/lit/ - Literature

>>12867723
even with all of that said you don't just have to read all of this philosophy just to get to Nick Land. Land makes philosophy a pretty interesting project again, but it's more because his work requires you to go back and retrace all of the steps along the way, all the way back to Spinoza (at least). to me he presents a genuine no-bullshit Way Out of the 20C, which is a century of complete disaster in many ways, and we are still living under the cloud of it. it's been something like a half-century of postmodernity at this point, but the way forward now is through technology, computers, intelligence and much else. it doesn't mean we all have to sacrifice our humanity immediately, but it does mean not deriving our ideas of what makes humanity from the worst, most depraved, barbaric aspects of ourselves.

the two major thinkers of the 19C are to my mind Marx and Nietzsche, and before them Kant and Hegel. in the 20C it's Heidegger and Deleuze. a long and winding road that starts from Spinoza (and before him, Plato) winds through these, and can bring you all the way up to today. there is some kind of story being told here, and it invites a lot of other things as well - mainly the rise of technology in our lives, but also international policy, the meanings of the world wars, shifts in culture - the Foucault Effect - and lots and lots of other stuff. there is no *point* to this unless you are just interested in understanding, which i have been, and i have found those desires to have been pretty well amply delivered in full. i am now a believer in philosophy, even in a time of maximal cynicism, times when it seems that we have all gone blind and truth is simply a matter of opinion. but it is for this reason that i would prefer we *don't* go Full Stupid and just double down on whatever ideology works best for us, because largely this happens when we *don't* have a sense of historical perspective on any of this. there are reasons why we think as we do today. and it makes for wonderful conversations also.

>>12867736
see
>>12867751.
that is the answer. there's a lot of stuff that i am opposed to in those things as well! but i like to feel as though i am on reasonably solid ground in my attitudes. these things happened, and things today that happen are often echoes of them. this is why it's useful to understand the metaphysics that underlie them, the historical contexts, much else. mainly so that in trying to accomplish what we want we don't just wind up repeating the past, over and over again...

and also because it's fascinating as fuck to unlock the philosophers, learn a new concept. there's really nothing else like it, the moment when Thinker X hits you, and you realize you can suddenly make moves you never knew you could make before. or, rather, that you always could make them, but you thought you were the only one who understood this...it's a wonderful feeling. the French Revolution and Marx are major, major events.

>>12631078
here then is what i know about Land: he is a man very much after my own heart, in a way, for sussing out that something was well and truly rotten in the state of Denmark v/postmodernity circa 1990. he knew, as many theorists did, that something very big and yet unknown was on the horizon after the fall of the Soviet Union, which was that capitalism had no off switch and no brakes, and that its higher meaning and libertarian impetus was not necessarily going to be compelled to play nice with the ethos of social democracies that had produced it, given that it was - to his mind - the ultimate product of those democracies themselves.

what makes Land interesting is that his contribution to the big story is one worthy of George RR Martin. in many ways, he Held The Line - while everybody else was drifting off into the far end of the linguistic turn and the many questions raised about semiotics by Derrida, Barthes, Baudrillard, Foucault and others, Land decided to double down on old-fashioned Marxism, and there he stayed - which turned out to be both a blessing and a curse. he was very much like a member of the Night's Watch who decided that it was going to be absolutely necessary for the future of Westeros to understand the nature of the White Walkers themselves, and he wound up becoming a sort of Bran Stark in the process, and captivated by the power of the Night's King. when the wall falls and the Seven Kingdoms collapse into warfare and intrigue with each other, Land gets to have a certain cold and bitter last laugh. but i've never really felt that it was a truly joyful laugh. Land is unique for still clinging to the magic word *Capital,* which marks him off as having, i think, some old or painful shard of his young lefty self locked within him, which torments him to know end. and i will always have a measure of sympathy for him for doing so, and it is why i think his later interest towards more ethnat concerns like race and gender are unworthy of him, but sadly inevitable, and also uninteresting for someone like me, who will always go on dreaming about a happier togetherness that doesn't require us to release the furies and tear each other apart. hence my love for Cixin Liu adaptations in the previous thread: there is a better way to digest the legacy of continental theory.

put another way, Land might be understood in a sense like a kind of Freud of the free market: he's on to *something,* of this there can be no doubt. but it is a work to be continued, developed, and explored, and not one that should immediately lead us to the worst and most horrible conclusions. Darwin, Marx, Freud and Nietzsche gave us the modern world, a world which is now due for another seismic epochal shift. it will happen whether we want it to or not, that's always how it goes. and if we want to have some sense of why that is, or how things might play out, we can retrace some of his steps, but we can also take our own side-adventures also.

(cont'd)

>>12620946
i might have used more thematically appropriate art tho...