producing as much as he used to. i think trump and other stuff really skewed with a lot of what NRx and other guys were thinking, that somehow it all happened too soon and too fast.

but yeah, i'm in general a fan of his work. it feels like electroshock therapy sometimes, true, and that's not exactly fun. but horrorcore marxism is a legit innovation.

>>10977321
the former. there just happens to be a particularly hyperactive tripfag in it also, drawn to it like a moth to a flame and wont to go on weird tangents. i'd be very interested in talking about a girard-bataille-mauss connection as well tho. it's definitely there.

[Anonymous No.10977826]

>>10976412
>it's why i think baudrillard was such a prophet and why modernity is a phenomenon worth thinking about.
>If that's how you feel, I suggest you read pic related. The book is pretty much an updated Reign of Quantity, but what drew me interested in Glass was, he thought Marx, Ellul, and Baudrillard were prophets of their times, who described the world for what it was: Maya. Also, unlike Guenon, his tone is very lighthearted, especially for a Traditionalist, but why be so serious for things concerning Maya?

[Anonymous No.10977832]

>>10977826
Forgot to turn off green text

[Anonymous No.10978027]

>>10977826
>>10977832

yup. i actually did read that one about two weeks ago, and only because i saw a thread here on /lit/ about it - maybe yours? - and picked it up on kindle on that recommendation. was totally worth it, so if that was your thread, than thank you very kindly for an excellent read. went back and re-read the technological society afterwards and started an ellul thread to talk about it afterwards, since ellul made such a big impression on the author. re-read some schuon too. and some dugin also, to try and understand the 4PT.

one thing that struck me was the size of that next-to-last chapter, which was like an entire book in itself, and like three times as large as every other chapter - kind of unusual. it was almost painful to finish, if only because you can really feel the author's own frustration and exhaustion with everything he's been getting through and trying to find a way to stop.

anyways. would recommend that title to other anons ITT for sure. yugas and cyclic history are their own thing.

and you know this connects to to what >>10977321 is or was asking, maybe, about the world of sacrifice and the world of technique. which i would say is a pretty fascinating question to think about. capital runs on theories of enlightenment and rational accumulation that occlude the very real need for a concept of sacrifice...and to go along with the girard-bataille-mauss threesome i'll shill for baudrillard and pic rel too.

the sacrificial society is the one that gets hidden by the consumer society and is beholden to concepts of time and space of a whole different order of magnitude. like the furies...

>ywn see a girard/bataille lit-crit tag-team rescuing gotham city from its own self-propelled dialectics of superhero terror and abundance
>y even live

[Anonymous No.10978081]

>>10978027
i wonder sometimes how crazy it would be to think about a *sacrificial turn in philosophy* to parallel the linguistic turn of the 20c. because there is a whole murderer's row of thinkers ready to go on the subject: girard, bataille, mauss, baudrillard, land (yes, he belongs in there), eliade, jung, freud, and others. a whole bunch of post-marxist theorists you could use to consider these ideas of exchange and sacrifice, the necessary *destruction* of wealth, abundance, excess, and all the rest. who else am i forgetting?

the one thing you would probably not expect from this movement would be *sweeping revolutionary change,* however. at least i wouldn't think so. partly because you would have to really, really love thinking about death, poverty, and disappointment.

i don't know if i would really want a mash-up of acephale and the frankfurt school to become an ideology of itself. in general i think political movements are largely philosophical ideas compressed and become evangelical, repurposed and ready-to-order for people who don't like to ruin their whole lives dwelling in dark caves.

but it's something worth thinking about, i guess.

[Anonymous No.10978142]

and because we live in a golden age of youtube, we can even post stuff like this directly into the thread, just to keep the hearth-fires burning.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5XCnGuK8CVc

bataille and girard are indeed a Winning
>read: the correct form of losing
combination

[Anonymous No.10978158]

>>10977826
why is this book over 800 freedom credits on amazon?

[Anonymous No.10978245]

>>10978081
i might put pic rel on this (completely arbitrary) list as well. spengler's whole argument about the process by which a culture metastazises into a civilization - quality into quantity - is all a part of this.

but the idea would be a kind of resistance towards the idea of seduction or any kind of mass-movement sentimentality. capital gonna capital, but communism and fascism are both forms of reactivity towards a concept of economics that ultimately prolongs itself ad infinitum into wasteland theology, 'hauntology' and the rest. that haunting will never end. you wind up like derrida that way.

and it's not like derrida was a bad dude or anything. he wasn't. he figured out some crazy important stuff. foucault also. but sometimes i just feel like the winds are shifting, somehow. and that there is no mass political movement under the sun that cannot eventually become something totalitarian in the long run.

dystopianism or dystopiology would be things worth thinking about. it's not like going back to primitive society is the way to go either.

i did find dugin's 4PT interesting, if only because he seemed to find a role for eurasia in a new world order as being a kind of pan-religious sphere, this place that says, anyone with a tragic cyclical view of history is welcome here. that's pretty innovative.

i will, however, stand by an earlier forecast that sometime in the next ten or fifteen years some analogue of dugin will be shot by james bond.

[Anonymous No.10978405]

>>10978027
If you mean the thread that didn't go anywhere, then yes, it was mine. I was looking for Traditionalist authors who weren't the big 3 (or 4 if you include Evola), and from reading Glass' bio, he seemed to be /ourguy/. So, I went with him.
>>10978158
Amazon is not the be-all-end-all of meeting all of your consumerist needs (at least not yet anyway). I got my paperback copy through B&N online for $20 including shipping.

[Anonymous No.10978712]

>>10978245
Cringe

>>10969703
Gerard is just a bad Lacan ripoff

[Anonymous No.10978903]

>>10978245
>forecast that sometime in the next ten or fifteen years some analogue of dugin will be shot by james bond.
*analogue of james bond. But yeah, probably.

I also wonder if a Dugin emerges in the west. Like eventually frenetic western cyber-traditionalism boils over and becomes as tragic as what you can find in eurasia

[Anonymous No.10978908]

>>10978903
>I also wonder if a Dugin emerges in the west
Macron

[Anonymous No.10978984]

>>10978245
Girardfag, do you have a profession?

[Anonymous No.10979039]

He was the proto Jordan Peterson except left leaning

[Anonymous No.10979057]

>>10979039
But Jordan Peterson is left leaning.

[Anonymous No.10979067]

>>10978903
>I also wonder if a Dugin emerges in the west. Like eventually frenetic western cyber-traditionalism boils over and becomes as tragic as what you can find in eurasia.

in the united states 2016 produced at least one pretty good example: pic rel. glenn beck said it: bannon's ideology was essentially duginism for the US. he was crazy about evola and the fourth turning and much else. he wrote trump's bane-citing God and Patriotism speech, talked about Economic Nationalism, much else.

one difference is that dugin takes heidegger as his foundational guy and bannon doesn't. he seemed to prefer evola and god only knows what else.

>>10978984
no. with one happy, if short-lived, exception i've only ever worked fuckface jobs for minimum or near-minimum wage. i have a worthless double major from a good uni and a graduate degree from another pretty good one in a field i hate. neither really relates to philosophy or cultural stuff, which is all i think about.

clearly i am designed for some kind of shitposting but everything i read about the state of universities these days tells me that i should probably avoid that all for now. i've always been into reading but i never really cared all that much about politics until about 2015. i guess i just sort of naively assumed that university scholars and political figures knew what they were doing. after all, they looked and sounded so self-assured...

...so i just read and read and read and eventually just sort of tried to figure things out on my own. things sort of fell into place around girard after wandering through other continental guys. hence the somewhat idiosyncratic nature of my shitposting here.

i'm kind of like the wild man of borneo who discovered a shipwreck full of books and dead scholars on the beach one day and became deeply confuso-fascinated with what they meant.

[Anonymous No.10979077]

>>10969703
>French
>20th century
I'm going to go with 'no.'

[Anonymous No.10979131]

The philosophy of the last 50 or so years has been one long race to the bottom to see who can be the most "prophetic." This faglord, Baudrillard, Horkheimer, Foucault, Delluze, Althusser, Adorno, and that one Canadian bastard whose name eludes me are each facets of a singular mindset that has driven Western thought down a bottomless pit.

[Anonymous No.10979164]

>>10979131
idk about the hotdog school fags but foucault didnt say anything everybody wasnt thinking anyway, its just now instead of trying to explain how knowledge production creates power or that sexual orientation is a social construct cuz no one is gonna believe u can now just be like "foucault bro"

[Anonymous No.10979517]

>>10979077
>20th century French guy who is the opposite of every other 20th century French guy

[Anonymous No.10979567]

girardfag where do you stand politically and how do i become bigbrain

[Anonymous No.10979577]

Girardfag is both a blessing and a curse to this board

[Anonymous No.10979899]

>>10979567
where do i stand politically? i think junger had the right idea.

>the I recognizes itself in the other, following the age-old wisdom, 'thou art that.' this other may be a lover, or it may be a brother, a fellow sufferer, or a defenseless neighbour. by helping in this manner, the i also benefits itself in the eternal. and with this the basic order of the universe is confirmed.

>these are facts of experience. countless people alive today have passed the midpoint of the nihilistic process, the rock-bottom of the maelstrom. they have learned that the mechanism reveals its menacing nature all the more clearly there; man finds himself in the bowels of a great machine devised for his destruction. they have also learned firsthand that all rationalism leads to mechanism, and every mechanism to torture as its logical consequence. in the nineteenth century this had not yet been realized.

>only a miracle can save us from such whirlpools. this miracle has happened, even countless times, when a man stepped out of the lifeless numbers to lend a helping hand to others. this has happened even in prisons, indeed especially there. whatever the situation, whoever the other, the individual can become this fellow human being - and thereby reveal his native nobility. the origins of aristocracy lay in giving protection, protection from the threat of monsters and demons. this is the hallmark of nobility, and it still shines today in the guard who secretly slips a piece of bread to a prisoner. this cannot be lost, and on this the world subsists. these are the sacrifices on which it rests. - the forest passage

it's pretty hard to beat that sentiment, and junger walked through fire twice to arrive at those conclusions. in the end politics are only a mask for deeper stuff.

as for the rest of it, just read what you like, anon. when in doubt start with the greeks.

>>10979577
yup

[Anonymous No.10980030]

What is modernity? It is a drop of rain that fell through a mist and mingled with its substance. Now it disperses into the sea and colors it. Now the sun shines through it and the fish eye collects the gloomy rays. Yet it is enough to stir the heart to the love of old, the everlasting love which is longing for that which one lost. One's state of loss becomes the "I", the individual. And this individual is the response to the particular affectation of the ray of light. To behold pure light would be to be liberated from the need for the "I", yet to see it in its gloomy, darkly color one needs to *be* something to compensate for its impurity. Therefore the self. Therefore the children of each age are interpreters, created for their age, to give it a place among the ages. Each age falls over the earth and clings to it and desires to be loved.

[Anonymous No.10980051]

>>10974465
I feel like I disagree with this sense that philosophy has a direction, but other than that pretty much everything you said is spot on.

[Anonymous No.10980071]

>>10980030
there's more to be found in stuff like this than in all the tragicomic late-marxist exegesis in the universe. beautiful.

[Anonymous No.10980123]

>>10979899
If you like Marty Glass, you will get a kick out of this.
>http://www.sophiaperennis.com/80-questions/

[Anonymous No.10980155]

>>10979131

[Anonymous No.10980176]

>>10980123
holy smokes, what a beautiful link...

how the fuck do you even know how you feel about questions like these until you set your mind on them? just to think about these questions seriously and not be all about trying to craft a bon mot or signal.

i'm really looking forward to going through these now. marty glass, what a guy. o that yuga.

granted, i'm somewhat apprehensive about finding out what a crushingly dull vision i may actually have of the universe. guess i'll find out soon enough.

too cool anon. a kick will indeed be had.

[Anonymous No.10980212]

>>10979899
So basically he's a humanist hoping he never has to make the decisions of generals or politicians because the realpolitics of choose the lesser evil does sit well alongside a noble, benevolent species. It's the sentiment of live and let live. Which is a good method for those hard of hearing, given their proximity to cliffs and moral sceptics.

>Why not pose as a tyrant for fun?
The hand is not heavy, not barely enough.
>Three Stoges tied up by the reins of a camera?
What is there anyhow but a handlessness and the sound of the crack before the comedy is steered toward some end that can never be arrived at due to the task at hand.
>This is not going well.
You're telling me.
>I wasn't talking to you.
That gives me an idea!
>A sparkly thought bliss.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lw8ctJTF1ZY

[Anonymous No.10980231]

>>10980212
kill yourself
unironically

[Anonymous No.10980262]

>>10980231
it might be too late. i'm not sure if a thread so unironically concerned with girard and bataille can recover from being exposed by strindberg and helium.

we may be observing the mandate of heaven at work.

[Anonymous No.10980640]

>>10980155
Is this a recommendation or a rebuttal?

[Anonymous No.10980653]

>>10980155
Yep, that's the guy. I recall buying a used copy of Locke's second treatise only to find that this smarmy bastard had written a sickeningly condescending introduction for it.

[Anonymous No.10981825]

>>10980123
i'm going to post the graham ward essay glass refers to - 'the commodification of religion or the consumption of capitalism' - on that page you linked to here. it's absolutely worth reading for anyone following this thread or interested in these topics and ideas.

http://iasc-culture.org/THR/archives/Commodification/5.2FWard.pdf

some excerpts:

>While this is not an essay on Castoriadis, his work reveals a tension inherent in critiques of reification. This tension focuses around an
understanding of what it is to be human. On the one hand, there is no place outside the immanent cultural logic of production. On the other,
in order for there to be real transformation of and critical engagement with this production, a point has to be insisted upon that does lie outside this immanence—namely (here) “genuine humanity.”

>The question of what is genuinely human is, in fact, the crux of the matter. In order to vouchsafe the possibility of resistance, the logic of capitalist
production cannot be allowed to be a logic that subsumes all things. But the very inability to give an account of what is genuinely human
raises the question of whether this logic does subsume all things, of whether the consummation of that logic is, in fact, the subsumption of
all possibility of there being an externality, a transcending means of resistance, a dialectical other. Marx himself writes: “The inherent tendency
of capitalist production does not become adequately realised…until the specific mode of capitalist production and hence the
real subsumption of labour has become a reality” (1037). Antonio Negri argues convincingly that this “real subsumption” that “reduces dialectical
possibilities to zero” now has occurred.

>What I am wondering, in effect, is what Castoriadis would have made of a film like The Matrix. For capitalism to be possible, human beings must be impossible to reduce to productive-economic abstractions. In
Marx’s terms, neither they nor the products of their labor can simply become bearers of exchange-value. This is, of course, precisely what
Morpheus makes Neo see in the film: that human beings do need saving from their advanced reification and the advanced commodification
that maintains all their illusions of free, autonomous individuals making significant choices about lifestyles. The truth is that human beings are farmed in order to be used as batteries to power a matrix that generates their own false consciousness of living in a Western liberal
democracy.

it's still art, i would say, that gives us the required symbolic touchstones and referents we need to explain the theory and vice-versa. and maybe all of it so that we don't find all significance in politics.

anyways. major thanks for showing the way to a brilliant essay. cheers anon.

[Anonymous No.10981832]

>>10981825
fuggin' greentext y u no get along with copypaste

[Anonymous No.10981888]

goodmorning fellas lets get thsi grind going

[Anonymous No.10981946]

>>10981825
a few more quotes:

>As such, Capitalism is inseparable from Gnosticism—only there is a subtle inversion with respect to the body and the soul, an inversion that is worthy of Foucault. For it is capitalist evil that moves through history like Hegel’s Absolute Geist and imprisons the goodness of the material order; the body is captive to the soul in the production (understood both in terms of economic process and theatrical staging) of commodity values.
And like Hegel’s Geist, the magic of the money fetish (Marx’s language) lies in its power to vanish, “leaving no trace behind”. It erases its own presence by becoming “visible and dazzling to our eyes” like Jean-Luc Marion’s idol that can only reflect the desire and retroject the values projected onto it. Money has not only the “appearance of value,” like other commodities; it is “the form of appearance of the value of commodities”. It participates in a Platonic metaphysics in which its abstraction is consummated by its disappearance.
The power of capitalism, in other words, lies in the omnipresence of an absence that circulates in and through desire and is constitutive of desire—an absence that is at once demonized and adored. What the power of capitalism effects is a trade in bad faith, winning allegiance, through seduction, to the incantatory credo of credit.

>Commodification produces a spectogram or hologram of religion, a bloodless and disembodied “religious cast of mind”: a fantasy of religion, which, like an atmosphere, demands only that we breathe it in. We cannot say the real is enchanted, for there is no place locatable
outside this enchantment. Marx continually depicts the immanent laws of this world in religious metaphors such that his own representations mirror the mirroring activity of all commodity fetishism. He cannot find a place for an alternative social world, materially grounded, because his own writing circulates within and fosters the production of the orders of simulation and simulacrum, the theatre of spectacle. What is produced by this simulation is not simply the religion of commodification, the pop-transcendence of capitalism, but the commodification of religion—the metamorphosis or transubstantiation (Marx’s two favorite words for describing what takes place through commodity-exchange) of those socially and culturally embedded practices of faith into a misty realm. His critique of capitalism, which is simultaneously a critique of religion, is only made possible by taking up a position that mirrors from within the body of religious discourses, turning it into a bourgeois commodity. The communist can announce himself only in and as a capitalist; the atheist can only announce himself in and as one initiated into the mysteries of religion. The immanent circulations of desire only fold back upon themselves in an eternal reoccurrence of the same. This is the order of simulacrum.

>we are entering a profoundly post-secular age.

[Anonymous No.10981969]

>>10981946

>But as a concluding coda let me emphasize that theological discourse, however critical, does not bear the holy grail across the wastelands of late
capitalist democratic culture. It is not the antidote to commodification, or even reification. As I said at the beginning of this essay, “commodification
has always been constitutive of religion”—fetishism is first and foremost a religious phenomenon. And this leads me to recognize that there is the smell of moral self-righteousness throughout this essay. For what seems presupposed is that commodification (and reification) are bad things, evidence of corruption in the social body. Castoriadis evidently
believes this and pits his own humanism against such wicked forces.

>Marx is clear that even among primitive nomadic tribes, Imperial Rome, and Christendom’s Middle Ages, the circulation of commodities becomes necessary. While commodification is inevitable, it is not in itself a social evil. Moral enquiry and moral debate are only possible on
the basis of the evaluations of goods, situations, and behaviors. The operation of a judiciary requires both the atomization of individuals
within larger social groupings and their reification. Commodification and reification are not in themselves wrongs; nor are they simply the
products of capitalism. Capitalism produces certain forms of the circulation of commodities and certain forms of the reification of persons.
Theological discourse, and theological praxis more generally, cannot escape either commodification or reification. Escape is not the point; rather the point is to produce forms of the circulation of commodities and the reification of persons that critique and resist the social and cultural effects of rampant capitalism.

>Christian theology is a case in point. For some of its key doctrinal moments weave notions of exchange, debt, repayment, and redemption
into accounts of “making good.” Capitalism does not have the monopoly on economics—and in that lie all our hopes for cultural transformation.

that is a fucking solid essay. reasons why /lit/ is a part of a balanced breakfast. holy hannah.

[Anonymous No.10982118]

>>10981969
Maybe I'm a brainlet but there's not a word of any of that which made any sense in my mind. Reminds me of reading academic papers by women trying to explain Otto Weininger as some bourgeoisie phenomenon.

[Anonymous No.10982160]

>>10981969
besides the matrix - and fallout, which matters for different reasons, namely, because it takes the subject of the apocalypse as a thing which already has happened, as opposed to something over which the hero has control over - one of the most brilliant stories ever written on these themes was ender's game.

there is no concept of holy war without a matrix or a simulation, and no simulation that ultimately can stand as a simulation without being able to simulate or explain the concept of war. one of the key ideas of EG is that the war is not winnable if it is understood for being what it is. in order to fight the war at its best possible level, the war has to be a simulation which only later is revealed to be the thing in itself. and it's the same thing with all modern forms of war, particularly wars fought with nuclear weapons: the weapons of absolute destruction require tiny screens and vast distances. even the death star is a monument to cold-blooded bureaucratic efficiency. press a lever and a planet disappears. technique requires abstraction, and abstraction requires technique.

this is not to champion star wars as a magnificent text, because of course the whole problem is that it can only function by legitimating a different, positive form of ideological terrorism (and by making those who turn to the sith have their heads turned into scrotums). a more interesting star wars might take as a central character an anonymous Imperial engineer who lost his family during a raid on a death star...but this is to go off on another tangent.

simulation, war and ideology are more interesting themes. sun tzu says that in the end all war is based on deception. so how about the need for necessary self-deception, just in order to survive in a world where truth becomes by the hour indistinguishable from illusion? these are the kind of things that just fascinate me to the moon and back.

>>10982118
tastes vary. some authors just click with you, with all of us, in mysterious ways. there's a fine line between truth, meaning, and symptom, where the philosophical and psychological encounter each other. marxist and accelerationist stuff speaks to me, but increasingly, as ward indicates, there is this need to grasp phenomena like reification and debt in other than strictly dualistic or reciprocal terms. there's always higher mindfulness at work. like the sphinxes within dimly intimating when their riddles are getting subtly dissolved. it's kind of a relief.

[Anonymous No.10982238]

>>10982160
again, though, this is all to sort of get at why there was so much earlier gushing over planescape, fallout, and ultima. because games - well, the games i like, anyways - always do have this question about violence in them, the meaning of violence and this ongoing aspect of increased immersion, aestheticization, spetacularization.

so why is it then that they also contain within them - the good ones, the really really good ones - these lyrical meditations on the meaning of all of this violence? it's because great auteurs in any medium bring this irreducibly literary dimension to what they are working with. the far cry games pretty much always now have interesting endbosses who are absolutely aware of the conspicuous consumption of violence that makes a first-person shooter attractive. they all do it.

girard didn't live to see the era of videogames, but the question of violence and spectacle in gaming is a legit fascinating topic. games aren't like movies like this, you can't really be a passive spectator in quite the same way...although the more virtual virtual reality becomes the more the gap between the map and the territory becomes effaced.

even games like fortnite or PUBG are pretty close to being a completely hygenicized versions of the actual *film* Battle Royale, which is imho the most goddamn terrifying horror film of the modern era. it's almost a satire of our culture's own already bizarre tendency to want to watch other humans get chopped up by monsters and aliens. for all kinds of reasons. but mainly to try and make sense of the meatbag condition.

i thought ward's essay was pretty dope tho. and listening to the painful harris/klein podcast just tells me that we are, as ward says, entering a post-secular age. i think that's entirely apt. it's the enlightenment under review, the skepticism about skepticism, postmodernity flipped inside out, and totally revealing in terms of the flash-points of the new culture wars that seem to be everywhere these days. we get our politics wrapped up with our post-secular religious tendencies.

and it becomes these chimerical questions designed to inflame. which is better: equality or inequality? discuss!!!

and the wasteland grows, incredibly, in the midst of the most superabundantly luxurious civilization the world has ever seen.

[Anonymous No.10982253]

>>10982238
girardfag what vidya should i play while im procrastinating

[Anonymous No.10982305]

>>10982238
>girard didn't live to see the era of videogames

chalk this up as being another dumb thing i say. obviously he *did* live to see it, he just didn't write about it. the same goes for baudrillard as well. he lived it, he just didn't spend a lot of time writing about it.

but games are mos def the texts to be used today, i think, if you're looking to write those papers.

>>10982253
pic rel is obviously a personal choice but it is beautiful. for one thing it's a complete labor of love, a bunch of guys got together and made a completely free mega-remake of U5 on the dungeon siege engine. i love me some ultima but it's definitely one of those things where either you will dig it or you won't.

there's a reason people hype planescape, i'd check that out. again, there's lots of long dialogue and stuff. if that's your thing you will like it, if not you won't.

fallout 2. it's an old game now and has Old Game stuff going on in it. but for all that it's fucking brilliant also.

i mean these are games that i think contain within them some pretty cogent arguments for playing games (since you may have to explain later on that, you know, you're doing it for philosophy reasons...). obviously you should read books, do your homework, exercise, eat vegetables, blah blah.

but those three are all pretty good. they're all slow and provide pretty slow-drip dopamine hits. my steam library will tell me that i've put far more hours into games that are just 100% mashing the Pleasure Button ad infinitum. but generally speaking i would say i racked up the most time playing games like that because i was achingly fucking depressed.

when i'm not looking for pure escapism, i recommend games that have some more lit-crit value, such as those above. there are others i'm probably forgetting, but those three are all good, for various reasons.

[Anonymous No.10982314]

>>10982160
I am a Schopenhauer man who has never read Hegel or the 20th century French philosophers. Maybe I will at some point.

My feeling is this: this focus on capitalism, accelerationism, and so forth--even the critiques of modernity by Guenon, Spengler--it all seems very fixed on the temporal. Where is the discussion of things eternal? Even someone like Girard, whom I am reading and learning much from, still seems fixed on "the future" and "hope for humanity". Yet even if "humanity" survives and thrives and all these problems are solved and so forth... human beings are still mortal creatures subject to nature, and nature is always at odds with itself. The lion will still chase the gazelle. Jealousy will creep into the human mind and the cycle will continue. Even if humanity achieves some sort of utopia, wherein people die of old age and live lives full of universal celebration. It's still not the point.

What is the point of sitting around discussing capitalism? The wise sage does not waste his time protecting the mouse from the cat. My own salvation is the only thing I really have control over, therefore discussing things not pertinent to it is only vanity and frivolous divergence into endless puzzles and paradoxes. Girard and I'm sure the French philosophers are full of interesting tidbits and so forth... But at the end of the day it is only devotion to God and the overcoming of self which is the consolation of my heart and my life. Everything else, no matter how fascinating--questions of logic and science and societal decay--does not truly satiate the longing. There is learning here but brevity has not been learned.

In the essay you referenced for instance, I see considerable technicality and I'm sure it's all very poignant when you break it down--but where is the devotion? Where is the real urgency? Nietzsche spoke with fire and fervor even though he made his ideal into something with could never survive that fire. This essay seems to be a bunch of jargon-filled rambling.

This is all very cute dipping of one's toes in the water but my life is ending as we speak. Am I to sit around waiting thinking about where "the world" will be in 50 years, 100 years? This does not matter. It is vain.

[Anonymous No.10982395]

>>10982314
i totally understand where you're coming from. i think i do, anyways. and i agree with a lot of what you've said. i'm definitely not a schopenhauer guy...but it doesn't matter. i am on board with these sentiments.

this the part i want to focus on:

>In the essay you referenced for instance, I see considerable technicality and I'm sure it's all very poignant when you break it down--but where is the devotion? Where is the real urgency?

devotion and urgency indeed is the thing. and here i can only really describe my own experience, so make of this what you will.

part of my own adventure has been a side-bar conversation with myself that occasionally turns into this fantasy/sf text that i always want to appear and never does. maybe it will someday. i don't know. but it's been a big part of my worldview, because in it i have kind of been testing out a lot of these ideas that frequently converge on concepts of *zeal* and *revolution.*

nietzsche writes, as you have said, with *volcanic* urgency, fire, and zeal. he is the sorcerer supreme in that regard, the quintessential sword-sharpening whetstone of whetstones.

but i have found in reading him that i have this increasing awareness of living in a world today which does not lack for zeal, devotion, or urgency. indeed it has an excess of it, but it often seems to me to be quite headless. people become, to use a petersonian term, animus-possessed. and for reasons which really are beyond good and evil.

to use a recent example, the harris/klein podcast indicates this. so did harris/peterson. there is no lack of urgency in any of these men: even harris, who is sometimes uncharitably painted as some kind of unfeeling robot. plainly he isn't. peterson's hellfire preaching wins converts and enemies at the same time. many others i'm sure see in klein a guy fighting for the cause they need to hear articulated.

but this is what struck me about ward's comment that we live in a post-secular world. this will *not* be a world governed by detached Enlightenment rationalism: those foundations were demolished (in part, this was necessary). but - i say this reluctantly - this does mean that we have to ask about the future of a culture with this in mind.

i am skeptical about zeal and particularly its relation to concepts of honesty, authenticity, and so on. stoicism is a hard position to hold, as is taoism. only mystics and madmen can truly be on the side of universal change, but i think it's a debased form of this to be an ideological crusader. and yet we live in a time that constantly seems to provoke and seduce us into doing so, for all kinds of reasons.

i think zizek was right, partly: the need to interpret again. but this is inevitably and understandably frustrating for many (>>10974465).

but i think it's where we are. things like charity are hard if you feel you are stuck in the middle of WW1. big guns blasting, over the top boys. that there is *nothing* behind the face of big brother.

[Anonymous No.10982413]

>>10969703
>grug want rock because other grug want rock

woah...

[Anonymous No.10982453]

>>10982395
but again tho. here's a model that can be followed. junger, who was no fucking stooge, wound up fighting for the Bad Guys, twice. he did so with honor and distinction. no need for zeal or devotion here, if you know - as he did - that that to which the collective zeal was being devoted to was completely wrong-headed. he had to conduct himself as a *soldier* but even in doing so there was this double need to refrain from doing *more* than a soldier was supposed to do.

the nazis, it should be remembered, are the original prototype for social justice. and the stalinist types afterwards, and the maoists of the cultural revolution. it doesn't matter whether they were left totalitarians or right totalitarians. the end process was the same every time.

marcus aurelius is another not-terrible example of what i mean. here's a guy who does his job, which is defending rome from the german barbarians. there is no need to drive them to the edge of the earth, crucify them, whatever else. the job needs to get done and it *gets* done, but you don't read a lot of devotion or zeal in the meditations, unless its devotion to the stoic ideal.

nietzsche's commentary on the stoics is, as it is of everything he writes, of course devastatingly accurate. but we have to ask ourselves about the concept of zeal, and especially political zeal, today. mob sensibilities are very hard to argue with, but that is what a mob always is, in the end: is collective zeal looking for an object.

and it's why girard is That Dude. because he understands that the mob is *looking for a cure for its collective identity crisis.* it is 100% the same conclusion lacan reached when he was inquiring into the nature of hysteria and the sphinx: that the sphinx is looking for a master, and all of its questions are riddles poised to *evade this truth.* it's why i can argue that girard is not just a cheap ripoff of lacan, as >>10978712 suggests, he's looking at the *phenomenology of the crowd* rather than the individual being in psychoanalytic practice. it's a crucial distinction.

existential man is not really religious man, but the lines get very connected once we start talking about hegel, heidegger, sartre et al. in situations of religious holy war, as zizek says, everything is permitted. the gods are not too far away but much too close.

consider again the ending of the dark knight: the joker knows all of this and absolutely depends on it. and yet one boatful of people declines to pull the trigger. in the Hour of Decision, sometimes the right thing to do is absolutely nothing. you just wait. you have no idea what for. but not firing the first shot meant that the second and far more destructive shot was not fired.

i haven't been to church since middle school and i am not a practicing catholic. but girardian stuff just makes too much sense to me. maybe it won't always be so. this is to be hoped for.

[Anonymous No.10982521]

>>10982395
>>10982453

one final point in this regard. i think i read it on mark fisher, but it could be somewhere else. basically:

when we talk about going beyond good and evil, we really only mean talking about going beyond good.

evil is a much harder concept to wrestle with. for bataille evil is an absolutely necessary concept in literary theory. it's probably a *horrible* concept to introduce into political theory. a guy like carl schmitt - or hobbes - has to basically proceed from the idea of civilization being anarchic or manichaean at the bottom in order to think how he thinks and explain the need for the absolute sovereignty of the state.

baudrillard talks about the concept of evil in his later work as well, although it's in a very different sense, since he's actually saying that Evil is this necessary, even revivifying process that prevents Good from being hegemonic. i like his stuff a great deal and think that he is a very astute commentator on the concept of terrorism. for me, though, terrorism is an end-boss concept in philosophy because it comes out of despair, crisis, tragedy.

but here again was girard's point on this. religion, as he understood it, was what effected a shift in human consciousness *away* from the aesthetics, and the politics, of tragedy. that was the point. and it wasn't a neat and orderly logical progression, but a complete paradigm shift.

if people today still believe in the radical emancipatory potential of ideological warfare, they are eventually going to have to ask about how their platforms in any way are distinguishable from terrorism. and i would submit that that is always going to be a difficult challenge. this doesn't mean to say it would amount to a refutation: after all, this is what crisis politics means and does. there's no time for talk now, we have to act!

and so on. this is how things slide into anarchy. but it's also why i think it's good to pour one out for a dude like vasili arkhipov.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasili_Arkhipov#Aftermath

of course, during the height of the cold war, the americans were high-fiving each other: we just had a game of chicken, and the other guy blinked, blah blah. this is obviously the official narrative - fuck you, we stood you down, big dicks swinging. but there's more to the story than that.

anyways. that was quite a rant. i don't know if that answered your question or cleared anything up. again, just sort of trying to clarify where i'm at on some things.

[Anonymous No.10982550]

>>10982521
sorry. warrants mentioning:

carl schmitt was not hobbes. he legit believed in the katechon and the coming of the antichrist. this is not something that should be glossed over lightly, because it has profound implications for the way he thought.

but i won't go into a huge ramble on that now. just wanted to mention that so that i don't oversimplify which is a whole other issue. i'll leave the link here in case anyone is interested in reading more on the subject. it's a heavy one.

>In Nomos of the Earth, German political thinker Carl Schmitt suggests the historical importance within traditional Christianity of the idea of the katechontic "restrainer" that allows for a Rome-centered Christianity, and that "meant the historical power to restrain the appearance of the Antichrist and the end of the present eon." The katechon represents, for Schmitt, the intellectualization of the ancient Christianum Imperium, with all its police and military powers to enforce orthodox ethics (see Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum, G.L. Ulmen, trs., (New York: Telos, 2003), pp. 59–60.) In his posthumously published diary the entry from December 19, 1947 reads: "I believe in the katechon: it is for me the only possible way to understand Christian history and to find it meaningful" (Glossarium, p. 63). And Schmitt adds: "One must be able to name the katechon for every epoch of the last 1,948 years. The place has never been empty, or else we would no longer exist."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katechon

[Anonymous No.10982556]

>>10982395
Yes, yes you are making a little more sense now.

>charity is hard when you're stuck in the middle of WWI

Yes but it is precisely this kind of quietness (that potentially ends in an invisible martyrdom) which is what I'm referring to by Devotion. The possession by the animus, as you say, yes I understand this yet this is not devotion. This is merely frenzy and is nothing new as Girard will easily explain to us, along with any saint or sage born in an age of tribulation (any age).

What I am talking about is a kind of fervor, fascination in the opposite direction--opposite to what? Take Peterson for instance: he is a single genuine person in our time and this is why he appeals to people, he speaks as though he is himself invested in what he says. Yet there is something missing in him. This may seem irrelevant but there is still a kind of youthful lack of self-awareness in him (you can hear it in his laugh and in his readiness to debate). Anyone who goes on national television these days and pretends to have mature discussions with anyone involved in the media... there's something very off about it. What I mean is, there is a kind of lifelessness, a kind of robotic tendency in people and especially people who are on camera. Forgive me if this is turning more into a ramble but: some of the early videos of people first experiencing "being on camera", there is some very weird stuff going on. Yes it partly has to do with the craziness of the 50s and 60s, rock and roll music and the increasing influence of the Negro on culture (forgive me but I think it is clear--the gyrations of dance music and so forth). There is a video of a Bob Dylan interview where he is answering questions from an audience and cameras are present. There is something very, very bizarre about it all. People considered with *looking* and *appearing* a certain way (the form), and creating some false substance and "meaning", which apparently everyone is searching for but all the while what is totally absent is a genuine *wonder* at life, the feeling of God, of grandness, of the universal above time and place. The camera, the lens, the eye, the implication of mass audience and being seen--it does something to people. It changes their behavior, the way they think and speak. Imagine suddenly having millions of eyes on you, things must run smoothly. It would be maddening, bizarre, and yet people have to acclimate to it, and today it is "normal". Peterson is on television having this discussion about these things, and yet, to me, the elephant in the room, the real *strangeness* of it all, of modernity, is not spoken of. There is a search for meaning, but people are fixed upon shadows, they nod their heads and look very engrossed and interested but... there is almost a lack of a sense of one's own nakedness, of being here, now, alive and talking to this person. Where is the sheer awe at being *with* another person? A true, genuine wonder at the miracle of another person?

[Anonymous No.10982591]

>>10969757
>But apologetics of any kind will only convince those who were willing to believe and just needed a little push.
Spot on.

[Anonymous No.10982616]

>>10982556
So this devotion I am speaking of... it often comes in the form of *listening*. Of just watching and looking. This receding is actually evidence of intense inner life and movement. Yet people do not know these people because they are looking for the exact opposite. They want to listen to the mouth that is speaking on the television. They want to talk about *the thing* which is in fashion, which is "relevant". Devotion is looking at the others around you looking at the spectacle, and thinking that these people and their looking at the spectacle is itself the real spectacle, and you are their wonder why these people don't see *it*. They don't see *each other*. They don't see *themselves*. They are missing the true miracle.

There is an awakening which has not occurred. The fixation on space travel, mars, technology, AI and so forth, "the future", it is all really fascinating, yes. But in relation to the self, to the very vibrancy of consciousness, all these things are just ideas, and very banal in comparison to... well, what is *real*. The awakening I am speaking of is: people's eyes are all fixed on certain places. But once a person peels off this veil of spectacle, all of the sudden, I can look at a spot on the wall... and just begin to ask, "What even is this? Where am I? Why are there walls around me?" This kind of state is what stops people from fighting in said wars and from heating up in "debates". They remember that what they are doing is absurd and strange and that their is real life happening around them, in the flower before it is rolled over by a tank. In the peaceful, undisturbed rays of light shining over every day regardless of its twists and turns.

He who has seen the sun, truly seen it... who could look away? Who could turn back to the miserable swamp, the facade of the bustle of the city? When have these philosophers of recent days spoken of the sun, like the humble and beautiful sages of the ancient worlds? Correct me if I am wrong! Where are the true disciples of light? Today it is all Lucifer, the false light, the vanity of the morning star trying to outshine the dawn. What's needed to today, as with every day, is not complexity, but merely someone with their finger pointing to the sun. Yet everyone disregards it as something banal... "Ack, it is to simplistic" and "no, no we must dismantle the such and such and rethink this and that and deconstruct and on and on and on." Of course, what is the point of all this? What is the goal of removing the clutter? Nothing but to let the light in!! Yet when will they speak of this light? It is as if they believe the world is nothing but obscurity upon obscurity. Yes, yes! That is why we must look beyond the world. But when someone points to the light, the fools fixate on the finger and say, "no, no that can't be right!"

[Anonymous No.10982626]

>>10982453
>wound up fighting for the Bad Guys, twice

[Anonymous No.10982659]

>>10982556
first of all, no apologies necessary for rambling. /lit/ is to be forever praised for being a fertile place for necessary rambles. which yours is.

the thing with peterson is that he is, of course, honest to the point of madness. but his interpretations of derrida and foucault are uncharitable in the extreme. he even posted something about julia kristeva's connection to roland barthes on his twitter the other day, and i couldn't believe it. barthes? you're getting mad about roland barthes now? i'm pretty sure roland barthes is not the problem. barthes was a completely harmless, totally classy literary genius who lived with his mother and wrote brilliant essays on semiotics and professional wrestling. i understand where peterson is coming from but sometimes he just says the dumbest things. much as we all do, perhaps.

i guess one thing to ask about then is about the relationship of the natural built-in craziness that was always there in human nature, and then how it all became televised (and now internet-ized).

>here is a search for meaning, but people are fixed upon shadows, they nod their heads and look very engrossed and interested but... there is almost a lack of a sense of one's own nakedness, of being here, now, alive and talking to this person. Where is the sheer awe at being *with* another person? A true, genuine wonder at the miracle of another person?

maybe it belongs to the age of suspicion, where all intimacy is always-already placed in quotation marks by the presence of recording devices, or the profoundly sad need to take souvenirs of those rare few moments when you couldn't prove to yourself that you weren't a human being after all so that they can be posted on instagram.

i don't know anon. i don't know where the wonder in life went. but cameras absolutely fuck with us.

i mean why is /lit/ such an interesting place? is it because you can be anonymous here? or pseudo-anonymous? unfiltered? un-mediated? because there are no points to be scored?

but you're completely right. fame and celebrity - who doesn't have publishing dreams? who *doesn't* believe that they're a novelist, deep down? and yet few, if any of us, will ever really understand how strange it must be to be surrounded with cameras...

maybe we're discovering, through television and the internet, this weird feeling of having a kind of third-order conscience. the sense that everything we do is destined to wind up on film, in some weird way, whether we want to or not...somebody said this once about facebook, that it was like furnishing your own lifelong obituary. conversations taking place entirely in emojis that come to look like hieroglyphics doesn't make the case any less strong. just being there isn't enough. we want to have souvenirs too...

>>10982626
oh come on. i put Bad Guys in capital letters for a reason, anon. throw me a bone here.

[Anonymous No.10982683]

>>10982616
what you're saying about *listening* is absolutely the thing of things. it's why i became so all in on heidegger and lacan. that really is where the enlightenment happens, i think. just as you've said it. all of that. the nondual turn. aletheia > veritas. unconcealment > concealment.

i mean i could go on here and say something else about girard, but...i mean, you're basically saying everything i already feel i would want to say anyways.

suffice it for me to say that you got it mi amigo. couldn't possibly say it better than you have right there. all of our modernist shit is only so much wasteland to be traversed.

you nailed it.

[Anonymous No.10982702]

>>10970302
>>10970349
Great posts. 10/10.

[Anonymous No.10982708]

>>10982413
>grug want rock because other grug want rock

yeah, i agree. it's a completely ridiculous thesis.
i mean who could possibly desire a heavy weighted object? i mean you can't eat it, right?

i mean, the only reason you would only really want it at all is if, i guess, somebody else wanted it and so you could trade it for something. but that's basically all you could do with it.

it's surely an intellectual dead end.

[Anonymous No.10982714]

>>10982702
cheers m8

[Anonymous No.10983642]

>>10982659
Since you really like Yuga, I thought I should let you know about another one of his works: The Sandstone Papers: On the Crisis of Contemporary Life. It a collection of six (fictitious) essays on the crisis of the modern world, each of which from the different points of view of a psychologist, a nun, a Marxist professor, a professor of Philosophy and Romance Languages, a ‘beat poet’, and an anthropologist. I haven't read it myself, but I think this ties into his point that we are all "unconscious prophets of the Kali Yuga." It seems to me we all have a sense that there is something wrong with the world, but only a very few can correctly diagnose exactly what it is. Those who misdiagnose the problem are usually the same people who think the problem can be fixed, reformed, or reversed, and by doing so are unaware they are contributing to the unfolding entropy. Going back to your Dark Knight example, the key may be to do nothing at all.

[Anonymous No.10984227]

>>10983642
>we are all "unconscious prophets of the Kali Yuga."

i love this sentiment, for a lot of reasons. not least of which is because of the internal anti-scapegoat logic of it. the kali-yuga is not to be *blamed* on anyone. not the bourgeoisie, not the jews, not the liberals, not trump, not the space aliens. i really like this idea. we are *all* unconscious prophets in that sense. i like this idea a great deal. whatever this horrible monster is, it belongs to thinking.

>Those who misdiagnose the problem are usually the same people who think the problem can be fixed, reformed, or reversed, and by doing so are unaware they are contributing to the unfolding entropy.

this. so much of this. who watches the watchmen? even psychoanalysts have psychoanalysts - which is a kind of a workaround, but you know what i mean.

>the key may be to do nothing at all.
there's definitely something in this, the old buddhist idea: don't just do something, sit there. a classic.

but of course there are reasons why peterson has become a thing to. clean room, sort self, all this. it's all legit.

but yeah, anon, you've really sold me hard on marty glass. between that book, those questions linked above, the graham ward essay, and other stuff you've written about here, it's really been a fucking great discovery. there was a thread not so long ago where some anon was looking for correspondence between girard and guenon and i really struggled to give anything like an answer...pretty sure i just shitposted up a mushroom cloud as usual. this has been way more promising in that regard thanks to some of the stuff you've illuminated me on in this thread. so thanks are very much in order.

it's pretty brilliant too to have all of those figures talking about what's going on. kind of like rashomon: the truth is there but it's hidden by the overlapping narratives. in the end whatever the truth is necessarily escapes us is both a mega-downer but also probably a lot more important to understand than whatever the fuck we were believing in before just for the sake of believing in something.

[Anonymous No.10984324]

>>10983642
>>10984227
this is from a review of that book on amazon:

>the Sandstone Papers speaks to the myriad questions that arise in the midst of the passing moments--commuting to work, walking to-and-fro, riding in a silent elevator, a curious glance made by a fellow pedestrian, waiting in line at the post office, in those moments just before closing one's eyes before a night's sleep. Marty Glass has a unique gift of being able to address the needs of the diverse seekers in an era that, in many ways, refuses to recognize how perplexed it truly is. The `signs of the times' are everywhere and yet an imperative question is posed: what role or character are you playing in the allegory called life?

that last sentence is so interesting. this idea - contrary to the absolutely summoning existentialist ideas of being the Subject Supposed to Know, and with everything that follows from this, whether from nietzsche or jung or freud...what if there's a much smarter way of looking at this?

you're one of these characters. a passing character in someone else's life. just a type, not the hero. one of my favorite things about ff6 was how it elided so cleverly the idea of the Big Hero Who Changes Everything. because that role goes, as always, to the one who suffers the most - and who was in that case kefka, the doomsday clown who is experimented on Because Reasons and Because Modernity. he's not the hero, but he does Change Everything, and he does it because he is a victim of circumstances. ff6 has no true hero, not even terra. and they are all struggling with nihilism, in some form or another. even before the apocalyptic event actually occurs within the plot.

when you aren't the hero anymore - when even heroes can't change the way things are - things change. now this is *not* the message parents tell their children, for obvious reasons. but i've been wondering about this like this for years.

in some sense, the yuga isn't really caused by deliberate action, of course. it happens for reasons only partly thinkable in terms of a mandate of heaven. in the west we call it modernity, capitalism i guess. but when the revolution *fails*...i mean this is where we really have to think about things way more carefully. and even at the end of ff6 it's not like the land gets cured.

the point is not to talk about vidya even more, given that there's a dedicated board for that. more that the idea of accepting that maybe you can only really practice a kind of fidelity to a misguided type...all of the hype about Be Yourself and Be Authentic and the rest - what if it's just not possible? you really can't Be Yourself. it just might not work that way. even baudrillard's 'i am my own simulacra' sounds kind of desperate.

i guess i'll have to pick up a copy of that book.

[Anonymous No.10984416]

>>10984324
one more thing about the yuga and why it's a relevant concept. basically, the End of the World is the 'desert of the real' that baudrillard talks about. it's also, in a sense, what could be argued is that thing that the mob is frightened of: what if *no* hero intervenes to save us?

well...what if?

it's *fear* that makes us do things we don't want to do. now, to be sure, allowing the end of the world to happen because we simply couldn't make up our minds is a sub-optimal outcome, sure. it would have been better if we had had a better plan. but our better plans got tangled up in our other better plans. like one of those dwarf fortress chain-games where by the end of it all nobody even knows what half of the traps are supposed to do and it's a complete clusterfuck.

but at the same time, the concept of yuga as glass explains it is just so fucking germane. there is the terrain of the thing you were afraid to see. that is what lies beneath it, that for which the now-ineffective scapegoating was done. neither so good or so bad. well, okay - it's bad if you look to cormac mccarthy to explain it. but even in that case it wasn't even so much the land itself, which was always still poetic, viewed sub specie aeternatis. what was really scary there was the judge. the judge was bad news.

but in reality there is no judge either. he exists because he incarnates so much of what we are afraid of, what we are afraid we inescapably are or must become. when things *really are beyond the control of humanity* even at its most feverishly calculating, there's kind of an important psychological process at work there. that nobody is to blame for this.

fucking finally.