/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.8899402]

Derrida BTFO. How can anyone take this hack seriously?

[Anonymous No.8899415]

>>8899402
This image forgets that Derrida's books contain anything but clearly communicable ideas.
Good luck next time, analytic plebs

[Anonymous No.8899501]

contrarian for /lit/ but i think derrida's time will come again. not right now b/c SJW plague but at some point when we realize all of the market-driven ideological propaganda that turns the wheels of our scenic disasterland tour runs on myth and ideology.

derrida's not sexy now for 2 reasons. 1, b/c poststructuralism goes hand in hand with globalization. and 2, because globalization is the enemy, alt-right mythology (or analytic STEMfaggery/technophilia/whatever) seems like the answer. ok

people dislike JD because he didn't supply any easy solutions. we want easy solutions because life is scary. so /lit/ likes to make him a scapegoat but what really grinds gears is that he wouldn't have given a fuck

i'm not a derrida apologist and i've shit on him plenty. but he's only an easy target if you think he wasn't aware of the fact that modern humans are always looking for linguistic solutions that only reproduce the problems inherent in language and representation

the west handed itself over body and soul to capitalism, but the real magic is done by advertising, text, and myth and derrida knew it. he knew that there was no correspondence between text and reality but that doesn't stop people from blaming him for pointing this out. if you go to your doctor and he gently implies that you are a fat fuck it doesn't mean he's a bad doctor. it means he can't stop you from destroying yourself with another cheeseburger.

derrida just wanted to break the spell he thought needed to be broken. but we're still addicted to the magic of text because we're afraid of the alternative, which is free-floating in zero-G. and we should be.

so that pic suggests that he BTFOd himself but all it means is that he was on to something. language isn't able to clearly communicate ideas. it doesn't stop people from trying, but they only reproduce themselves

[Anonymous No.8899512]

>>8899501

this made me interested desu

suggested reading to get started on derrida?

[Anonymous No.8899518]

>>8899501
>contrarian for /lit/

Its not really, only idiots dismiss Derrida off hand, most well read people here have respect for him

[Anonymous No.8899528]

>>8899501
>language isn't able to clearly communicate ideas.
So how are you able to convey that thought, then?

[Anonymous No.8899537]

>>8899501

Derrida, along with Marx, basically created the SJW plague though

[Anonymous No.8899541]

>>8899501

meh that whole period of french philosophy is done, son. except for that fag who died of aids, i like him.

[Anonymous No.8899542]

>>8899537
Not even close to true.

[Anonymous No.8899549]

>>8899512
start with heidegger

>>8899518
i used to shit on derrida a lot also tbqh. but only b/c i wanted a scapegoat. everybody does

>>8899528
because the thought is not perfectly communicated. it has no real beginning and no real end. it's fragmented and weird and it comes from a fragmented and weird mind that never gets to the bottom of what i really mean b/c i am afraid of death or my landlord or whatever the fuck else. it is communicated to other fragmented and weird minds in a fragmented and weird place called /lit/

there's nothing clearly conveyed or communicated. and yet you understand and so do i. partly. not perfectly. but maybe that's how it goes

[Anonymous No.8899553]

>>8899542
It actually is. What is PC other than applying deconstruction on notions like gender, race, etc.

[Anonymous No.8899559]

>>8899415
It's the continentals who are the real plebs.

[Anonymous No.8899567]

>>8899553
They don't though. While they sometimes make vague references to deconstruction terminology for the most past they are still very much idealists. They believe in gender and sexual "identities" and assert race essentialism

Statements like "She's a woman trapped in a man's body" is utterly laughable from any deconstructionist viewpoint.

[Anonymous No.8899569]

>>8899559
lol not even close

[Anonymous No.8899573]

posting randomly from my post-nuke folder

>>8899537
SJWs are a phenomenon. they were inevitable. the problem for philosophers is hordes of amorous well-meaning fuckwit disciples. anything that seems to work spawns hangers-on and culture-war profiteers

>>8899541
the marxist vein i agree. i like foucault also. but they still have better explanations for things than anyone. the problem and paradox for these guys is that they don't offer solutions, and this is why they get scapegoated. people want something to do without knowing why. they want to fix things but fixing things reproduces the problem and compounds it.

to be sure, quitting in some sense is the way to go: just transcend all of it and be a cool dude. but it's hard to do. i find it hard anyways

really i think we need to let them go in some sense because you're right, marxism is not the way. but neither is fascism. it's why zizek likes what he calls 'democracy' and derrida did also. democracy is super-unsexy and totally incompatible with liberal capitalism

this was a good read

>In a world set on objectifying everybody and every living thing in the name of profit, the erasure of the political by capital is the real threat. The transformation of the political into business raises the risk of the elimination of the very possibility of politics.

http://mg.co.za/article/2016-12-22-00-the-age-of-humanism-is-ending/

[Anonymous No.8899580]

>>8899573
>my post-nuke folder

[Anonymous No.8899593]

>>8899549
>2+2=4
How can a simple statement like this be understood "imperfectly" unless you're a total moron? Let's face it: some concepts actually CAN be communicated perfectly, if not anything else then at the very least the thought that some ideas can only be partially understood, which is in itself an absolute statement.

[Anonymous No.8899601]

>>8899593
Certainly, explain to me precisely what a number is?

[Anonymous No.8899605]

>>8899549
>i wanted a scapegoat. everybody does
not really, no

[Anonymous No.8899610]

>>8899601
a word or symbol (such as “five” or “16”) that represents a specific amount or quantity

[Anonymous No.8899616]

>>8899512
Wes Cecils lecture on him on YouTube is top notch

[Anonymous No.8899620]

>>8899580
post-nuke is sexy af tho

and it goes well with where i think things are at. i dislike modernist literature and pomo literature even more. i prefer genre trash except that it's mainly trash. i want rare & delicious trash-jewels and those are hard to find

it's why i live in a back alley and scavenge in dumpsters for delicious cultural morsels. i am hideously disfigured and i smell like pee also

anyways

post-apoc stuff is to me the spec-fiction genre that makes the most sense. when things are blowed up real good in the desert wasteland of the real. the fact is that what people find odious about deconstruction is that it is a continuance of text and narrative itself but beyond that there is nothing at all except you and other people. scary but potentially liberating

i can talk about this shit all day but i've already started to repeat myself tho

[Anonymous No.8899624]

>>8899567
>they believe in gender
Wait, I thought gender is nothing but a social construct for them.

[Anonymous No.8899625]

>>8899573
Derrida was very into Debord, this should say a lot to those familiar with the ideas of the S.I.. I still haven't read Žižek which is, honestly, quite odd, as it'd make sense for the case to be otherwise, any tips on where to start?

>>8899593
>>8899601
You two are about to have the shittiest discussion there could be; just read Derrida instead of pretending you both "got the gist" of it out of a post. I know, I know, this is a horrible thing to do, but to explain Derrida's ideas on a post is not possible, to me, currently, at least.

[Anonymous No.8899639]

>>8899610
What is an amount of quantity?
Seems like you're just reverting to synonyms

[Anonymous No.8899654]

>>8899624
>Wait, I thought gender is nothing but a social construct for them.

No, it seems the vast majority of them believe binary genders are a construction and there is a spectrum instead. But they don't go the extra step and see the entire idea of a "spectrum of gender" is nonsensical

[Anonymous No.8899659]

>>8899573
who do i need to read/understand before i tackle these mid-20th century frenchies?

[Anonymous No.8899662]

>>8899620
>i dislike modernist literature and pomo literature even more. i prefer genre trash except that it's mainly trash.

[Anonymous No.8899673]

>>8899625
Why should I waste my time reading his books when it's appearant to me that even his die-hard fanboys have a hard time defending even his most basic notions? And no, "he's to complex for mere mortals to understand, you have to read his book and even THEN it's not 100℅ clear what he says", doesn't make me want to read him any bit more. It honestly sounds like something a douchebag would say.

"Yo, my theory is really dawg, I just can't explain it you clearly tho lol"

Give me a break. I could read Wittgenstein in that amount of time and I'd actually get something out of it.

[Anonymous No.8899699]

>>8899639
And that's wrong why? Sentece-long-synonyms are exactly what explanations/definitions are.

[Anonymous No.8899731]

Honestly I have read a fair bit of Derrida and I still have no idea what the fuck is he on about. I understand that he's criticising communication as the communication of mental states, that are at the same time representations of objects.
I understand his point on writing, and that all discourse has been previously cited, you don't write something new but imbricate it in a new context.
Now, this content includes and is determined by the intentions of the writer so we can never pinpoint it exactly because his intentions are not accessible. But once a text has been written, the original context is not accessible anymore to readers, therefore there's always some indeterminability in the texts? Is he implying that a text can mean whatever the fuck the reader wants it to? Or that there's some range of possible meanings that the reader can adscribe? If mental states and context can not detwrmine meaning, what is he proposing? And how does all this tie with deconstruction, and with the critique of logocentrism?

[Anonymous No.8899741]

>>8899699
So you're saying that language is always ultimately self referential and thus perfect communication is impossible

[Anonymous No.8899754]

>>8899741
what did he mean by this?

[Anonymous No.8899772]

Disregard all French pseudointellectual hacks.

[Anonymous No.8899777]

>>8899741
How does that follow? Just because something is self-referential doesn't mean that it is unclear or arbitrary.

And again, how can you convey the notion that perfect communication is impossible if, you know, that very communication is impossible according to you? Riddle me this, homeboy.

If anything, deconstruction is self-referential and self defeating.

[Anonymous No.8899782]

>>8899777
>how can you convey the notion that perfect communication is impossible

Easy, I convey it (or at least appear to convey it) imperfectly

[Anonymous No.8899786]

>>8899772
This.

[Anonymous No.8899806]

>>8899782
How so? You say "perfect communication is impossible" and I understand "perfect communication is impossible." What the fuck did I miss? You've conveyed that idea perfectly, there's nothing one could misunderstand about that.

Just give up, muh boi. Wittgenstein and Lacan tackled language and its problems way better than Derrida ever could.

[Anonymous No.8899809]

>>8899782
>fake it until you make it
lame

[Anonymous No.8899816]

all of them french niggas are gonna be obscure as fuck in the future the only philosopher in the last 200 years that will remain is NIETZSCHE

[Anonymous No.8899832]

>>8899816
Nietzsche was an antisemtic, misogynistic fuck tho.

[Anonymous No.8899841]

>>8899832
no he wasn't

[Anonymous No.8899877]

>>8899624
You have to be pretty fucking dense. Let's say I hate watercolors while you like them. One day, both of us get watercolors (watercolors are a construct, this is pretty obvious). You like yours, it depicts a pretty boat on a laguna, and you hang it on your wall. I hate mine and burn it down in a gallery and call it a performance.

As we understand gender, a lot of notions are indeed constructions, while others aren't, but this is irrelevant, what is relevant is that through plastic surgery, hormonal treatment or whatever, there is a solution that allows people to move beyond it.

Now, I like watercolors and some performance art, but I don't think there's a way of fully moving "beyond". I think the same about gender.

[Anonymous No.8899878]

>>8899624
you're making a monolith out of a pretty diverse cluster of ideologies. There's a difference between the more rational side who espouse that gender is a social construct, and those who make youtube vlogs about 'omg there may be like 57 different genders how cool is that!'. Judith Butler's performative approach to gender is totally at odds with the kind of mind-melting twaddle you find shat all over the tumblrs of teenagers who try to define their gender as 'snowdragon'

[Anonymous No.8899887]

>>8899659
with the greeks, naturally. but the big three in the 20C are marx, freud, and nietzsche. everything continental is done in their shadow. heidegger is sort of in his own place, and he follows from nietzsche, and derrida follows from him. but marx & capitalism are everywhere and derrida channels some of that too. so things get tangled up. you've got a fair bit of reading to do. but get up to speed with marx, freud and nietzsche and the rest of it will maybe make a little more sense. everybody will be connected back to those three one way or another

saussure also, if you want to see linguistic positivism at work.

on an unrelated note the other guy /lit/ rarely talks about is roland barthes, who isn't a huge deal but i kind of like him for that reason. to me at least he was one of the brightest of that bunch, and avoided getting sucked in to infinite ideological meme warfare. he was the guy who proclaimed the death of the author and the birth of the reader, which is in a sense what deconstruction was supposed to be about. to me at least tho the problem is that it is virtually impossible to resist the temptation to make things political, to make having no meaning into a meaning. sartre couldn't avoid it. or zizek today. the more you try to not to espouse an ideology, the more you have to talk about ideology. it's the same with capital. every time you try to build a better mousetrap, the more you get sucked into mousetrap universe. /lit/'s own jordan peterson said this, the connection between capital and neurosis. things don't stop. they just keep going. it's all recursive. baudrillard saw it too.

so while all of this deconstructionist fun was happening in france capital arrived and scooped up everything. it's why the whole era is kind of a mystery and in a sense even a failure. but that failure is part of culture now and the way people think. people became exhausted with criticism and now are trying to find places in a world that that criticism failed to prevent or even explain. maybe it even caused it to appear. zizek today is in total despair. and a guy like trump cannot be ironized, cannot be satirized. so maybe now a new chapter begins. i don't know tho.

[Anonymous No.8899894]

>>8899841
>From the beginning, nothing has been more alien, repugnant, and hostile to woman than truth—her great art is the lie, her highest concern is mere appearance and beauty."

Let's face it: he was a salty fuck who couldn't get laid.

[Anonymous No.8899898]

>>8899832
>Nietzsche was an antisemtic
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ac%C3%A9phale#Ac.C3.A9phale.2C_the_review
Ctrl+f: "The second issue of"
You can read it here: http://i.a.m.free.fr/acephale/nietzsheetlesfascistes.html

>misogynistic fuck tho.
Kind of: http://rsleve.people.wm.edu/FNLAS_1882.html
Also: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/167504.Spurs

[Anonymous No.8899901]

>>8899501
never read derrida but i've been thinking about that concept that words can shape the way we see reality and how toxic it can be.
what would be the particular work of his which covers that topic?

[Anonymous No.8899904]

>>8899877
Did you invalidate my statement that SJWs think gender is a social construct? Because that's all I stated. You're the one who's dense like fucking lead.

[Anonymous No.8899910]

>>8899901
Read Heidegger, that's basically his whole thing

[Anonymous No.8899923]

>>8899904
SJW is a spook created by social media and ignorance. Pls leave your house and talk to ppl

[Anonymous No.8899927]

>>8899901
The three that were published on 1967.

[Anonymous No.8899940]

>>8899923
What if you're a spook though?

[Anonymous No.8899958]

>tfw you have to read all the postmodernists and the deconstructionists in order to properly refute them

I just want to live in a world where when I type CTRL + F on an essay, I don't get 25+ results for ''gender'', ''power'', ''women'' and Derrida.

[Anonymous No.8899971]

Why do you people comment on threads like these when it's obvious that you have never read the author in question and have no desire to?
What makes you think that anyone wants to hear your half-assed caricatures of a philosopher's thought?

[Anonymous No.8899977]

>>8899971
What makes you think that I give a fuck?

>muh butthurt feelings

[Anonymous No.8899980]

>>8899537

read a book and stop using the word "basically" as insulation from criticism of your idiotic claims

[Anonymous No.8899988]

>>8899402

POSTS STUPID MEME ON 4CHAN

BOTTOM TEXT

[Anonymous No.8899994]

>>8899971
they don't have the willpower to refrain from posting their bullshit, plus think they are tricking more than themselves

[Anonymous No.8899996]

>>8899887

i would say marx is the biggest one, though. you really can't grasp poststructuralism until you're aware of what a fascinating philosophical object capitalism is in marx's work. freud and nietzsche provide the concrete groundwork for the poststructural theory of the subject but they all agree that that subject is determined by its object, and its object is always produced under capitalism.

[Anonymous No.8899999]

This bro TKO'd Derrida with his work on language.

[Anonymous No.8900007]

>>8899988
T R I G G E R E D

R

I

G

G

E

R

E

D

[Anonymous No.8900008]

>>8899999
>99999
Congratulations.

[Anonymous No.8900010]

>>8899999
why don't you elaborate, anon

[Anonymous No.8900011]

>>8899999

>neofoucaultian body politician

pass

[Anonymous No.8900014]

>>8900007

ya triggered you by my righteous digits

[Anonymous No.8900015]

Post-1900 philosophy has done itself a huge disservice by turning into a language/meaning/word-game.

Semantics, in short. As far as I can see, Kant is largely to blame.

[Anonymous No.8900034]

>>8900011
>reducing Agamben to a neofoucaldian
Have u seriously engaged his work, desu?

[Anonymous No.8900043]

>>8900034

the entire interest in "The Body" over the past three decades is neofoucaultian. i have only read that book about "bare life" and it was like a footnote to discipline and punish, and just as uninteresting/masturbatory as that book.

[Anonymous No.8900054]

>>8900043

Discipline and Punish is great you fucking pseud

[Anonymous No.8900059]

>>8900043
Try some of his stuff pre-Homo Sacer

[Anonymous No.8900061]

>>8900015
So much this. I wish more people could see this.

[Anonymous No.8900071]

>>8899501
>language isn't able to clearly communicate ideas
How is this different from Lacan?

Lacan was telling me we are bound to struggle with using language and getting ourselves understood, what do I even need Derrida for?

[Anonymous No.8900082]

>>8900015
Does that mean the pragmatists are the heroes we deserve and/or need?

[Anonymous No.8900085]

>>8900015

This. Someone needs to drag philosophy back, kicking and screaming if needs be, to where Nietzsche left off. In 1900, funnily enough.

[Anonymous No.8900089]

>>8900071
He's used by autistic fags who aren't capable of connecting with other people to justify themselves.

>See, this French homo says communication is impossible, I'm not an anti-social fuck after all lol

[Anonymous No.8900096]

>>8900054

i don't think it's that great. he occasionally strikes sparks when he's talking about the procession of the prisoners and the different involvement of the working class and the bourgeois with the parade, but that's just marxism. i find his attempt to reduce marx to a historian of discipline in the factory environment—thereby buttressing his own idealist thesis as the determining instance of society—kind of underhanded and even a little plebeian. he does this thing where he'll cite marx as though he is on equal footing with the random court letters he pulls out of the archive. it's a cheap rhetorical trick that underplays the importance of marx to making foucault's thought possible—an importance which, by the way, he acknowledges quite candidly in the earlier essay on the author function.

and not for nothing but you'll never find out where any of these things come from in foucault. there's just this grinding necessity of the autoconstruction of "power relations." of course marxists, of course, have a name for invisible, omnipresent, and grinding necessity: it is called capital, and it has an identifiable material basis, if you only look for it. foucault is militant about not doing that, and jerking himself off to his own precocity in the archives instead (pic related on this last point)

[Anonymous No.8900097]

>>8900082

No. Philosophy should only ever be *coincidentally* pragmatic and/or utilitarian - if it is to be either of those things at all.

First and foremost, philosophy needs to be *interesting* again - exciting, even. 99% of philosophy from 1900+ has been so *dry* that we need only wait for a single spark to set it all alight, and watch it blaze away in a puff of smoke.

[Anonymous No.8900111]

>>8900089
not really. the awareness of how language shapes reality and thus the way you come across in interactions can make you a good communicator.
nice projection though.

[Anonymous No.8900129]

>>8900071

i actually just read an essay by zizek where he articulates the difference between the deconstructionist, derridean stance, and the lacanian psychoanalytic one pretty succinctly. in Derrida meaning collapses with the reader. the very process of reading in such a way as to make the text cohere undoes the text—as subjects, we cannot help but decimate, denaturalize, alienate our object from itself.

with lacan the object already has the subject inscribed into it, and thus is basically illegible to the subject because he cannot reckon himself into it. there is a stain, an incommensurability, a blind spot at the heart of the object—the text, the film, the mode of production—which marks the subject's place in reality, but which the subject cannot get "out of." it's like a malevich painting (one of zizek's references in the essay): we are always taking the white background for our object, and trying and straining to see around the black square, unaware that the black square is OUR PLACE already carved into the heart of the object itself. of course the painting literalizes the process, so the metaphor must fall flat. but if you've never tried to analyze something and run up against the point at which it is no longer clear if you are projecting something into it or pulling something out, then all of this will always be lost on you.

anyway, in short the difference is in where the break down of meaning occurs. derrida retreats into the subject, lacan tries to break the subject's world open onto the object. the essay is called "The Undergrowth of Enjoyment," and can be found on google.

sorry if this isn't succinct, i'm just now wading into lacan myself.

[Anonymous No.8900137]

>>8899901
see
>>8899910

that's basically it. derrida is following from heidegger on this, and it's heidegger who to my mind does the real heavy lifting with regards to your question: the metaphysics of production are so deeply inscribed on your modernist consciousness, going back through descartes all the way to the greeks themselves. where derrida bothers people is in i think going farther than perhaps heidegger would have wanted to go: that there is nothing like real or authentic discourse at all. and he does this because of course heidegger's legacy is permanently coloured by his involvement with the nazis, who show up the problems of excessive authenticity all too clearly. but you have to be charitable and read heidegger anyways to understand what derrida is wrestling with.

so as anon says, derrida's big three are important. for myself it's important for me to tell you that reading derrida before reading heidegger is really, really not a great idea, because derrida's deconstructionism will bother you to no end if you don't understand where he's coming from. this is in a sense what this thread is about: people calling derrida an obscurantist hack, etc, without having properly gone through what it is that he is responding to: heidegger's own very real and not remotely obscurantist project. the last thing heidegger wants is pointless obscurantism, but what *he* is saying is that that technology and technological thinking, which is on the surface so clear and direct, is actually hiding a much more powerful and deeply-buried question, which is the nature of being itself. heidegger thinks that nietzsche has basically completed metaphysics by effacing all differences behind the will to power, and he is deeply bothered by what that meant. but this is a derrida thread and you'll learn all of this by reading heidegger.

so don't read derrida before reading heidegger or you will blame derrida for not solving a problem that heidegger's own compromised project only disastrously re-produced - and which was itself a continuance of nietzsche, who *in turn* was not oblique in his disregard for anti-semitism...

>>8899996
no doubt. and you clearly know what you're talking about. the thing about the big three is that you can really begin from any one of them: whether marx is the place to begin, or freud, or nietzsche. they all make pretty compelling arguments. and so the 20C guys wind up sort of like venn diagrams laid overtop of them. baudrillard starts as a marxist, then becomes a nietzschean; derrida stays with heidegger, but writes about marx and politics; lacan reads heidegger, freud and nietzsche; foucault is a nietzschean, but he's also on the left; sartre reads heidegger, but marx as well; and so on. so freudo-marxism forms this one-two punch, but nietzsche's thought seems to be irrefutable, and heidegger's continuance of him leads to the nazis...it's a fascinating, but bewildering, car-crash of ideas.

cont'd

[Anonymous No.8900141]

>>8900111
Shut up. When your mom sucks my dick she has to pay me, you brain-dead fuck.

[Anonymous No.8900145]

>>8900141
Jesus.

[Anonymous No.8900146]

>>8900137

>foucault is a nietzschean, but he's also on the left

And that's why he's a joke to anyone who's actually read Nietzsche.

[Anonymous No.8900153]

>>8900015
>>8900085
Deleuze's molecularisation of philosophy is probably the absolute limit of non-semantic philosophical thought– beyond that and you stray into the territories of techno-occultism and other weird shit that goes on in the cold dark of cultish cyberspace communities. whether or not you accept Deleuze's notion of philosophy as genuinely productive (in the sense of concept-making), it has to be said he bears one of the few genuinely innovative responses to nietzsche

[Anonymous No.8900155]

>>8899537

From my experience, the problem with the whole 1960s crowd, specifically in relation to the way their ideas have been disseminated through US colleges, isn't really their ideas. It has more to do with the way they're taught to students.

I don't go to a US college, but the unis of the UK have been Americanized to the point where they're basically indistinguishable. And in the humanities department I study in, which is an English Literature department, but I assume other departments are not a million miles away from being like this, the way that these thinkers--Derrida, Lacan, Foucault, Frankfurt School--were introduced to us in first year, was through a combination of selected essays in an anthology, and through references to their ideas in lectures, with the lecturer not actually contextualizing or explaining the idea.

Since most students don't do their own work on these thinkers, the only exposure they get to them is assigned reading and lectures.

I don't claim to be an expert on the post-moderns, but I can read, which is more than you can say for 90% of humanities students. When I hear my lecturers make use of the concepts of a Foucault or a Derrida, they're usually making pretty obvious interpretative mistakes which always betray a lack of background knowledge of where the theory comes from. They then pass these decontextualized fragments of insight onto the students, communicating them very badly (because humanities lecturers are obscurantist frauds, and not the good kind of obscurantist frauds either), leading to the students having a misinterpretation of a misinterpretation.

If you confronted them about this, they'd mumble something about Barthes and how there is no true interpretations, and would cite their misinterpretation of these thinkers as evidence for this. Which is obviously bullshit, because you can believe in a multiplicity of interpretations without believing anything goes and we should all be absolutely mercenary in the way we engage with texts.

These motley readings of the original work, distorted (very postmodern it has to be said) beyond recognition, are commandeered for political purposes. Which is how you get the SJW types who mix postmodern theory with their own grand-narrative, oblivious to the contradiction of doing so.

The original anon is right in saying that these thinkers will all have a renaissance once the SJW shit-storm has cleared, and they are no longer associated with them. They should never have been associated with them in the first place. I'm honestly not convinced that my lecturers, all mad SJWs without exception, have actually read them.

Fucking mental desu

>inb4 ur uni a shit

It's not oxford, but it's one of the oldest and most prestigious unis in my country, especially for humanities degrees. Or at least it used to be before the SJW plague hit.

Also why the fuck do these people always fetishize Barthes "DotA" when "What is an Author?" is obviously the more nuanced and mature essay?

[Anonymous No.8900163]

>>8900155

>Also why the fuck do these people always fetishize Barthes "DotA"

HOTS is better, scrub.

[Anonymous No.8900170]

>>8900096

>Foucault can be reduced to marxism

''i find his attempt to reduce marx to a historian of discipline in the factory environment''

Aren't you just reducing Foucault to a marxist?

Marx is not Engels.

Marx is about structures and their reproductions ,Foucault is concerned with devices.

Marx said mostly nothing concerning the concept of pouvoir-savoir, only pouvoir-propriété.

[Anonymous No.8900172]

>>8900153

>beyond that and you stray into the territories of techno-occultism and other weird shit that goes on in the cold dark of cultish cyberspace communities

So you're saying Nick Land is the next step in the evolution of philosophy?

Awesome.

[Anonymous No.8900178]

>>8900141
think you're confusing my mom for your mom. she pays you before sucking your dick?

[Anonymous No.8900179]

>>8900129

Zizek of course puts it clearly, i should have just quoted: "The gaze marks the point in the object (the picture) from which the viewing subject is already gazed at: it is the object which is gazing at me."

So for Derrida, say, the "gaze" which always breaks down, which fails to get at meaning, is a determination of the constitution of the subject, a subject whose act of gazing is destructive to the natural object. but for lacan, every object has already presupposed the subject meant to gaze at it, and it is not the subject who denaturalizes the object, but rather the object that very precisely naturalizes the subject who is meant to view it.

the parallel is of course to Althusser's theory of ideology: there, ideology is like a shout in the street, to which we instinctively reply, knowing somehow it was meant to us. we are pulled out of our dumb, half-conscious reality as individuals and pulled into a subject-object relation that determines our place AS subject.

[Anonymous No.8900184]

>>8900172
No, I'm saying he's a step too far into a very dark and very deep pit. Land is certainly intelligent and he's a very prophetic figure but its risky buying into the cult of personality surrounding him

[Anonymous No.8900185]

>>8900146
>I read Nietzsche better than Foucault

Shut the fuck up kiddo

[Anonymous No.8900187]

>>8900097
I don't have anything to say about your post except to say thats a 10/10 metaphor desu so well done

[Anonymous No.8900189]

>>8900170

no, i'm not doing that. i'm saying that most interesting parts of foucault are the ones that are closest to marx. other than that i find he retreats into a vague rhetoric of "technologies" and "devices" and "techniques" which, again, spring up from nowhere. he can't explain history, only report it in interesting and precocious ways. this is the problem the left has been dealing with for the past few decades: foucaultians applying this sort of "technological" alchemy to articulate their own neurosis without any notion of political engagement. which is fine, if you want to be a historian. but don't claim you're carrying the banner of 1968, as shwarma-wearing wolfkin foucaultians love to do.

[Anonymous No.8900190]

>>8900185

>I read Nietzsche better than Foucault

That's literally what I'm saying.

Foucault's the guy who wrote an entire book on the basis of some words that Nietzsche was using interchangeable.

[Anonymous No.8900192]

>>8900137

the worst part of it is when people who are wrapped up in the mysteries of this stuff get blamed for failing to produce solutions for which, to my mind at least, are best explained by the Taoists: just leave that shit alone. the more we talk about a thing, the more we need to talk about a thing. talk creates the thing. and where things really get confused is when universities themselves become industries and chase capital as well. perhaps inevitable, but this is what spawns infinite memetic warfare as everyone scrambles to be on the right side of history. baudrillard is my favourite example of this, the guy who is always held up as being the worst example of postmodern obscurantism simply because he saw it the most clearly and offered no easy solutions. he knew the problem was the production of Meaning itself.

it's why i am starting to prefer religion and mysticism to philosophy. especially Girard, who to me draws the correct conclusions about violence and mimetics and where this is headed. control over reality itself through signs will eventually be fought with real-life weapons for real-life $$$. and i think it's where we are headed.

also the thing i like about mysticism is that it looks really dumb when you try to make it political. i'm a big fan of Eastern nondual thought for this reason. my own feeling is that we basically need to get a grip on ourselves and come back to politics later on when we can afford to be indifferent about it. if that time is never then fine. but in the meantime i would like to see people bringing less gasoline to fires that are already wildly out of control. things like mastering a craft or a trade, doing jobs that are required, trying to get over the addiction to Capital...politics can't do this stuff for us. and maybe not culture either. we should be thinking about going back to older and simpler stuff. but that's my own personal ideology and even i betray it six times before lunch daily.

>>8900071
>How is this different from Lacan?
it's really not, and i love lacan for this. i prefer him to derrida, no question at all. lacan is a giant. for whatever my opinion is worth if you're reading lacan now just stay with that and go back to derrida later. way later. if ever. it's why i said in my first post that this is not a good time for derrida. but it definitely is a good one for lacan.

[Anonymous No.8900199]

>>8900189

Nigger I'm not a wolfkin

[Anonymous No.8900213]

>>8900184

>No, I'm saying he's a step too far into a very dark and very deep pit.

Well don't just state into the abyss, silly. That's what Nietzsche said we shouldn't do.

Jump into it!

[Anonymous No.8900217]

>>8900199

sorry chief, just a little ad-hom addressed to the big Other of university discourse to lighten the mood.

[Anonymous No.8900229]

>>8900213

>That file name

[Anonymous No.8900272]

>>8899501
Anon...... I love you for giving me the most sensible text for today.

[Anonymous No.8900300]

>>8899501

>i'm not a derrida apologist and i've shit on him plenty. but he's only an easy target if you think he wasn't aware of the fact that modern humans are always looking for linguistic solutions that only reproduce the problems inherent in language and representation

I don't really care for this sort of philosophy, and have never read anything by Derrida, but I admit there are some language 'quirks' that interest me. Take for example:

>"A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is 'merely relative,' is asking you not to believe him. So don't." - Roger Scruton

That played on my mind for a while when I first read it. If we say, for example, "There is no truth", that in itself is a truism of sorts - and yet that's clearly not what is intended. It is difficult, if possible, to express a sentiment like that without simultaneously contradicting/defeating it with the language we use - yet we can clearly discern what is meant, even if the language fails.

I'm not sure if Derrida/etc touch on anything like that, but I find the limits/faults of language to be an interesting subject.

[Anonymous No.8900311]

>>8900300
>>"A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is 'merely relative,' is asking you not to believe him. So don't." - Roger Scruton

this is your brain on positivism. there's really no speaking to people who think like this. that's why we have gulag.

[Anonymous No.8900322]

>>8900137
i forgot about hannah arendt in there, who puts marx and nietzsche in a room together: homo faber. and who also, as we know, had a thing with heidegger

there was a better picture i wanted to use here from starcraft 2 but i can't find it: it's the guy standing on a platform. had to use this less awesome one instead. i think that's the world we are living in since nietzsche, although marx detects it too: prometheanism, or what baudrillard talks about with reference to the sorcerer's apprentice. we just can't stop making shit anymore, and we now live in a world which is becoming increasingly autonomous. we must suffer because the economy suffers, but the economy is all there is now: market logic supplants every other form of logic, but we understand this through the failure of 'obscurantist' deconstructionist/poststructural types to explain it. the more we try to resist, the more the resistance looks stupid: but, as zizek says, the more we try to comply, the more we *fail to enjoy.*

so much of this has to do with technology and media. the desert of the real never looks like the desert of the real, it looks like plenitude and abundance. but now everything is smashed up together, we know that the world economy really includes everyone, and there is no escape from it. we have to make shit in order to make shit in order to make shit. the spice must flow. and there is no way off that ride.

except, i think, to go back to the old ways. learn a craft, learn a trade, get out of the cities, and repress some of the infinite desire to express meaning, to create scapegoats, others, all of that stuff. cities in the end just become industrial prisons that have no escape, and those cities in time get linked up with the needs of other cities, like a big perpetual desire machine. i would say that there is no marxist revolution possible because marxist criticism is itself an industry. the real radical break is turning off the computer and basically trying to just do what your grandparents did. everything in capitalist disneyland is seductive, and the more we feed it the harder it is to break away. in the end i can't see it heading for anything but a meltdown, but the real heartbreaker is that the meltdown will have been so fucking pointless. we will not have learned anything. it will just have been a meltdown. but maybe that's how it has to be.

and now, to get extra-stupid: when you steal the fire of the gods, and then the gods disappear, the worst part is that you aren't able to give it back afterwards. you're stuck with it. the sorcerer does not reappear at the end to save you from the dancing brooms. or like having a One Ring without a Mount Doom to throw it into. that's capitalism to me. to be silent and generous is really the revolutionary act today. to not say more or less than what you mean. but maybe that's a personal thing.

>tfw wanky

[Anonymous No.8900323]

>>8900311

[Anonymous No.8900341]

>>8900311

>implying having your brain on postmodernism is better

[Anonymous No.8900344]

>>8900192
>the worst part of it is when people who are wrapped up in the mysteries of this stuff get blamed for failing to produce solutions for which, to my mind at least, are best explained by the Taoists: just leave that shit alone. the more we talk about a thing, the more we need to talk about a thing. talk creates the thing.
Wouldn't the Pragmatists be closest to the Daoists here among Western philosophical traditions? Down to earth and against obsessive speculation over meaning, the meaning of meaning and so on?

[Anonymous No.8900418]

>>8900341

>implying you know what you're talking about
>>implying that's even a meaningful contradiction
>>>implying the retreat back into positivism in response to the destabilization of truth-value isn't a postmodern phenomenon

[Anonymous No.8900424]

>>8900344
sure, could be. i haven't read a lot of the pragmatists, but they're doing their part. guys like pierce are important (and pierce himself was ridiculously super-ultra-smart). barthes too is a sort of a pragmatist, in his way. but maybe that won't make sense.

the West does existential torment in ways that the East (or aspects of analytic philosophy) don't. we should know by now that there is no cure for the black hole opened up within. i like the Tao because it gets right to the issue: reification. the Tao is essentially negative and irreproducible. even things we like, like etiquette, are only there because something has fallen away from the Tao. And the Tao is *not humane* - this really is the thing. it is humanism, and in particular Western humanism, whether explicitly theological or tacitly so, via sublimation/repression/SJW-itis/etc that is bothering us. it's a big thing, the destruction of all myths, communities, narratives, etc. it's just not healthy. it's not good for us tiny fragile meatbags.

even Girard will say that all literary criticism is done in the shadow of the gospels. we're fucked up about the death of god whether we get it through dostoevsky or nietzsche or marx. we have produced capitalism and capitalism has triumphed over everything. now we are seeing that it is finally doing away with its maker - more like pic related than Frankenstein.

a little aside. there has always been a weird correspondence between sex and death in romanticism: Frankenstein, Dracula. with robots we are going to see things that neither experience death nor desire in the way that we do. they will be superior to us by transcending those aspects which make us both inferior and infinitely seductive: our mortality, our desire for mutuality, and so on. and we will bring these things into being that don't care for us, that we brought into creation precisely though the depths of our indifference to ourselves, to each other, to the planet, and so on. that's my own wonky prophetic bullshit, though.

anyways, pragmatism. it's a good look. it prevents us from being confounded, as wittgenstein says, by the craving for generality. specificity is not always sexy, is not always super-aesthetic. the mystical, the divine, is necessarily vague and beyond deconstruction. so is poetry. but we decided those things just weren't as awesome as capital. and now capital is going to do what it does, i think: take the reins. we're out of answers, and the infinite rancor you see with SJW shit (or the incredibly banal horseshit from the alt-right) only confirms it. we don't want civilization anymore. we only want market logic.

[Anonymous No.8901002]

>>8899971
It's just fun mocking something others have invested so much time and money studying. Reading them would only hinder my ability to say things like "Foucault is solely responsible the current crisis faced by Western civilization." or "Derrida legitimized newspeak as serious academic discipline."

You clearly don't know the joy of shitposting.

[Anonymous No.8901341]

Language and the symbolic order are a mystery completely unlike anything else in the phenomenal universe. It takes as much faith to parse simple sentences as it does to believe in God, only one is an unconscious and the other a conscious decision.

The only reason no one knows this is because this book contains no passages on anal fisting and is thus of no use to contemporary students or continental philosophers.

[Anonymous No.8901564]

>>8900418

>implying I'm even the guy that made the comment you were responding to in the first place

[Anonymous No.8901824]

>>8901564

>implying there is anyone on /lit/ but you and me

[Anonymous No.8901918]

Derrida uses language to showcase ideas.

[Anonymous No.8903901]

>>8900322
Cheers anon, most interesting post(s) I read on here in a while in this thread.

[Anonymous No.8903966]

Cool thread anons

[Anonymous No.8904003]

>>8900097
Philosophy is finding the truth. It's not supposed to be interesting.

[Anonymous No.8904023]

>>8900424
>The great person is ahead of their time, the smart make something out of it, and the blockhead, sets themselves against it

I like you and what you've written but i don't think there's any "going back"

[Anonymous No.8904315]

>>8900179
>it is the object which is gazing at me
>it is the object which is gazing at me

What?

Is he referring to art? Or objects of any kind? Like an apple. Is the apple gazing at me?

I'm gonna guess he's not really saying that but that we give to the object a value that includes being-perceived. But then you say...

>but for lacan, every object has already presupposed the subject meant to gaze at it, and it is not the subject who denaturalizes the object, but rather the object that very precisely naturalizes the subject who is meant to view it.

Like there's some teleology intrinsic in things that appeals to the eye/ being perceived?

Fuck

[Anonymous No.8904344]

>>8904315
>Like there's some teleology intrinsic in things that appeals to the eye/ being perceived?
>Like an apple. Is the apple gazing at me?
Anon, if fruits and flowers are attractive to animals, plants can better spread their seed around...

>Fuck
THERE IS NO ESCAPE

[Anonymous No.8904418]

>>8904344
Is this what lacan is saying?
Or what zizek is saying?
Or what anon is saying?
Who speaks these diatribes?

[Anonymous No.8904425]

I thought it was pretty clear on how useless words can be.

[Anonymous No.8904452]

>>8904418

it matters little. your confusion is already carved into the enunciation.

[Anonymous No.8904460]

>>8899402
Forgive him for trying.

[Anonymous No.8904468]

>>8904418
If you want to trace this line of thinking, you go back to Freud and Darwin.

[Anonymous No.8904697]

>>8904023

I'm >>8900424 and others. I didn't even have to look that up to know that's a quote from pic related. It's a line I think of often.

>I like you and what you've written but i don't think there's any "going back"

In a mass-cultural sense there isn't. Individually, we can. But this is the problem: how to wrench your own sense of individuality back from mass reification and spectacle. Becoming a Taoist riverboat captain is one way. There are others.

But if we want to stay surfing the great waves of criticism and dialectic for a moment longer...you could also say that there may not be any "going forward" either. I think that is what makes the present age fascinating: I might even be tempted to call it axial on a planetary scale. I also think that it is a particular quirk of intellectual history that right when things cannot seem to go any further in one direction they tend to mysteriously spawn or engender their opposites. Socrates emerges out of a culture of sophistry; the scientific revolution and the renaissance begin from medieval monks going out to explore the world, trusting that all they are going to find is God; the crowned heads of Europe believed the First World War would be over by Christmas 1914. Paradigm shifts, in other words. Brought about by critical masses of common sense. We do these things time and again.

Now that is a highly hyperbolic and even gnostic remark, but I think it's interesting. Jaspers' axial age theory is to my mind pretty compelling: everyone moves from the country to the city, and it's the birth of great psychology and wisdom traditions. Maybe we're on the verge of repeating that now on a planetary scale. Capitalism puts us all in cities, and this is what bothers us: we're all smashed into this thing together, suddenly, and we need a new way of thinking.

It's a terrifying time, but it's also a tremendously interesting one. If we're prepared to jump through a few psychological/intellectual wormholes.

And the fact is that other people today are very smart and very sensitive. We are, increasingly, coming to think the same things about the same things. There is potential in that. Not revolutionary potential. Maybe just something like a common understanding. To me that would be all that is required. In the darkest depths of misery you find the weirdest moments of optimism, things you can't even explain. I've had experiences in my own life that verge on the supernatural, but you'd have to get me a little more drunk than I am now to share them on /lit/.

In the meantime, philosophizing hyperbolically (or is it just making shit up? hard to tell, sometimes) seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to do. So thanks to you too, anon, for prompting some of this stuff. In the end the one thing that both vexes and relaxes is the sense that people really are all in this one big thing together. And that's good for my ulcer.

Let's not sleep lightly on paradigm shifts.

>>8903901
thank ye kindly gentle-anon