/lit/ - Literature

>>10193508
the thing about being an idealist means, *you have to prove it.* right? and isn't that exactly where things get...complicated?

hammond isn't a philosopher, or a literary idealist, he's a *genuine* idealist. the forces that compel him to *recreate dinosaurs on earth in the 20C* are - what else could they be? - *childlike wonder.*

he imagines a world in which dinosaurs exist, on earth, and he waves his hand, and *that happens.* if he knew, or thought through, or read the scientific paperwork, he presumably would not do this...but nobody sees this coming.

*idealists have to show it.* they have to prove it. they *make things real.* they can do no other thing. in a historical sense, this is what luther does: he actualizes and politicizes faith by *taking a stand.* this is a terrible idea...but who can stop him? nobody. he is inwardly compelled to follow his ideals. bonaparte will do the same thing, in a way. he *incarnates* the abstract ideals of the revolution...

what's interesting about hammond is that his own desires to create a dinosaur theme park for children and families contains within itself consequences that nobody can predict. not even him. and even *if* he was shown them...what difference would it make?

idealists become idealists when they bring things out of their imaginations, and into reality. amber-capped cane in hand, he's already halfway to looking like an actual wizard...which is exactly what superabundant capital does to people. it means - it may even *compel* you - that *what you imagine, is what happens.*

no civilization has *ever* been able to put a cap on human beings' own desire to imagine things. least of all this one. but we really *are* on unusual territory today, because neoliberal capital basically *runs* on these fantasies. even if they are disastrous or apocalyptic. and maybe that is the thing about all fantasies - a *repressed* fantasy (ideology) invariably seeps out and becomes a part of the political realm...and an *unleashed*, or realized, fantasy becomes a disaster...

i think maybe philosophers get it the wrong way. maybe the point is to *start* with the disasters, and then work backwards towards the idealism...but of course, that's not as adventurous, or sexy...

idealists have to *prove* it. but a *proven* fantasy, a fantasy that crosses over into the real, never stays a fantasy. it becomes its own thing. it becomes alive. i feel like i am next door to some CCRU-type shit here more than baudrillard, though. that capital runs on our own idealistic fantasies, but that fantasies are never complete without this disastrous, traumatic, or catastrophic dimension, just as ideologies are never ideologies without that sense of the missing piece, lost object, or other. i think this was zizek's point also: the *actual* fantasy, when you really see it, in its fulness, in its self-sufficiency, isn't beautiful, precisely because there's nothing left to imagine. it's fucking horrible. and hungry.