Girard vs. Guenon

[Anonymous No.10177644]

How to combine traditionalism and the theory of mimetic violence? Guenon was a discovery for me. Now I read Girard and this is in contradiction with what I learned from Guenon.

Any thoughts?

[Anonymous No.10177834]

Bump.

[Anonymous No.10177841]

>>10177644
Guenon is a pseud and makes up stuff.

[Anonymous No.10177922]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9_Girard
>Increasingly threatened by the resurgence of mimetic crises on a grand scale, the contemporary world is on one hand more quickly caught up by its guilt, and on the other hand has developed such a great technical power of destruction that it is condemned to both more and more responsibility and less and less innocence. So, for example, while empathy for victims manifests progress in the moral conscience of society, it nonetheless also takes the form of a competition among victims that threatens an escalation of violence.

[Anonymous No.10177937]

Godzilla vs King Kong

Who wins?

[Anonymous No.10177976]

>>10177841
Why do you think so?

[Anonymous No.10178194]

>>10177644
Can you point out some contradictions?

[Anonymous No.10178663]

Hoping girardfag will come here to post if we all just keep the thread alive.

[Anonymous No.10178674]

>>10177644
>attempting to concile Girard and Guenon
>not attempting to concile Girard, de Maistre and Schmitt
Pleb.

[Anonymous No.10178736]

Meme right-wing philosopher Olavo de Carvalho actually managed to bring the two together in his work. It's pretty interesting, but I think it is ultimately flawed. I also believe their thought is incompatible, and I tend to agree with Girard's "darwinism" more. Guenon was just kind of resentful of his time (also, he dismissed violence as an element of sacralization).

[Anonymous No.10179849]

>no mention of Bataille
r u kidding me niggaz

[Anonymous No.10180583]

Bump.

[Anonymous No.10180683]

>>10178736
how did he do it?Which work?

[Anonymous No.10180714]

>>10177644
This is the first time I see Girard being mentioned here.
I didn't read Guenon, but which part of their work is contradictory?

[Anonymous No.10180720]

if he contradicts guenon just reject him and move on

[Anonymous No.10180734]

>>10180720

>being this much of a fangirl brainlet

Guenon was corrected multiple times throughout his writing life, by his own admission.

[Anonymous No.10180748]

>>10180714
>contradictory
I mean contradictory with Girard's thoughts

[Anonymous No.10180870]

where is girardfag?

[Anonymous No.10181206]

>>10177922
brilliant post, entirely explains why RG is a guy

>>10177841
guenon's aight

>>10178663
sheesh

>>10178674
interesting. some people just like to make things difficult tho. i agree girard, JDM & schmitt make a powerful cocktail tho

>>10180870
just taking a breather from this place to ask myself why the fuck i bother opening my trap at all

at present: not sure

probably a good scene

>>10177644
>How to combine traditionalism and the theory of mimetic violence?
here's one possible ten-cent thought: you turn your violence inwards. this is what the saints and ascetics do. it is a perverse and paradoxical undertaking but witness the fruit of the crusades: the streets run red with jewish blood and the entry of the crusaders into the kingdom of heaven is an unknown quantity.

there is a crucial aspect of masochism in all of these questions; deleuze knows it also. life is suffering. finding a way to grasp the necessity of that suffering is the project for philosophers and authors of great literature. projected and externalized exculpatory violence is exactly what makes scapegoating what it is. the apparent historical necessity of violence as a political tool is what makes for critique of ideology.

the central question is always violence. but this is what makes the crucifixion what it is. quite possibly the ultimate work of symbolic violence and its meaning for human civilization (with land's reading of kant's invention of capitalist time being somewhere up there, if you're into that stuff). it would seem to me that traditionalism would ultimately understand that the gnostic violence done in the name of politics and utopia would be a thing the traditionalists would understand as a sad and self-refuting symptom. mark lilla has some interesting thoughts on this ('The Great Separation', &c) but liberal society is just in a tough spot right now. b/c consumer happiness is not enough. we want meaningful suffering. and only zealots find that in gnostic politics, which rewards zealotry with orgies of blood and destruction.

life sure is complicated sometimes. but because i am not feeling like taking myself too seriously these days, i will use a picture of some hot dogs rather than something more conventionally aesthetic. if only to make life more difficult and irritating than it already is. i'm sort of on hiatus from /lit/ for a while. capital is placing its own inexorable demands on my life-time.

love to all. good luck out there.

[Anonymous No.10181238]

>>10181206
Are you French?

[Anonymous No.10181246]

>>10181238
no

[Anonymous No.10181257]

>>10181246
How did you get to know Girard then?

I believe that he will gain a lot of relevance in academia as time goes by, but it's really hard to find someone who knows Girard nowadays.

[Anonymous No.10181316]

>>10181257
i've just always been a philosophy wonk and girard was the last guy in a long daisy-chain of reading. he's also stunningly fucking brilliant and 114% relevant for today. the fact that he is also a stupendous reader of Great Literature is just icing on the cake.

it actually makes me realize that the other guy i tend to refer to a lot is land, who has a kind of similar career path, in a way: a guy who plunges so far into self-referential critique that he winds up driving himself insane. baudrillard did the same thing, with a little bit more elegance (though he got shit upon as much by other academics as by readers who confused his style of writing for being wilfully obscurantist, which of course it is not). the connecting thread here: the critique of critique.

but to go back to girard...i guess you could say it's part of a kind of desire to disentangle the inevitable relationship between philosophy and politics, which is the fruit of much political theory and continental philosophy. girardian logic is pretty robust (as is lacan's) but without the hegelianism...and hegel is a big deal. even land is in a way still kind of a marxist, just flipped inside out...now it's all about the triumph of capital over humanity, and so on. this is not to say that i don't like hegel...it's more the concept of revolutionary political gnosis that is the ultra-trap.

i don't know if girard will gain more relevance in academia...it sort of depends on how politicized academia is ultimately going to become. right now the politics of Max Outrage is producing blowback (Peterson, alt-right stuff) but, I mean, the pessimist in me says that this means the outraged simply double down and things get more hysterical...

...which means that girard gets *less* notice, but even as this happens, he becomes *more* germane...right?

so yeah. he's the voice of reason for unreasonable ages. alasdair mcintyre is no joke either, I just finished After Virtue the other day and i'm now feeling crushed as fuck and basically miserable, but it's not all bad. it's better than convincing yourself that you're seeing reality when really it's only fuckface desires and desperation.

the full landpill is pretty intense. there's a space for moderation instead. it's just that that kind of moderation, as espoused as it is by guys like girard or mcintyre, is *tragic* and doesn't lend itself well to irony or a cozy kind of centrism. works for me. and it's basically impossible to export also, which i also like. tragedy does not really translate into evangelization. you just learn to accept the asymmetry of things. things this fag can into.

[Anonymous No.10181357]

>>10177922
>it nonetheless also takes the form of a competition among victims that threatens an escalation of violence.

You have no idea how much this hurts me.

[Anonymous No.10181365]

>>10181257
>>10181316

sorry, should clarify one thing. girard doesn't drive himself insane at all, and the connection between him and land i didn't really explain: it's that these are guys who are essentially critics of critique (at least, that's how it seems to me). baudrillard also.

land we know about. girard's relevance is that he isn't a hegelian, or a marxist. he's a catholic...but you don't have to be a catholic yourself (i'm not) to be able to grasp his essential point. which is already brilliant, but is especially useful when applied to contemporary discourse (as >>10177922) indicates.

holiness spirals, purity spirals, critique-of-capital spirals...they're all the same. land's adventure landed him among far-right politics - and baudrillard flirts with these also - while girard's politics...are just the sensibilities of a catholic who never really wavers from his faith, and indeed makes one of the greatest apologetics for it, ever.

he's especially relevant for today precisely because, i would say, of the nature of criticism itself, which is completely tied to the fate of economics (and this is why the present culture wars are so disastrous and painful). the search for political solutions to philosophical problems, or philosophical solutions to political problems, is what lilla calls 'tyrannophilia'...and it really makes sense, especially if you consider the amount of influence that Nietzsche has had over virtually all of the continental thought that came after him, since this idea of the ubermensch & will to power seems so desperately and tragically honest.

but honesty, especially of that kind, isn't necessarily the best way to do politics (what is more honest than outrage?) and it may not be the best way to do philosophy either (since there is nothing to talk about other than oneself, the abyss, alienation, et al).

lilla isn't a pantheon-tier heavyweight, and i don't agree with everything he says, but gnostic politics is the state of things today. all things connect vis-a-vis capitalism, which is the frustrating part. here again though, girard doesn't go that way. he just stands back and observes the consequences (and the origins) of the mimetic nature of things...

and so does mcintyre. no solutions, only problems, the biggest of which being our own proclivity to substitute our own perspective for the whole...gnostic politics is really a kind of unwillingness to digest the real meaning of tragedy, which is completed, some would say, in religion...and we might even say that with the decline in religion has come also the decline of the ability to *deal* with tragedy, which in turn drives us further backwards into the *myth* that tragedy in the first place showed us how to deal with...

...i mean, the argument for a deliberate (though unconscious) regression backwards sort of makes itself, does it not? and that is why you see so much blind fury and wrath these days...

[Anonymous No.10181439]

>>10181206
>which rewards zealotry with orgies of blood and destruction

Glory? Or is that passe'? Guess the Generals are still dying in their beds and the middle class children are helping us sort ourselves out. Very classy.

Have fun, dog.

[Anonymous No.10181440]

>>10181365
and anyways, this was girard's point: that religion completes tragedy, just as tragedy completed myth.

if we are traveling culturally backwards in time (and looking at things despairingly, it would be hard to say that we are not) then all we are doing is opening up the same furies that were originally domesticated thousands of years ago. we look today for solutions, for something to fuck up or annihilate, because we are dissatisfied...but this is exactly what girard would have said religion ultimately does, that is its necessity. but now we are unbinding those knots, for the sake of more freedom, more happiness...forces that we can't even control. although this is my own landian capital-crazed lizard-brain creeping in.

and so people like guenon have a pretty consistent argument to make about this, when they talk about the parallels and similarities in esoteric religious belief...but all of it is predicated, at least, on the idea that we cannot create paradise on earth, now, here, today. the transcendent remains the transcendent, the sublime remains the sublime. and it *has* to be that way. we cannot create the utopia without a dystopian scapegoat mechanism: the guillotine, the holocaust, stoning, witch-burning...and indeed, part of the allure of fascism is that, like 40K, in the grim darkness of the future there is only war. perhaps that is how things can loop around on themselves and become self-propelling feedback circuits.

so we know, or should know, that we are no angels. i will leave off further lamenting about the politics of happiness and the inexorable forces of capitalism for another time and another place (those being: probably never, and nowhere). but. anyways. and so on.

[Anonymous No.10181515]

>>10181365
Thanks for the detailed rssponse.
I'm familiar with Girard's thought as I have read a few of his books and have studies some of his most famous students as well.
Girard is, in my opinion, the first individual to make Christianity a reasonable philosophical position in our modern days.
What can you say about Nick Land though? I always thought that he was a sci-fi writer and nothing more, which work would you recommend as a intro to his thought?

[Anonymous No.10181525]

>>10181439
i think you're misinterpreting me.

glory is a complex phenomenon. glory is *never* passe. and here we are required to do a kind of delicate balancing act. it would be very easy - and disingenuous, and embarrassingly stupid - to take a militantly anti-war or ultra-pacifist line. this isn't what i'm going to do, and neither does girard. he reads his clauswitz and he understands very well that states are *obliged* to respond to each other in mimetic ways. of course there is going to be glory there. there was glory for napoleon and there was glory in the peloponnesian war also. in the second world war. everywhere.

so this is an interesting question you've raised, and i'm actually not trying to say that you're wrong. the question is - from what does glory derive? ultimately from victory, from having a *just cause* - but what makes a just cause just is all too frequently a transcendental reference which actually isn't there. it only arises mimetically.

and now i am required to qualify this. there *are* wars that, in fact, i would say need to be fought. it's not an anti-war argument, and i'm not a 'middle-class child' helping to sort the rest of the world's problems out. this is precisely what i do not do. a stable and well-maintained international order would not be one of hysterical pacifists or scaremongers. it would only be, to my mind, one which doesn't glorify violence *more than it has to.*

does that make sense? there are brave and excellent and awesome battlefield commanders who achieve strategic goals with a minimum of lives lost. the more serious philosophical question is *to what degree are any of us immune to the attraction of a successful battlefield commander.* the answer, i would say, is that we *aren't* - the greeks get swept up, the french get swept up, the germans get swept up...*nobody* is immune to glory. so the question we have to ask is, *where does glory come from?* this isn't to say that it isn't real, it's to say that it is *incredibly real.*

and here is why girard is not a hegelian, because war invariably produces glory because it produces victory. but not all victors are glorious, and not all gloriousness necessarily comes from winning: sometimes it comes in defeat.

he's a complicated man, and so is your question. i would like you to feel satisfied, though, with the answer, or what i'm trying to say. does this make sense? girard understands war very well. it is not an anti-glory message, it is that in war - which is to say, mimetic conflict - *nothing prevents the escalation to extremes.* the more glorious things get, the more terrible the price is going to be. we are not immune to glory. gloriousness is a thing. it's just that the endgame of that is a lot of destruction. the cold war, clauswitz, whatever.

not every war has to be apocalyptic. but there is nothing inherently *in* war that is naturally self-regulating. you need reasonable people. that's not always glorious, though, is it?

[Anonymous No.10181641]

>>10181515
i have a lot to say about nick land. for an intro read fanged noumena: the first essay, definitely, and circuitries, machinic desire, meltdown...all of it, really, or at least until he starts writing in his own private code. you don't need to go into the dark enlightenment stuff, or his politics, or anything, really.

he's a kind of brilliant apologist for capital, but only gets there through turning continental philosophy on its ear. basically, he re-hegelianizes marx, but with a twist: it is not that capital is a problem for people, it is that people are a problem for capital. capital - as machine intelligence - wants to be "free."

it's an extraordinary reversal but to my mind a very interesting one. it sounds crazy, but i actually think it's quite a useful way of actually looking at capitalism from the reverse. and the thing is, everything that he writes about cybernetics is mirrored in what tiqqun will say. tiqqun are communist/anarchist/situationist/???-ists but the interesting thing here is that they and land are fundamentally saying the exact same thing: that cybernetics is a big, big deal. the real difference is that land, as an accelerationist, recommends, well, accelerating that process indefinitely, whereas tiqqun believes that it will eventually culminate in a communist-anarchist alternative. personally, how things end doesn't really matter so much to me...i'll be long-dead by that time anyways. but they're basically agreeing on the salient details.

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/tiqqun-the-cybernetic-hypothesis

girard is a much easier intellectual to argue for. arguing for why people should read - or agree - with land is harder, so i don't do this. i recognize my own obsession with land as being my own, and every attempt to justify why anyone else should read him usually amounts to failure and comedy, so i won't do this. personally, i absolutely and unequivocally think he tapped into something massive in continental theory that is still being digested. i think it's enough that land makes a persuasive claim that, whether one considers to be among the bourgeois or the radicals, life - and intellectual life is no exception - is economically determined. that's why he goes squirrely, i think: the place that is supposed to be *farthest* from economic determination (the university) turned out to be the most intense focus-point for it. land basically just time, space, capital, the libido, Lovecraftian monstrosities, &c entirely through his own skull and came out of it half-insane with what he learned (not, to my mind, any indication that he was wrong..).

so it's a pessimistic, even nightmarish, view, no doubt. but again, it's one of these things that I think takes philosophy beyond the linguistic turn, even the baudrillardian simulacrum...we really can't be indifferent about capital. this includes LARPing 'revolution'...which, in *exclusively* economic terms, would like like what? only more capital accumulation...

[Anonymous No.10181671]

>>10181515
>>10181641
in fact, i can leave you with this interesting post by a guy who (i think) has probably thought the far horizons of land's stuff even more than me:

"Your flesh is a relic; a mere vessel. Hand over your flesh, and a new world awaits you."

— The Second Renaissance: Part II, from the Animatrix

"Machinic desire can seem a little inhuman, as it rips up political cultures, deletes traditions, dissolves subjectivities, and hacks through security apparatuses, tracking a soulless tropism to zero control. This is because what appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space that must assemble itself entirely from its enemy's resources.”
— Nick Land, Fanged Noumena, Machinic Desire

"The essential thing that people refuse to understand, is that capitalism, for all its flaws, is still superior to the screeching xenophobic tribal communism of the average human monkey. The advance of capitalism moves civilization from the organic towards the cybernetic, and from the centralized towards the anarchistic. Nature builds in hierarchies; cells have mitochondria, organs have cells, bodies have organs, brains have bodies, corporations and governments have people; and in the future, AIs will have governments and corporations.

The cybernetic communication system of the cell is intracellular RNA. The cybernetic communication system of leaf cutter ants is pheromone trails. The cybernetic communication system system of the body is hormones.
The cybernetic communication system system of capitalism is price signals. The cybernetic communication system system of the government is feedback loops.

Capitalism is the absorption of man into the machine. Liberalism is an auto genocidal reaction to the selection forces of capitalism. The equality inherent in capitalism is standardization and not equity. If everyone has equal rights it is only as equally interchangeable components of a machine."

source: http://theanti-puritan.blogspot.ca/2017/10/cybernetic-invasion.html

so there you go. better said than i might have said it. and i'm not even remotely that hardcore. of course it's grim as fuck, but there's a kind of logical consistence in market formalism, which is ultimately where land's thought goes to (or one of the places).

nihilism, as brassier says, is always a kind of speculative opportunity. and if anything, all of this stuff tells me to *leave politics the fuck alone.* and definitely to leave philosophy *out* of politics. that is the proverbial crossing of the streams. the real thing to do is to understand that, maybe, "revolution" is not actually what we want...because why wouldn't it look exactly like this? assuming we don't want stalinism, or fascism...well, here's market formalism. more "revolutionary" than anything. is it desirable? probably not.

[Anonymous No.10181687]

>>10181525
>which actually isn't there.
If you're into levelling the individual from your seat at the left hand of God, then yes. But that transcendence is as real as the self is necessary, as true as the world can be inside of our mind. Glory is achieved in actualising your part in justice/revenge or even within the spirit of conquering.

It's systematic and prescriptive violence that undermines the value of these pursuits through co-opting the aesthetics of glory that are inhuman and ultimately doomed. Reasonable people are no more than the farm hands prodding cattle into line so that the slaughter house door isn't too jammed.

Being humane is inevitable.

[Anonymous No.10181711]

>>10180683
Well, by "his work" I meant his whole body of work, but mostly in articles and in the courses he gave about Aristotle and Louis Lavelle. His opinions are very pulverized all over the internet, and are indeed a very nice read.

He used to be in Schuon's tariqa, worked as an astrologist in his early life and has a sort of guru-aura to what he preaches, so he gets a lot of shit here in Brazil for that, but he's a smart guy, if you can separate the intelectual persona to the public figure. If you wanna get into it I'd rec two books of his, "A dialética simbólica" ("Simbolical dialectic") and "Jardim da aflições" ("The garden of afflictions"). There's also a new documentary about his life made by some of his students and fans, homonymous to this second book I mentioned.

[Anonymous No.10181716]

>>10181687
>Glory is achieved in actualising your part in justice/revenge or even within the spirit of conquering.
This is pre-Christianity.

>>10181671
Thanks again for the intro, but I think I will avoid him for now as his quotes sound like I.T language.

[Anonymous No.10181730]

>>10181206
>we want meaningful suffering. and only zealots find that in gnostic politics, which rewards zealotry with orgies of blood and destruction.
Hey, girardfag, ever read Eric Voegelin? He goes in the same direction you're pointing. Look him up, I think you'll enjoy it.

t. We had a fun conversation last time

[Anonymous No.10181739]

>>10181716
>>Glory is achieved in actualising your part in justice/revenge or even within the spirit of conquering.
>This is pre-Christianity.
Very true. This dialogue is a good way to sum up Girard's thought.

[Anonymous No.10181765]

>>10178674
Hi myrmex

[Anonymous No.10181768]

>>10181687
spooky aesthetics because reasons.

i guess the interesting thing about this post is how much i agree with it. i'm not quite surprised why you included the beckett laughing clip...the thing is that i actually agree with you entirely in what you've just said (or, almost entirely). you're quite correct.

>But that transcendence is as real as the self is necessary, as true as the world can be inside of our mind.

yes. but this is the thing: mimetically, all of our desires are shared, refractory, reflective. there is no truth exclusive to our own minds. that transcendence is what comes from being swept up in The Narrative - whatever it is. which, for girard, is going to be, almost invariably, a narrative of scapegoating and myth.

>Glory is achieved in actualising your part in justice/revenge or even within the spirit of conquering.
yes - *but only if you are on the winning team.* and this is his point. that justice, that revenge, that glory, requires a scapegoat. that "actualizing" that you are talking about means participation in the mythos of violence. we ourselves lend legitimacy to these things by that very process, and we are compelled to do it by powerful forces...essentially, it's a kind of masked or veiled panic to restore order and unity to a situation that has become loosened or un-stuck ("things fall apart," &c).

so again, this isn't to say that glory isn't real. the point is that it absolutely *is* real, 100%. it's real because *everybody else is feeling it*, and in crisis-mode, it would seem to us to appear that *any other response other than the conquest would be ridiculous.* indeed, we repeat these things, as civilizations, as tribes, as nations, time and again.

the thing is that i have a funny feeling you already understand this already. as i said, you've actually made the point brilliantly well, more accurately than i was trying to! so well done.

>It's systematic and prescriptive violence that undermines the value of these pursuits through co-opting the aesthetics of glory that are inhuman and ultimately doomed.
i think so...although i'm not sure what you mean by 'co-opting the aesthetics of glory.' if it's just propaganda, then yes. and this much tempts me to ramble on about the constant bombardment of the consumer society by the ideology of happiness here...but i will resist that temptation for now.

>Reasonable people are no more than the farm hands prodding cattle into line so that the slaughter house door isn't too jammed.
i would agree with this also.

>Being humane is inevitable.
not sure if i understand your meaning, but that's okay.

anyways...well said. being laughed at by beckett was entirely worth it.

>>10181716
kek. they do. well, thanks for prompting me to think about some of this stuff in legible human language, anyways.

(cont'd)

[Anonymous No.10181825]

>>10181730
i've had voegelin on my to-read list for a while. i've read some of his Order & History stuff...he really does make my brain hurt, but he's no joke either. seems weirdly unappreciated...derrida/foucault/&c get all the mad praise, but it's really because, i think, the marxist-inclined thinkers always do. they're more popular, after all, and popularity is a thing even in intellectual circles that seem based around showing the right way to show disdain...

basically, the problem with taking a tragic mode of things is that it's so unsexy. as i said before, i really got a strong vibe off of this after reading mcintyre: this sense of realizing that even the gnostic critique is itself gnostic. i was really moved by mcintyre's perspective, that philosophy is - or so it seemed to me - to be this profoundly tragic, humble, shit even *pathetic* kind of practice. there's nothing really sexy about aristotle (aquinas, maybe a little moreso).

but ultimately the thing is this fatal bromance between the critique of capitalism and capitalism itself. so there's room here for voegelin: the seekers, yes? the knowers? the gnostic eschaton? this is always what seems to be the fruit of tyrannophilia...and it's interesting to think how in those circumstances when we seem to get "philosophical tyrants" - nietzsche, napoleon, hitler, stalin - we wind up with these self-referential philosopher/criminal/jester/tragedian types. i realize that those characterizations probably sound strange or misleading, but really it's just because i've been up my own rectum with this stuff for a while...so please excuse my lack of formality (or even good taste).

land works because he finds this incredible market formalism: capital is its own gnosis, its own autotelic process. being an accelerationist is kind of like being a weird marxist gnostic in a way. but it's all the same thing. with land, like so many others, the revolution, the eschaton, is infinitely deferred, rendered increasingly excruciating as capital seems to run away from us, producing more and more evidence of our incredible sophistication and less and less indication that we might *ever* be able to know what any of it means...

it really finishes as a kind of poetry of its own, i think. which is maybe what disarms critique from within and prevents it from being turned into another theoretical weapon, another license for violence, destruction, and so on.

i will admit: i'm in a very weird place with this stuff these days. feels very much like floating in space, and probably sounds like madness. it isn't, though (well, i don't think so, anyways).

the point of all of this was supposed to be art for me anyways...

[Anonymous No.10181841]

>>10181768
>Glory is achieved in actualising your part in justice/revenge or even within the spirit of conquering.
>yes - *but only if you are on the winning team.* and this is his point. that justice, that revenge, that glory, requires a scapegoat. that "actualizing" that you are talking about means participation in the mythos of violence. we ourselves lend legitimacy to these things by that very process, and we are compelled to do it by powerful forces...essentially, it's a kind of masked or veiled panic to restore order and unity to a situation that has become loosened or un-stuck ("things fall apart," &c).

It is also worth noticing that the process even if you are on the "winning team", the losers won't simply decide to humbly accept their defeat. Today, we have weapons of destruction more powerful than ever so an exercise of conquest isn't going to end well regardless of who ends up winning.
Also, the Beckett guy seems to think in the old good/evil model. This is simply unreasonable, even if you share the same flag with the others, it does not mean that they share the same interest, or do you think that people will simply be satisfied in "conquering"?. Ultimately, the winners will wage war against themselves.

[Anonymous No.10181861]

>>10181768
>that transcendence is what comes from being swept up in The Narrative

And no one is swept that isn't apart of that narrative, making justice true for themselves so as to continue, contain and control the myth. Songs around the fire, roasted goats on the spit, turning and turning and turning.

----

I'm just lobbing them in down like Pollack, waiting for my esteem. Can't help but find your posts fascinating. Like to see how indebted you are to your definitions. Good times, friend.

[Anonymous No.10181862]

>>10181525
Which of Girard's works would you say are most essential to read, and in what order?

[Anonymous No.10181896]

>>10181841
>It is also worth noticing that the process even if you are on the "winning team", the losers won't simply decide to humbly accept their defeat.
yes, absolutely. indeed, being defeated is only likely to produce the stronger and even more powerful counter-narrative: redemption, taking back the homeland, revenge, whatever. "humbly accepting defeat" is a rare thing indeed. it's hard to do.

>Today, we have weapons of destruction more powerful than ever so an exercise of conquest isn't going to end well regardless of who ends up winning.
that's right. these are points girard makes also: states grow in power, the consequences of war become more destructive, involve greater degrees of mobilization and so on. the necessary question to ask here is: do they also become "more glorious?" thucydides believes his war to be the greatest and most significant of all time; certainly homer would have felt the same about the iliad (although homer is an interesting case, since someone like simone weil will argue, convincingly, that there is a lot more sympathy for the defeated in the iliad than is often thought); there are the wars of revolution, ww2, the already-nascent desire for ww3 that is building today...gloriousness is a kind of inevitable aesthetic byproduct that can't be ldismissed. it is very human.

>Also, the Beckett guy seems to think in the old good/evil model. This is simply unreasonable, even if you share the same flag with the others, it does not mean that they share the same interest, or do you think that people will simply be satisfied in "conquering"?. Ultimately, the winners will wage war against themselves.
i think his point was slightly more nuanced than this; he made an interesting point about actualizing things at the level of the self, which is to my mind crucial, and incredibly honest. and it part of what makes these conversations interesting: we *do* internalize things, at deep levels. we *are* crowd-driven beings (especially so in times of crisis). and so we *cannot* say that a patently glorious thing is not patently glorious!

again, all this to make the claim that girard's thought is *cautionary* - he's the last person to say, well, war is stupid. he knows patently well that, *if we were there, we would feel differently.* but then, of course, wars *end*...and we begin having to deal with the question of bodies, and justifications, and so on...

>Ultimately, the winners will wage war against themselves.
very probably yes. or to look somewhat cynically at the contemporary politics of outrage: the winners argue over who has the most victimized by their own having won everything. is this uncharitable? i'm trying not to be triggered by the triggered, but this is what i invariably wind up feeling.

[Anonymous No.10181911]

>>10181841
>This is simply unreasonable, even if you share the same flag with the others, it does not mean that they share the same interest, or do you think that people will simply be satisfied in "conquering"?. Ultimately, the winners will wage war against themselves.

Humanity is the sickness; humanity is the cure. Each animal is proud of how God gave them each, individually, the duty to their home in Nature. Pride in the ability to do violence is inseparable from an individual relationship with God, or with that sense of Humanity that brings harmony to the marketplace. There is no escape from this Daemon's trap. But we can definitely get a good drum circle happening.

[Anonymous No.10181925]

>>10181861
>And no one is swept that isn't apart of that narrative, making justice true for themselves so as to continue, contain and control the myth. Songs around the fire, roasted goats on the spit, turning and turning and turning.

this is absolutely true and very germane. consider also the dilemma of the one who *refuses* to be swept up: maybe they are the enemy, the next scapegoat, an ally, and so on. the politics of enthusiasm require total commitment, total mobilization...and they are, as you have said, without these ends.

land has made the point elsewhere, about atomization...it's much the same thing.

>I'm just lobbing them in down like Pollack, waiting for my esteem. Can't help but find your posts fascinating. Like to see how indebted you are to your definitions. Good times, friend.

mutual! i'm cheating on my self-imposed (and very necessary) /lit/ silence for a while...sadly, i have to do other less interesting things than muse on tragedy and philosophy here. but it's always enjoyable and interesting...and good for venting. always a treat to find a good conversation here.

>>10181862
all of them, really. essential? things hidden since the foundations. if you could only read one, that would be the one. after that violence and the sacred, desire deceit & the novel, the scapegoat, battling to the end are my go-to books.

but again, it bears repeating that all these guys connect with every other. the more you read nietzsche, the more girard will make sense, and vice-versa. don't skip heidegger. get your _____ in there too.

it's all like a gigantic, demented, costume party where all of these guys are coming and going. the more you read any of them, the more you will understand the rest, imho. i just happened to find that i really liked what these guys were saying, so it wasn't a chore to just try and slog through as much as i could. i never did a degree in any of this (and it probably shows). it was just things like the metaphysics of production or objet a or scapegoats that just seemed 140%, inarguably true, like, in-your-gut true. once you find somebody who can make you feel things like that, one sentence that doesn't change everything, just helps you realize it...you find time to read the rest of their stuff (even if it isn't as good).

so just read what you like. it's all good. but for girard, those books will keep you busy a while.

[Anonymous No.10181981]

>>10181896
>again, all this to make the claim that girard's thought is *cautionary* - he's the last person to say, well, war is stupid. he knows patently well that, *if we were there, we would feel differently.* but then, of course, wars *end*...and we begin having to deal with the question of bodies, and justifications, and so on...

That's what I meant. The body of winners will experience the feeling of victory, which for a certain time will be enough. In the medium term, however, there will be a need to divide the profit of this conquest and that's when the war will start.
Girard talks about this indeed and gives the example of the atomic energy that is being preyed by many countries as it is like everything caused by mimetic desire( USA has why we can't?). Regardless of the mythos and the potential profit that arise from victory, we should again understand that the potential of destruction today is much higher than in the past.
Also, There is no glory for the individual in war anymore, the soldiers return home with all sorts of PTSD, physical problems, financially broken and left to their own luck.

>very probably yes. or to look somewhat cynically at the contemporary politics of outrage: the winners argue over who has the most victimized by their own having won everything. is this uncharitable? i'm trying not to be triggered by the triggered, but this is what i invariably wind up feeling.
If I'm not mistaken, Girard considered the fact that nations are taking the same values to judge- which in a certain is being christian- is an evolution from the old scapegoat methods. We learned to look into the perspective of the losers (what Nietzche called slave mentality[actually reasonable if we consider that his intentions were to retun to the scapegoat method]). So these individuals(triggered) perceive that is more profitable today to be a "loser" than to be a "winner".

[Anonymous No.10181986]

fwiw i've also been reading some stuff by mark lilla these days..."the stillborn god" is an interesting look at a lot of this stuff from an interesting dude. he's taken a lot of heat for what he's written, but i think it's quite fascinating. sort of in the allan bloom/jordan peterson mode of things...humanities professors getting upset about the weight & volume of humanity on display.

he seems to be very pro-hobbes. the thing with him is this idea of maintaining a "great separation", a kind of required divide between the transcendental and the political...what makes this difficult, to say the least, is that people subsequently want to think of the world in materialistic ways that imho are actually the logical fruit of having created this separation. having nothing else to believe in besides material reality, it stands to reason that we would eventually come to agree on some form of political thinking which is materialist in nature...

lilla seems to make an argument for liberal democracy - he identifies as a democrat - as being the only game in town. and it makes sense, the argument is cohesive...but being me of course i can only really see capital as continually eroding the foundations of that. take everything else away - religion included - and you really do have nothing else left except capital accumulation, which doesn't spawn so much greed as *well-intentioned gnostic intellectuals angling to be on the right side of history*...the real thing that lilla (and peterson) seems to take issue with.

and this of course is just where we are today: the politics of outrage, everybody mad at each other for trying to find some empirical/intellectual justification for these things...what a fucking shitshow. man. anyways, interesting (if polemical) reading, for anons into this sort of stuff.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/20/opinion/sunday/the-end-of-identity-liberalism.html

[Anonymous No.10181993]

>>10181925
>iall of them, really. essential? things hidden since the foundations. if you could only read one, that would be the one. after that violence and the sacred, desire deceit & the novel, the scapegoat, battling to the end are my go-to books.

He repeats the same concepts throughout all his work, I suggest his interviews as a starting point - when these things begin for instance is a good start.

[Anonymous No.10182053]

I'm just going to leave this here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esk7W9Jowtc

[Anonymous No.10182305]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNkSBy5wWDk

35:12

-- a bit before for context, and more after for what is apt.

[Anonymous No.10182438]

>>10182053
>>10182305

so interesting. thank you kind anon.

[Anonymous No.10182484]

Did you know that Girardian theory is very popular in Russia?

vkontakte.ru/renegirard

[Anonymous No.10182538]

>>10181981

>We learned to look into the perspective of the losers (what Nietzche called slave mentality[actually reasonable if we consider that his intentions were to retun to the scapegoat method]). So these individuals(triggered) perceive that is more profitable today to be a "loser" than to be a "winner".

this also is a major phenomenon today: excessive identification with the victim. the thing is that it is difficult today to extrapolate "genuine" concern from the other from a sort of weaponization of marginalization...that is to say, because there is always suffering, there is always marginalization, and because that is the case, *someone* must be to blame for this.

perhaps one of the reasons why girard has never been as popular as some other thinkers is because there is a *necessary* dimension of scapegoating inscribed on marxist thought. even I have no problem admitting what my own bete noire has been: capitalism! however, since reading land i have been forced to take a more nuanced look at this...which is perhaps why i sound as strange as i do...

let's go back though. consider the current furor over race or gender. in order for there to be racism, there must be racists; where no actual racists are found, racism is found underground, in the unconscious, in unconscious bias. as a guy who is fond of reading lacan, the fact is, i can't even disagree with this attitude: i firmly believe that lacan is correct and that the oedipus complex is real. merely because processes are invisible doesn't mean they aren't there.

the problem, however, would be a *militant* lacanianism - that is to say, if i cornered someone else and demanded of them to tell me why they suddenly felt so nervous. obviously, the results are produced by the mode of questioning. the heisenberg principle has been known to scientists for some time, but it is *extraordinarily difficult to do this w/r/t/ social theory...*

as much as western civilization has essentially become swept up in its *technology,* it has also become swept up in its same critique of that technology - including capital and so on. to *do away* with some of these scapegoats would mean the end of an era that runs on critique: and you don't even have to be a marxist to know that just because you can open a scissor factory that within five years can give everyone in the world a pair of scissors, you don't close the shop afterwards. you're now in the scissor business, after all.

it's become the same with us. a lot of theory *depends* on the very same scapegoating girard warns us not to do. even when we *really really think it's justified, this time.* it never is.

not creating scapegoats: tough.

pic rel b/c herbert always has a good quote about these things.

[Anonymous No.10182893]

Nice thread.

[Anonymous No.10183365]

Archived, and bookmarked. Great thread!

https://archive.fo/6sZlI

[Anonymous No.10184067]

>>10182538
Is the war against racism an attempt to create a new metanarrative? Isn't the media creating both a skepticism towards Islam and a hatred against an unidentified group of racists and putting themselves beyond this artificial conflict which they've created (or created the appearance of)? Breakfast posting so sorry if I'm not making sense

[Anonymous No.10184566]

>>10183365
Thanks!

[Anonymous No.10185138]

>>10184067
So your question got me thinking. Long ramblepost inbound.

1/3

I wouldn't call race a new metanarrative. It's always been one of if not The metanarratives of metanarratives. What makes it so difficult to talk about (or so it seems to me) is the idea that it basically resists any kind of detached inquiry - more on that in a moment.

For example, is it possible to be a "partial racist?" Not really: we understand racism as being a total phenomenon (which is why it is so powerful, and painful, and so on). We don’t allow racism the same kind of flexibility we reserve for say, religious thinking ("I'm spiritual, but not religious.") And it's not like that’s so crazy either: try and imagine how weird it would be if you met somebody at a party, or a co-worker, and they introduced themselves to you by saying, "Well, one of the interesting things about me is that I'm pretty racist." And they aren't joking. Immediately things get weird.

We don't always imagine a person's private religious sensibilities - their own private metanarratives - as having an impact on our lives. We *do* imagine, and rightly, that racial sensibilities would. This metanarrative *does* concern us. Outside of exceptional circumstances - say, an Amish community - you won't be shamed for being a Wiccan. You *will* be shamed, however - or at least, looked at very strangely - for casually admitting that you are a racist. Is it because we presume that someone else's racism - their own metanarrative - now predisposes them to act in a certain way that is likely to have consequences for us? Is it because we would probably not take seriously the demands of a Wiccan Lives Matter movement?

Nobody says, "Yeah, I'm mildly racist" and expects this *not* to become a major talking point with whoever they're talking about for the foreseeable future. We don't distinguish between racist statements and *being* a racist all the way. If you say racist things, you are a racist; if you don't say racist things, this doesn't mean you might not still be a racist- you just haven't said anything yet. Racism isn't a phenomenon we look at objectively.

The thing that I keep feeling these days is that the real problem for flashpoint issues like these is not that they are themselves not worth talking about, it’s that they actually shouldn’t be talked about *objectively.* There are cases in which the *presumption* of objectivity will be seen as a failure to understand the complexity of the lived, organic reality of things. And this is the question I would want to bring up and talk about: the point at which a *private* metanarrative becomes one of objective social concern. Because somewhere along the line, the postmodern “skepticism about metanarratives” morphed into something much more different: a *super-interest* in metanarratives, and a skepticism not about metanarrative, but the *indifference to metanarrative itself.* In other words, total politicization of private thought.

[Anonymous No.10185145]

>>10185138
2/3

Consider the “Levi’s Woke” jeans commercial. Now this is a magnificent piece of satire. Who made it? Saturday Night Live. Personally, I haven’t watched SNL in years- it’s not my brand of humor. But this is a brilliant sketch because it’s made from *within* a culture as a form of *self*-critique. Steve Bannon couldn’t have made this, or Vox Day, or anyone. They wouldn’t have understood it: if you asked somebody on the alt-right to make a commercial like this they would have been frothing at the mouth with rage within seconds, and the whole thing would have come off as an angry and embittered political statement. And maybe even there would have been a tacit reference to some *other*, *older*, more “authentic,” “classical” kind of jeans…right? A kind of jeans more befitting those who are appalled by modern cultureless jeans…which would have in turn become an entirely deserving target of satire, and so on.

The point is, I think, that if you actually want some kind of social change to happen, it really does have to come from within on these things. Maajid Nawaz, for instance, is vastly more understanding about what goes on with Islam, I would say, than the SPLC. The thing about *criticism* of the classical post-structural kind is that it is almost impossible to criticize anything “objectively” without a tacit implication of the grounds from which you are mounting that criticism from (as another poster said it, from the left hand of God - but what does the god of the critic look like?).

And this I think is really where the veiled gnosticism of well-intentioned critics appears: the presumption of the Great We to which Everyone belongs: the ur-ground of metanarrative itself. That’s what I think is going on today: the One America that includes everyone, the One West, and so on. These are ultimately religious or quasi-religious sensibilities. The idea of One History also: I think it’s the influence of Hegel (and subsequently Marx) running deep. I think there’s a kind of weird tendency today to identify one’s own personal identitarian issues - one’s *private* metanarrative - with a greater whole that, as it acquires momentum, or converges upon other political snowballs, tends to forget itself, or lose itself in the critique, and sacrifice the objectivity upon which a rational argument rests.

So what I’m saying is that “metanarratives” are *not* exclusively historical, social phenomena: they are also deeply personal, private, psychological ones. I have my *own* metanarratives and so do you. The question we have to ask ourselves is: at what point do *private* metanarratives become objects of social inquiry? What *right* do we have to force someone else to answer the unanswerable question: “so tell me - what is it that you **really** believe?”

Is that question even possible to answer?

Is this really the critique of Enlightenment? Or Enlightenment 2.0? Post-Enlightenment Enlightenment?

[Anonymous No.10185148]

>>10185145

3/3

As you have said, the media absolutely has a part to play in this, because - and I think the 24 hour news cycle was a major turning point - now the media covers “news that matters.” You would never bring Christopher Hitchens or Edward R Murrow into the Situation Room: it just wouldn’t make sense. The sense of immediacy, What’s Happening Now, I think is what creates the very temptation to want to see things, In Real Time, and so on. There’s no detachment: everything winds up getting covered, essentially, like the shaky-cam from the Blair Witch Project. It’s gripping and intense, definitely “real”, but you lose your frame of reference and perspective.

Of course we know that to be detached and objective is just as illusory (or wilfully deceitful) as Total Participation. But down this road leads the politicization of everything: immediate responses, total psychic manipulation, total responsivity. This is why we get snowball effects from things. We see everything much too closely, much too soon, without any chance to reflect. It’s like being the passenger in a tour bus but being unable to communicate with the driver. The driver will give you the tour of whatever it is that they want to show you, but how fast they drive, or where they go, or when the ride stops…you have no control over these things. The doors lock as soon as you get in. You just see what you are shown and cannot help but react to them. Even the driver is being told where to go by the bug in his ear…

So yeah. We’re all essentially prisoners, in a sense, not only of our desire to know, but the ways in which we know these things. Things move too fast, there is more and more information and less and less meaning, as Baudrillard says. But maybe, we could even tweak that: maybe it is, in this hyper-politicized sense, that there is more and more meaning, and not enough information: just meaning, just emotion, just imagery, and no way to look at it all and conclude on anything but the desire to shut off the TV and hope that it all just goes away.

[Anonymous No.10185320]

>>10185148
One other thing.

Foucault makes a brilliant point about the Enlightenment and its attitudes towards criminal behaviour: that there was a shift, and a very powerful modern one, away from the *punishment* of crimes and towards their prevention in the future, which inaugurates an age of surveillance and control. In the Middle Ages if someone is caught poaching, you drag that guy into the public square and flog him. After that, he's free to go. With the Enlightenment, we begin inquiring, psychologically, into prevention of future poaching.

We may be on similar grounds today. Racism is not only a social crime but a moral one, and moral crimes touch us in the nerve centers of our consciousness, painfully, because they force us to ask questions about the limits of rational thought. Inquiries into the origins of racism open up realms in human behaviour which exceed these limits; maybe that is why they offend Enlightenment sensibilities, the unspoken wish to tidy up these dark places within us, that we might make a happier, more rational, more productive world: a world more alike to God - that is, *one without contradictions.*

Maybe we have gone back to the Enlightenment without realizing it: we want to live in a world in which racism does not exist, and yet our greatest tool - social critique - becomes recursive. We can police language, we can even police thought, but it doesn't make these problems go away. If anything, it drives us only further backwards into ourselves, as we become subject to an ever-more rigorous private inquiry before our own inquisitions: what is race? Am I a racist? How would I know? How could I prove it? Who would I prove it to?

We want - and this is not an unreasonable desire - a world in which racism does not exist. But doesn't it seem that the post-structural critique of these things is simply a newer form of the Enlightenment, turned on its ear? The postmodern skepticism towards metanarratives seems to become, to my mind, precisely the mirror image of what the Marxist critique would have been opposed to, once upon a time: now, your indifference towards metanarrative is the sign of your unreason: your skepticism is a sign of your ignorance, and ignorance - are there no theological dimensions to this? - unpardonable.

But ignorance isn't unpardonable, it's *human.* The philosophical gravitas of racism derives from the terrifying inability of Enlightenment critique to explain it away - *that* is why it bothers us so much, I think. Because it gets at the roots of an Enlightenment tradition that was co-opted by Marxist critique so thoroughly it became functionally identical with it. And which is destined to fall, ultimately, into the same traps, getting lost in the same dark and mysterious forests outside the city of reason.

Shame is an effective tool for policing and preventing crimes, but if there was one thing that Enlightenment thought was never particularly good with, it was the concept of *forgiveness.*

[Anonymous No.10185569]

>>10185320
So, racism is a social and ethical crime where there is no way to prove your innocence once accused since racism exists only in metanarratives. Essentially, racism is a thoughtcrime.

[Anonymous No.10185663]

>>10185569
>racism exists only in metanarratives
For one thing, in a certain sense, i would say that the more important point is that *everything exists in metanarratives.* This is where we are at. We don't have, really, an extra-metanarrative kind of thinking. Nor should we try to invent one. It's why McIntyre's argument, for example, is persuasive: we accept that metanarratives are simply a necessary thing that people do. The Nietzschean response is to see *one* process underlying all of it, and of course, this could seem hard to deny.

But the difficulty of advancing this position is that it would seem to be doing that which I am arguing against in the previous posts: objectifying metanarratives. I'm not. What I'm saying is that we live in a world of relative metanarrativity from which there is, really, no transcendental or exterior viewpoint. I would say the thing to do is to accept that we are bound up in a world of ideas, metanarratives, in much the same way that the globe is divided into nations. People think things in different ways. And this is not the same thing as saying, 'well, it's all relative then.' Plainly it isn't. It's relative in the places where it is relative and isn't in the places where it isn't. Does this make sense?

>Essentially, racism is a thoughtcrime.
It's not necessary to call it a thoughtcrime. What's the point? We have a word for this phenomenon already: racism. Calling a thoughtcrime is like putting it in quotation marks: it uncharitably distances ourselves from the thing itself. There's no need to describe racism as thoughtcrime if the only point in doing so is to separate ourselves from this thing, as though it were not a lived, felt, experienced phenomenon. Which it is.

Don't misunderstand me. I am highly aware of the inquisitorial nature of these questions, and I find them deeply troubling. As you have said, circumstances in which you find yourself unable to prove your innocence once accused are justifiably unsettling. What I am saying, or wondering, is what to do if a certain inquisitorial sensibility is inscribed on the process of writing theory itself: that is, that 'universalist' social theory is itself a tacitly gnostic idea, with all that that entails. I think it does bear a kind of resemblance to what could be called Bizarro Enlightenment, or Enlightenment 2.0: being *insufficiently* woke is a form of heresy.

But I am not mounting a kind of boilerplate/redpill resistance to this, because I think the situation is, of course, mimetic no matter where you go.

But again, consider *why* Woke Jeans are effective as a form of critique: because they are *parodic,* and they come from within. Nobody on the right could ever have written a more effective critique of left/progressive culture than Woke Jeans, because it would have lacked the *nuance* that comes with lived experience and participation in a certain culture.

(cont'd)

[Anonymous No.10185670]

>>10185320
FUCK OFF GIRARDFAG, BREVITY IS THE SOUL OF WIT

[Anonymous No.10185801]

>>10185663
So it's not, in a sense, the idea of 'thoughtcrime' that I am even opposed to, but *externally legislated thoughtcrime.* Thoughtcrimes get committed all the time. I *wholly* expect Benedictine monks to hold themselves to a standard of behaviour accordingly: if I go to a monastery, I don't expect them to be sitting around in a room full of empty pizza boxes and watching NASCAR. Something would seem amiss there. There is, in other words, something necessary about *internal* policing of thought. I'm okay with this.

It's the *externalized* stuff where things get complicated. The monks don't come into my workplace and bring their rules into it, and I don't bring mine into theirs. We only really call things 'thoughtcrimes' when we feel as though we are in fact being reproached for transgressing on the unspoken moral rules of *someone else*, and being punished for noncomformity to values which *we ourselves may not necessarily share.* The legislative or inquisitorial aspect of this derives from our feelings that we are being punished by forces over which we have no control, and do not wish to be controlled by.

But in the world at large, questions like racism really do impact on everyone, *directly or indirectly.* And this is part of the intellectual climate today: who gets to say where intellectual politics gets to go, or does not get to go? This is a question for theory, of course, but also for public policy, and increasingly of private life.

Again, this is why I think so highly of the Woke Jeans commercial: the best critique of left/progressive culture is the one that *comes from within* and *satirizes itself.* The mockery is self-directed, and blisteringly accurate. It makes the case more persuasive than any right-inclined individual ever could. That is why it works. It disarms the critique and makes it something more than criticism.

>>10185670
True. Sorry for triggering you. Thanks for the feedback.

[Anonymous No.10186477]

>>10185320
>Racism is not only a social crime but a moral one
The concept of racism has entered the public consciousness only about 150 years ago. Who is to say that it is a moral issue? Wouldn't it make more sense to say racism in and of itself is a social phenomenon rather than an evil? One can argue there is negative racism such as discrimination, and positive racism in a form such as affirmative action. If all that racism is is making a judgement based on race, wouldn't that make everybody racist to some degree?

Girard said scapegoating doesn't work anymore since humanity has became aware of it. I agree with Girard that we have became aware of scapegoating, at least to a degree, but I disagree that it doesn't work because cognitive dissonance still occurs. Take today's climate of identity politics for example, there are signs of scapegoating among minorities accusing whites. It's true whites have oppressed these minorities in the past, but it's also true these minorities are far better off today than they were 100 years ago. Yet, today's generation of white males are still accused by minorities who persecute them with an archaic ethic that the sins of the father are passed down to the son, and mythologizing them as inherently evil, racist, and the source of most of the world's problems, even when most of them are probably innocent.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3i6J2fcrKi8

But I think we have gone a little off topic with all the race stuff.

[Anonymous No.10186569]

What films can be viewed through the prism of girardean theory? Any movies on mimetic desire and sacrificial crisis? Could Girard be a little zizekly?

[Anonymous No.10186602]

>>10185148
>maybe it is, in this hyper-politicized sense, that there is more and more meaning, and not enough information: just meaning, just emotion, just imagery, and no way to look at it all and conclude on anything but the desire to shut off the TV and hope that it all just goes away.

A glint in a sea of suns. A place of beauty within all that is beautiful, and a shadow at night. A glint that is nothing without that blinding illumination of a galaxy. Hope, as we are surrounded by darkness, that why the patterns burn into Taurus is known, that Isis may not recognise her gift, but still gives life to Osiris after he is slain. Only a glint in a sea of suns.

[Anonymous No.10186732]

>>10186569
Code Geass comes to mind, particularly the last episode of season 2.

[Anonymous No.10186769]

>>10186477
>But I think we have gone a little off topic with all the race stuff.
You're 100% correct. It's honestly a topic I usually prefer to avoid like the plague. It's a far cry from what OP was asking about originally and, from a Girardian standpoint, more of a self-proving kind of lesson than anything else. The fact that conversations about race almost *immediately* spiral into craziness don't prove that he was wrong about anything...more that he was right about everything. Apologies then for getting too carried away with it. Moving on.

>Girard said scapegoating doesn't work anymore since humanity has became aware of it.
This is kind of an amazing point, when you think about it. Because he's right, and you're wise, I think, to bring this up. Here I understand the point being that it's not that we can't victimize or destroy other people, it's that we *can't feel good about it.* Which is enough to say that the myth-goggles aren't working. And who could argue that they aren't? We know the current situation sucks -
that much, at least. We just don't know how to fix it. At least, that's how I interpret that.

>>10186569
>girardian cinema
It's an interesting question. Zizek is a master with films, and Girard's stuff seems to be more popular with literature than cinema. It might be too easy to just say that they're talking about, ultimately, the same things. For a more explicitly Girardian film? I might go with Fail Safe, a 1964 Cold War drama about nuclear war. This is more in his Clauswitzian sense than his biblical/anthropological sense, but similar themes: the logic of (mutual) destruction as it restores an order that has come unstuck.

>Like the human members of the nuclear system, the machine that sends the launch code just follows orders, or tries to. But nobody has thought through what happens when orders are followed poorly—or too well. The American bomber commander, for example, must carry out his attack order even if he cannot verify it by radio, since radio loss could mean that home has been destroyed. He cannot be recalled even when successfully contacted by the president, or his own wife, as he’s been trained to regard these as impostors. Even the leaders are bound: They must counterstrike, even when convinced they’ve been attacked by mistake.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fail_Safe_(1964_film

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2014/10/fail_safe_50th_anniversary_sidney_lumet_s_nuclear_war_movie_is_better_than.html

And surely there are lots of other films that might tackle the more Biblical or literary stuff. I'll be thinking about this for a while, I suspect. I'm certain there are other good ones.

>>10186602
Gives me the feels, anon. Dem shivers. You're on to something really interesting there.

[Anonymous No.10187491]

bump

[Anonymous No.10187581]

>>10185801
If you like left wing parodies of itself you should check out Portlandia, a show by progressive/leftie hipsters for these hipsters essentially making fun of progressive hipsters

[Anonymous No.10187586]

>>10177841
Even if this is true, that's bad because...?

[Anonymous No.10187768]

>>10181357
Why is that bro?

[Anonymous No.10187892]

>>10181206
Wow pat yourself on the back we sure love to know your life story

[Anonymous No.10188293]

bump

[Anonymous No.10188669]

>>10187892
kek. sorry

>>10187581
will do.

death spirals of progressivism are fun to watch, i guess...it's just only when they produce something which is genuinely interesting, something that i guess is so perfectly parodic that it sums up the whole thinking of a period in an image or two that i get excited. culture contains within itself - maybe we're just sort of discovering this - a limitless potential for parody and irony. it's exhausting, though, also. isn't this why, or part of why, DFW ultimately decided to hang himself?

to get back to OP's original question on this, then, is sort of to ask ourselves: if we do require some dimension of the sacred, or even just a sense of noumenal reality in life...and if the absence of this is really a kind of feeling detrimental to life itself...is violence warranted? is warfare necessary? heavy questions.

my own thought is that they are not, but that warfare - and especially gnostic warfare - is a kind of 'great resuscitator' for exhausted or decadent periods. this is basically nietzscheanism, or a form of it: when all is lost, at the bottom, *pick a fight.* even if it's only with yourself. and, in a sense, it works...

...maybe the problem - more of a question for human psychology - is that the most animating fights are the gnostic ones. that's where we really get excited again, that's when we get the total commitment, the total mobilization towards things that seems to bring an end to our nihilism, sense of futility, failure, etc. the problem lies in justifications, though. it's why girard is, again, perhaps, not as popular in academic circles tinged with marxism. holy war, in whatever form, gets the juices going...or *keeps* the always-already flowing juices going so as to ward off the inevitable collapse into despair that follows from not having any wars to fight (and not, for example, ready to commit to buddhism or whatever else.) plus your consumer society that already runs on agitation, stimulus, and seduction...

...we need the sacred, in some sense, maybe. and you know, just regarding the mind itself, in all of its awesome complexity, should be sufficient. i think it's more that we are inclined to put the mind to work for capital or whatever that leads to this disaffection. if land is right, and everything is just market formalism, it's kind of a recipe for malaise...and this, maybe, is why a guy like guenon (or JBP, or many others) matter. because there is more to life than either holy war or consumerist disaffection & irony. it just requires a different kind of thinking.

we have minds and maybe we don't know what to do with them. but they're clearly good for something more than politics, warfare, or making widgets. all those things make us feel good, but...we would like, maybe, a greater and more inclusive feeling, a feeling of belonging to the world that is more than a way of just possessing everything in the world, or being possessed by it.

cool mellow jellyfish b/c why not.

[Anonymous No.10188681]

>>10188669
girardfag where do you live

[Anonymous No.10188719]

>>10188681
i've moved around. a lot. in the home country and beyond it. not by choice either. have just recently moved, will soon be moving again. frankly, i hate it. my dream job would be to maintain seed vaults in antarctica, i think. maximal solitude, maximal routine, lots of time for shitposting about philosophy. but it is what it is.

warrants mentioning, i guess, it sheds some light on how i view things.

[Anonymous No.10188729]

>>10188719
i have a similar fantasy about a teutoburg cabin

if you're ever in chicago i will buy you coffee and invite you to ramble for 6 hours, i have a feeling this era is trying to manifest various max schelers and novalises and socrateses and they're going wonky because they're like plants trying to grow upward into concrete and having to poop out at a side angle

having gone into academia in search of them and having found moss at best i'm wondering if you might be one

[Anonymous No.10188758]

>>10188729
that's too kind anon.

in terms of eras manifesting great thinkers, it's interesting to think about the meaning of philosophical *friendships.* deleuze & guattari. confucius & laozi. goethe & schiller. lennon & mccartney (okay, well...). nietzsche & schopenhauer (even though they never met). there are dozens of others here i'm forgetting...but you get the idea.

solitude & silence produces its own kind of thoughts. and mostly, i think, they converge on the esoteric. one of the things i've been thinking about recently is really that philosophy itself is only a kind of lingua franca for talking about the mind. whatever the mind is, it always escapes representation. we can create magnificent labyrinths of epistemology, with the most heartfelt sincerity, and maybe even sometimes other people will believe us...but then there's also this nice, other feeling of reflecting on the idea that there's a bigger mystery behind it. something us westerns have always struggled with. kant is a great theologian, as is nietzsche, in their roundabout ways...but i like the chinese attitudes, the taoist attitudes also. this idea that whatever it is that we do with our minds, we do against a kind of oceanic background of silence. apparently nn taleb has kind of a similar take on this: he says, basically, the ancients were right about human psychology, and all we moderns have to do is confirm it with our modern tech.

so eastern ontology, for instance, is a kind of relief, sometimes, because metaphysics will drive you bananas. but *really* i think the best part is just in exchanging, sharing, or communicating thoughts. that's a very human and kind of cool thing to do.

so yeah. philosophical friendships & exchanges. good scene. goes all kinds of interesting places. anyways, now i'm wondering, what are the other great tag-teams that i'm missing? i know there has to be more of them. maybe all the socialism - or existentialism, or gnosticism covered up the cool encounters that actually percolate the really interesting stuff.

but if i'm in chicago, i'll take you up on that coffee. i actually did have a plan to get down there once, for reasons i will not disclose unless i am unbelievably drunk, however.

[Anonymous No.10188945]

>>10188758
if i might then ramble on further in this direction...what does it actually mean to be friendly? it's surely not about the dialectical negation and reconciliation of opposites. it means being able to have a conversation with another person that isn't immediately reduceable to ideology, or paralyzed with self-awareness...

suppose we are mimetic beings. we like reacting - shit, if there is one thing you *can* expect about human beings, it's that we react, we respond. but how much 20C gnostic socialism was a way of speaking to huge crowds? how much has media simply internalized this process within us, so that we *instinctively* feel ourselves as *needing to be public beings?* what would happen if we abandoned dialectics and became merely agreeable nobodies? who we are is always a product of who we are speaking to. lacan takes this kind of stuff to the back of beyond:

>I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think. I am not whenever I am the plaything of my thought; I think of what I am where I do not think to think.

crazy (but true). but what was the goal of therapy? to locate the symptom. but this is a kind of thing that public intellectuals and critics - certainly not political figures - are never permitted to do, because political discourse requires the politician's ability to talk about public symptoms...and it kind of makes you realize why the 'tyrannophilia' of 20C philosophers makes sense. we want there to be laws, order, reasons, a Historical Narrative...

...all this media and philosophy tends toward pathologically socialization. no wonder we prefer silence and solitude, in the end. we don't want to be perceived as crazy, and yet, it would be crazier still to look at all of this stuff, our economically determined lives, and believe that we could normalize it...right? so being mutually victimized might *seem* to unite us...but does it?

...psychoanalytic therapy was halfway, perhaps, towards establishing a concept of philosophical friendliness among humans that did not require the presence of ideology as mediator/regulator. once you take the ideology away, you become a greatly reduced, maybe even pathetic kind of being...but isn't this also self-awareness?

...Power just seems like such a spook sometimes. and criticism - ***purest mimetics*** - dumb af. ordinary life isn't dialectical. maybe it's just banal. and maybe the mind isn't *anything* except that place where we always and naturally connect opposites...but not for any higher reason. maybe we do it because being self-contradictory is what makes us who we are: enigmas and paradoxes.

>clean your room girardfag
>nah JBP. i'm leaving it messy today. looks fine like that. mess is okay. too clean and it starts to look modernist. doesn't feel like a room. more like an office
>well then that's your problem. you live in apartments. you need a house
>...true
>rescue your father
>goddamn it JBP
>i mean it bucko
>i know. you're right. one thing at a time tho

[Anonymous No.10189146]

Nothing is not gnostic if we are talking from a perspective of identity taking action. A lot of it seems like a short sighted play of semantics with willfully ignored holes that leaves everything taken together a blotched mess. Hiding that every fruit of mind is idealistic abstraction we are close to by proximity as long as it is taken as an outside of us subject we are in dialogue with, proximity to truth but never the truth.

[mystikos No.10189357]

Philosophy tends to the soul. Politics tends to the body. Guenon is a philosopher. Girard a political theorist. Our modern society militates against both. As good hylomorphists, we must remember the distinction isn't a clear-cut Cartesian dualism -- if one ever existed.Republicans worry about saving souls. Democrats worry about saving bodies. What is needed is a centrism, truly nondual, not mere dualistic processual dialectical monism. Think the teractys and the pentagram and the emanation or overflow of Being. We are the result of this happy accident, a spillage of Being, encased in a particular being. It's easy to be a nihilist until you have kids. Then you think to yourself, maybe a little lie can act as a moral fable for the little one. Enlightenment, according to Kant (I think), is man's emancipation from his self-imposed tutelage. But surely one should take advantage of tutors, especially at a young age. When Christ says "I am the way" is it not unlike when your parent says "because I said so"? I think Sloterdjik is relevant these days, though no one on 4chan seems to know him. I will instead quote Ursula K. leGuin: “True myth may serve for thousands of years as an inexhaustible source of intellectual speculation, religious joy, ethical inquiry, and artistic renewal. The real mystery is not destroyed by reason. The fake one is. You look at it and it vanishes. You look at the Blond Hero — really look — and he turns into a gerbil. But you look at Apollo, and he looks back at you. The poet Rilke looked at a statue of Apollo about fifty years ago, and Apollo spoke to him. ‘You must change your life,’ he said. When true myth rises into consciousness, that is always its message. You must change your life.” But ya, this kinda supposes a linear notion of life and history and time. The necessity of a genesis if you will. Which is ultimatey the superiority of Girard in that he is an evolutionary thinker. Traditionalism for Guenon is trapped in the worst form of Nietzscheanism -- literal belief in the eternal return and Eastern cosmic cycles. As a Catholic myself, I certainly hope there is more telos to the universe than that. I would hate to be condemned to an eternity of mistakes without hope of redemption. But sometimes, I even wonder if birth implies rebirth outside the circles of time, that eternity conforms to its own cynical logic of time. That definition of enlightenment is one problematic aspect of Buddhism's reception. Buddhism is more about awakening than enlightening. And as newer traditionalists like Uzdavinys expose, Greek and Egyptian culture had essentially the same thing at the same time. Which is to say a virtue ethics and soteriological end to mimesis. Philosophy, in a certain sense, is a retreat from politics. You cannot save the world, only yourself. Or you can only save the world following saving yourself. But ya. Christ and the scapegoat. That's a novel invention. True salvation. But I have a martyr complex.

[mystikos No.10189498]

>>10189357
Sorry for this schizo ramble. I ran out of characters and tried to fit as much in as I can with litte regard to coherence.

>>10188945
Not sure psychoanalysis is without ideology. Not sure anything is without ideology. Supposedly it is grounded in science, which would be a sort of universal or neocatholic ideology if we could all stop pretending that it's not real, but psychoanalysis, in its current pseudo-scientific state, is definitely chock full of ideology.

Sometimes I feel like friendliness is being a living meme. Be successful, be happy, be selfless, supply generic advice, talk about the weather and the latest entertainment, listen and engage.

But somehow we can't even run through algorithmically predetermined conversations without butthurt. Maybe Witty is right. We got caught up in language games. You think the weather is cold? I think it's cool. You think today is a blessing? I curse the day I was born.

And I think a lot of the problem with it is not some sort of dialectically constructed attempt at synthesis but just raw negation. Absolute contradiction. If you told your kid the perfect philosophy he'd try to disprove it and come up with his own just to prove his independence.

What is condsciousness without ideology? Is it the naive state? Childlike wonder? Primitive ontology? Before we start critiquing and negating?

I guess that's the traditionalists answer, and if we really haven't evolved in over a hundred thousand years then maybe they really did figure out philosophy before us and we're just rehashing the same pseudo-dialectical journey of spirit not in worldhistory but in lifehistory.

But if Hegelianism applies to individuals why not nations? As above so below... as the hermeticists say.

The dialectic is a perfect example of Christ and the trinity and evolutionism. And perhaps the myth of the dialectic could become real through the myth of Christ and maybe that's why the Catholic church really is catholic and universal as they claim. But since I was born Catholic I like to do yoga and zazen instead of lectio divina and rosaries to be edgy and rebel against my parents.


America has a really messed up identity, its lack rather, but it also allows us to be highly unique and experimental. I believe the next philosophical movement is coming from America. But maybe that is just a fantasy.

[mystikos No.10189555]

>>10189498
My thought is a swirly mess of contradiction. Like poop in a toilet bowl flushing itself down a series of tubes until it arrives as a shitpost on a Taiwanese ladyboy love forum.

I say this: I have not read Girard and Guenon. I fear I will not anytime soon. My backlog is immeasurable... But these are my thoughts and impressions regarding this interesting thread and what I have learned secondhand from articles and threads like this.

>>10189146
What do you mean by this?

>>10185801
>self-crit
I like Ultra Spiritual Life personally.
>thoughtcrime
Politics is the corpse of a dying religion. But maybe America has an occult destiny. That which was never born may never die.

[Anonymous No.10189560]

>>10189498
>sorry for this schizo ramble
apologies rejected! was actually going to compliment you on that post. interesting af. don't martyr yourself yet please!

>Sometimes I feel like friendliness is being a living meme. Be successful, be happy, be selfless, supply generic advice, talk about the weather and the latest entertainment, listen and engage.
yes. seems simple...but really, much philosophy is for me an *excuse* to not do this...

>What is condsciousness without ideology? Is it the naive state? Childlike wonder? Primitive ontology? Before we start critiquing and negating?
this. 400% this. and then more this. maybe i'm just riding a little buzz today off of some weird chinese shit (and by this i mean books, sadly...not drugs...sigh) but - this. this this.

*what is the mind like prior to dialectic, prior to negation?* to me it would seem to be mainly *useless*...but zhuangzi is always talking about this very uselessness. true, it has kind of a tacit moral-ethical dimension, and is in line with his taoist sensibilities (or just a survival instinct)...but this is exactly the kind of thing that makes sense to me. it's a heideggerian idea too: the origins of technological thinking lay in this cause-effect thinking, and counterpoised to this is the 'effect-cause' thinking of poetics, aletheia, and all of the rest...

but what would it be like to be *just between these?* it would seem that you would be a cool confucian harmonist-nobody...and i find that there is something very attractive about that. you would just be a mind reflecting on itself, empty, and in which thoughts and epistemologies can appear before it...and *not* be mistaken for reality...let alone weaponized, put into production, and converted into social capital...it would be, i think, blissful. just like a background scene, perfect and complete within itself, before the inevitable action starts.

hot diggity, anon. this post (and the one before it) made my fucking day. i do love this place.

>And I think a lot of the problem with it is not some sort of dialectically constructed attempt at synthesis but just raw negation. Absolute contradiction. If you told your kid the perfect philosophy he'd try to disprove it and come up with his own just to prove his independence.
yes.

>The dialectic is a perfect example of Christ and the trinity and evolutionism. And perhaps the myth of the dialectic could become real through the myth of Christ and maybe that's why the Catholic church really is catholic and universal as they claim. But since I was born Catholic I like to do yoga and zazen instead of lectio divina and rosaries to be edgy and rebel against my parents.
kek

>America has a really messed up identity, its lack rather, but it also allows us to be highly unique and experimental. I believe the next philosophical movement is coming from America. But maybe that is just a fantasy.
nope. i think so too. might come out of computer science rather than humanities departments tho...

[Anonymous No.10189566]

>>10189555
>Politics is the corpse of a dying religion.

holy fuck you're on fire today my man. jesus murphy. i am fucking keeping that one

[Anonymous No.10189631]

i'm wondering something else now, maybe interesting, maybe not, from this thread. it's there's something really fucking interesting about /lit/ threads that is sort of like a *modularity.* nobody really knows how these threads will go. a thread can seem, perhaps, dull...and then suddenly - this is the perhaps way of all such micronesian tap-dancing boards - a new thought, or an entirely new poster, can come into it, and then, all of a sudden, everything changes...no?

>from defeat, to defeat, to defeat, to total victory

it is the fact that threads *cannot be predicted in advance* that makes them interesting collective thought-experiments...where do ideas come from, exactly? if you are a lonely and isolated philosoraptor quietly going insane trying to predict or monitor capitalism, whatever, the unpredictability of events can drive you mental - see bataille on chance, for instance, or land - but if you don't have an investment in a thing, or if ownership of a thing (like a thread, for instance) is just impossible...then you never know what can happen, and that's actually a *good* thing.

i don't know how interesting this is...but it's on my mind now, for some reason. the idea of chaos, or unpredictability, or how much a thing is improved by adding additional parts to it, that change the meaning of threads...by being exposed to chaos...

...right? you don't know where things are going to go. it's like teaching moments, or happy accidents. threads are basically subject to change all the time because they are open-ended...and i can, for instance, write post after post, having no idea why it is that i need to do so...until suddenly, someone else comes in, and then it all makes sense. maybe it goes in a new direction afterwards, maybe there is synchronicity, maybe not...there is something fundamentally beautiful, in other words, about limited anarchy. precisely because it's unpredictable. you don't *need* to know why you say things...maybe it's only to prompt something else. like fireworks...they look good when they blow up, as they do, in a kind of disorder...

more street fighter art then because reasons. i don't know why i like this picture but there's just something perfect about it.

also: fuck/aah/words. whatever. you know what i mean. just that. just that.

[mystikos No.10189690]

>>10189566
Can't take credit. Idea comes from somewhere inside pic related. It's one of the ur-texts of chaos magick, though I think the author is a thelemite, and for some reason it has been oddly ignored in favor of other works. He has some golden nuggets in there regarding Zhuangzhi too. Also it introduced me to Borges which is cool. Highly recommend.

>>10189560
>much philosophy is for me an *excuse* to not do this
Same here. I think when you read theory as your praxis it happens quite a bit. And since Marx that has been the dominant mode of praxis. I also fear the wageslave life which is shameful of me.

>riding a little buzz of that Chinese shit
Sounds noice. I am drinking from the western well at the moment but I am glad we can connect.

>return to before dialectics or be in between
That's the thing about Hegelianism. We always think that we are already at the synthesis or that it can't exist and we must merely hold uneasy opposition within ourselves. A bit like how every teen thinks he's the ubermensch after Zarathustra. More likely we are in the negative phase. If this is true, it is a mistake to regress or attempt to. Impossible one might say. But like Christ's birth, death and resurrection the thesis antihesis synthesis holds a greater meaning. The initial thesis or birth was merely the promise. And we entered the negative stage because it was incomplete and we sought maturity or enlightement or freedom. The rebirth or synthesis is the fulfillment of the earlier promise brought to fruition. We are trapped in this stage of death of despair of nihilism. We are in the valley of death. Kinda like a cycle of innocence sin and grace. Grace is what I am aiming for. A sort of mystical state where one can achieve theoria and produce theory without abandoning praxis both practical and academic. In advaita, you can somehow just realize you are already there. Suddenly enlightenment I guess. Sounds daoist. Just stop doing! Do without doing! Be usefully useless! Or uselessly useful! Damn... I'm confused now. Is this aporia? Or just the weed?

Hopefully I can figure this shit out before undergrad finishes kek.

[mystikos No.10189721]

>>10189631
Ya. I wish I knew how to quit ya, /lit/...

[Anonymous No.10189827]

>>10189631
This post is very on point to why I keep visiting 4chan. The possibility of a unique conversation is always here, and the search for such a thread keeps that dopamine pumping. However, some threads do predictably degenerate to shitposting, usually due to the very topic of the thread, and the topics that come up on /lit/ are most of the time predictable since they have a nostalgia for non-contemporary literature.

I do admit I unironically enjoy visiting /pol/. There are always new discussions happening every day, every hour. /pol/ has a very keen eye on the 24 hour news cycle. You can post whatever you like, and even if you go against the board's group think, the worst that'll happen to you is you get called a shill or a cuck.

In many ways, 4chan is a mental prison. I easily get distracted from reading, and getting work done by browsing threads and posting. Yet, I do feel it has a therapeutic purpose. In an age of hyper-connectivity, I think a place where we can have unrestricted anonymous communication with little to no consequence is needed. Anonymity gives us a voice without a face. We can amass all of our grievances and frustration in our day-to-day lives, and shout it all out to the ether, and the best part is, we don't know if other people read it or not. What matters is we THINK we are being heard, and that is enough to give our irl conflicts, no matter how small, meaning but without the consequences which stem from truly expressing how we feel and think. It's cathartic in a way.

[Anonymous No.10190110]

In what language did Girard write? English or French?

[Anonymous No.10190169]

>>10188758
i have had the good fortune to meet a few people who were as individuated as my own schizo-nomadic brain is (or at least i flatter myself in thinking that), and the really exciting part of forming friendships with those people is that you've both delineated not just non-standard/non-bourgeois objects, but the holistic grounds undergirding and sustaining those objects, and you can share in not just each other's crazy ersatz objects but those grounds as well.

it's like being at college at some guy goes
>well I believe in scientific materialism because it's the most reasonable thing
and you're like, "yeah i guess," because you know the entire back-ground and lifeworld sustaining his statement is milquetoast conformity that bleeds into everything else he believes, oversocialisation and averaging out of all viewpoints. but then you meet a crazy guy who is devoted to actually coming up with his own answers to things, and he goes
>well I believe in scientific materialism
too, but you realise that there's an entire actual metaphysic behind what he's saying, and he's only arrived at that position by zany twists and turns, he has zigged at a thousand places where you've zagged in your own years of isolated thinkin' about stuff, and all those zigs have allowed him to reach to places you didn't even know existed, or which you had written off as illusions, etc., and all of that novelty is accessible instantaneously through dialogue

every friendship and thinking-together is a gay little haecceity that emergently produces something novel and sui generis, in the same way a single author can from his private self, but more magical and with more possibility of escaping from cul-de-sacs

there's some interesting stuff being done with pragmatist readings of hegelian dialogics as "reason-giving" but never "Reason-attaining." it's too praxis-y and surface-level appropriable by liberalism for me but the underlying idea is really interesting when combined with hermeneutics/dialogics (like, e.g., therapy).

maybe the century of the self isn't all bad and in the end all this will just teach us to meet each other as more individuated immanences or more stable bundles of chaos. foucault can say "don't ask me to be who i was yesterday" to his boyfriend and still wake up and slap dicks together every day

>Neither of the two speakers will feel innocent, both will have accepted the challenge of the past, of the already said, which cannot be eliminated; both will consciously and with pleasure play the game of irony… But both will have succeeded, once again, in speaking of love.

[Anonymous No.10190192]

>>10189827
>In many ways, 4chan is a mental prison.
or a mental asylum. but the nice thing about this place is that you *know* it is an asylum, so you don't feel weird about being in it...after all, it would be a kind of failure of etiquette to be in an asylum and insist that it's *everyone else* who is crazy...right? if you mysteriously find yourself coming back to an asylum day after day, after a while you just kind of accept the fact that maybe it's because you belong there, for however long...

>What matters is we THINK we are being heard, and that is enough to give our irl conflicts, no matter how small, meaning but without the consequences which stem from truly expressing how we feel and think.
this also. thymos all the way. human need for recognition. but it's not all selfish, either. because it's not just self-recognition. sometimes it's recognition of social stuff that you kind of echolocate for...seeing if anyone else is seeing things the same way.

i read the other day that 4chan was described as a 'notorious cesspool.' so uncharitable. and, frankly, so wrong. this place is great precisely because it's so uncensored. it's why interesting conversations happen here.

>It's cathartic in a way.
mos def. the hardest part, as (>>10189721) says, is leaving. it's why i took a break from this place for a while (and should, really, try to keep to that, because IRL demands are pressing). but it is pretty special.

>>10190110
a quick survey on amazon indicates that most of his major works are translated. no doubt even more mimetically delicious in french. being a monolingual pleb i've never really thought much of the fact that basically everything i've read has been translated...ignorance is bliss.

searching for an appropriate pic, i found this...it's from 'bifo' berardi, iirc - the soul at work. interesting stuff from a cool and contemporary marxist intellectual. not totally on-topic i suppose but part of the conversation. relevant b/c how it gets at the contemporary alienation, maybe why we talk about religion (since actual revolution is off the table, and post-modern criticism spirals into atomization). the mind gets understandably esoteric in these circumstances.

[Anonymous No.10190237]

>>10190169
>and the really exciting part of forming friendships with those people is that you've both delineated not just non-standard/non-bourgeois objects, but the holistic grounds undergirding and sustaining those objects, and you can share in not just each other's crazy ersatz objects but those grounds as well.
yes. maybe you get to figure out - ah, so *that's* why i'm so anti-social! perhaps because now you know you're not alone...i find it's always the same thing with reading the big guys. they just have a way of weirdly articulating something you always suspected was the truth but, because nobody ever actually mentioned it - or would have been likely to mention it - you just go, well, it's just me, i suppose...oh well...but later, of course, you find out this is why everybody talks about heidegger or deleuze or whatever. because there is a concept for that mysterious fucking thing you always felt was the case, but nobody ever said. which is why we have to talk about things, i think, shitposting...

as you say,
>only arrived at that position by zany twists and turns, he has zigged at a thousand places where you've zagged in your own years of isolated thinkin' about stuff, and all those zigs have allowed him to reach to places you didn't even know existed, or which you had written off as illusions, etc., and all of that novelty is accessible instantaneously through dialogue
(yup)

also, procedurally generated/emergent gay little haecceities ftw.

>maybe the century of the self isn't all bad and in the end all this will just teach us to meet each other as more individuated immanences or more stable bundles of chaos.
that's the hope, i think. we *are* bundles of chaos. what we need is just the right context, at the right time, maybe with the right project. capitalism does at least have this going on for it: advertising really is the new coal. we know all about mass man in society after the 20C...we're going to find out a lot more about humans as experimental projects in the 21C as well. presently we do this through Facebook and ads for Chicken McNuggets...but there are probably more productive uses (or maybe not?)

>foucault can say "don't ask me to be who i was yesterday" to his boyfriend and still wake up and slap dicks together every day
things you can do when you're a heavyweight of french criticism. we all should dream so big. in the end this is the prize of being a god-tier poststructural intellectual: you can spend your whole afternoon - paid! - to slap dicks with consummate gallic disdain for the bourgeois theatricality of the whole thing. what a life.

but there really is something interesting underneath all of this: that is, the alternative to fuckface activism. maybe chaos is the way forward. beats the infinite self-excruciation logic of microaggression, that's for sure.

randomly searching through my unsorted pics folders turns up more herbert. germane? not germane? let's continue the randomness experiment.

[Anonymous No.10190470]

and, just for the hell of it, one of the most mimetically savvy men who ever lived. a guy who knew that ruling by *fashion* was a way to keep restless and unruly nobles in line...and perhaps that if people are feeling a little bit lost without a god to believe in, you can at least *dress* divinely. because good luck imitating this (and the best part is - even if you do succeed, you'll be accused of trying to one-up the king).

with stalin the same logic is there: he can ask you, at any time, the answerable inquisitorial question: so, did you betray the revolution today? but louis is different: he doesn't have to ask you anything. he can tell by the *way you dressed to come to the palace* what side of the fence you are on. which is, i think, a kind of a brilliant way to handle things. *give people something to imitate,* or worth imitating, and they will all fall in line...

politically those days are long gone now (although trump, i'm sure, would love nothing more than to be imitated) and the cherished commodity takes its place. rich guys dress like undergrads (like zuckerberg and custom hoodies). it's why we think about capital all the time. because capital is always sexy, always keeps its promises - capital is secure power, possibly the only secure power that exists. and yet this makes everything else insecure to the point of mental breakdown or collapse (ask nick land...). we wind up thinking about the charms of market formalism for perhaps no other reason...

but the thing about the sacred - or the embodied mind - is that you *can't copy it.* islam, for instance, shows us this...everything else can be copied, simulated, and so on, degenerating as it goes. and for us ideology is that *non-spoken* component, the repressed thing, the thing we *don't* say, or can't say (and yet can't resist implying), or so on.

maybe one of our problems today is the excess attention we pay to being 'original', 'individualistic'...of course these are all really traps, since people wind up sounding exactly the same...or are just delights for your local Starbucks franchise owner, since niche aesthetes are always good for business...

>*knock knock*
>ffs JBP i'm busy
>no you are not. you are idling in the belly of the whale. you are being a willing slave to tyranny. you think you are somehow ahead of it. you are not. this is not criticism. this is pure decadence
>i know that. i just figure if i push it as far as i can i will learn something...some flash of illumination, maybe
>you already learned it. now you're just being a bad-faith postmodernist. being a postmodernist in bad faith isn't even an improvement. in fact it's even worse. it just means you lack the conviction to believe in the nihilistic fantasies of your degenerate intellectual godparents
>*thinks*...holy shit
>clean your room
>fucking shit
>and no swearing either
>a-all right...how do you keep finding my apartment JBP. how
>i'm watching you bucko
>be careful on the window tho
>*stares*

[mystikos No.10190585]

>>10190237
I live for the gay hacceities. Seems easier to design them in hyperspace. If I graffitid my thoughts on a wall no one would read them, but plaster them across an imageboard and hope they germinate in fertile minds and you might even get a response. Psychogeography in cyberspace. Cybersituationism. Maybe detourn a few memes. Maybe derive to /pol/. Of course, this makes me wonder about the aesthetic versus the religious. I've been posting here since I no longer have a mystic gf to share my most elevated thoughts. I have committed to the ethical in real life and achieve aesthesis online. Trying to be religious now. Missed the last few masses though. Need to re-attend confession. Maybe my philosophy obsession is a surrogate for someone to understand the secrets of my heart... or alleviating the fear of death. Trying to find a sense to the world.

[mystikos No.10190659]

>>10190470
>>10190192
“As long as the dark foundation of our nature, grim in its all-encompassing egoism, mad in its drive to make that egoism into reality, to devour everything and to define everything by itself, as long as that foundation is visible, as long as this truly original sin exists within us, we have no business here and there is no logical answer to our existence. Imagine a group of people who are all blind, deaf and slightly demented and suddenly someone in the crowd asks, “What are we to do?”… The only possible answer is “Look for a cure”. Until you are cured, there is nothing you can do. And since you don’t believe you are sick, there can be no cure.”
-- Vladimir Solovyov

“Failure to recognize one’s own absolute significance is equivalent to a denial of human worth: this is a basic error and the origin of all unbelief. If one is so faint-hearted that he is powerless even to believe in himself, how can he believe in anything else? The basic falsehood and evil of egoism lie not in this absolute self-consciousness and self-evaluation of the subject, but in the fact that, ascribing to himself in all justice an absolute significance, he unjustly refuses to others this same significance. Recognizing himself as a center of life, he relegates others to the circumference of his own being and leaves them only an external and relative vale.”
-- Vladimir Solovyov

“It is proper for the ocean of Divine love to overflow its limits, and it is proper for the fullness of the life of Divinity to spread beyond its bounds. And if it is in general possible for God’s omnipotence to create the world, it would be improper for God’s love not to actualize this possibility, inasumuch as, for love, it is natural to love, exhausting to the end all the possibilities of love.”
-- Sergius Bulgakov, The Lamb of God

“Romantic love is the highest flowering of the individual life…

Each man is capable of recognizing and realizing truth. Each may become a living reflection of the absolute whole, a conscious and independent organ of the universal life. The truth, as a living force, as a talking possession of the inward essence of the man and effectively rescuing him from false self-assertion, is termed Love.

True love is that which not only affirms in subjective feeling the absolute significance of human individuality in another and in oneself, but also justifies this absolute significance in reality, really rescues us from the inevitability of death and fills out our life with an absolute content.”
--Vladimir Solovyov

“Sophia herself is not fourth to the Holy Trinity but rather is the matrix of the divine Creative power and as such is the bride of the Logos”
-- Arthur Versluis, Wisdom’s Children

>be fruitful and multiply, bucko!

[Anonymous No.10190797]

"You fucking idiots!", he yelled. Stopping them in their tracks.

"What"

"That code! What are you doing to that code!?!"

"The DNA? We're cutting it apart, freezing, editing it, growing it out of cellular context in tiny vats that cycle temperature back and forth, causing the DNA to replicate. We study these fragments and clones for information on how they work. We've blamed the DNA for most of our problems! We'll all be cured soon!"

"Don't you see that it's language? Living language. Where do you idiots think you write a book? In your mind. If this is code, a language, then we are already in the mind of God, we are in the place of the living word, that which exists in the mind of God Alone. You've opened the inner tabernacle. In the presence of all this we've done?!? Not even covered or hidden?!? you ass hats! Now he is here, aware of all this bullshit we're doing, and you're actually attempting to edit or copy his word, daring to place it inside human understanding.

You just fucking built and armed and started the count down for a nuke with the blast radius of all civilization on earth!

He's gonna be here soon. I'm going to go smoke as many joints as I can before then. They're like 5 bucks. It's amazing."

They paused like a group of children; parents home early, who had just cut open and dissected the cats in the living room, out of curiosity. DNA fragments smeared and spread all over the earth, all over their cute little faces, in a bloody mess. They knew better but some people suggested they were born that way and there's wasn't anything you could do about it.

The great filter offered to wash it all away. It's not like DNA ever doesn't write itself. That's ridiculous.

[Anonymous No.10190805]

>>10190659
>And since you don’t believe you are sick, there can be no cure.
mother*fuck.* holy hell this one gets me. is this the power of the fucking russians? good googly moogly. i'm fucking slayed by this. because of course *everybody* knows that things are fucked up...but it's not a question of just 'admitting that you are sick' - it's also, or seems to be, that we accept that we *are* sick and that there *is* no cure. not for late-marxist hardliners (or whatever), anyways...right? *everybody's* fucked up, the outsiders and the insiders...just in different ways...and we accept this, or as much as we can...i guess...

...i think part of it must be that, of course, we're raised on critique of ideology these days...'oh, you think you're *normal*, do you?' this kind of thing. the whole generation is born with CTRL-glasses on. and so, of course, we internalize this idea: 'no, no, of course, that's right, everything is perceptival...' and, of course this is true...but what we *aren't* used to hearing, anymore, is the fucking alternative...

and fuck...even if there *isn't* a normal, there does have to be something like an alternative to well-intentioned nihilism. it's just psychologically necessary. and whatever it is, it would sound like this guy.

>The basic falsehood and evil of egoism lie not in this absolute self-consciousness and self-evaluation of the subject, but in the fact that, ascribing to himself in all justice an absolute significance, he unjustly refuses to others this same significance.

because this is *exactly* the thing. 100%. isn't it?
seriously: isn't this the inner nerve-clusters of existentialism? isn't the *whole idea* that we are supposed to do exactly that, take responsibility for all justice, absolute significance...and that you *fucking cannot do it in good conscience?* you
just
fucking
can't
do
it.

this is why i was losing my gourd over those neoplatonism threads...the ironic, and perhaps comic, thing about lingering in the dark places is, good luck *not* falling hard for the Light when you see it next time, you sentimental motherfuckers...we can all be as surly as fucking shitty as we like brooding on market formalism or whatever...and the longer you do this, the more you are going to feel the sting when you read stuff like this...and realize that there is still something much, *much* more interesting to think about than fucking capitalism...

ai! that's twice today you have posted some of most perfect and perfectly-timed /lit/ ever, anon. wonderful post.

so vladimir solovyov, holy shit. Let's check this out on Wikipedia:

>A vigorous anti-Asian racist, Solovyov spent his last years obsessed with the fear of the "Yellow Peril", constantly warning that soon the Asian peoples, especially the Chinese, would invade and destroy Russia...arguing that in face of the "Yellow Peril", only the most merciless violence could save the white race

...ah, fuck it. i'm here for spiritual counsel anyways, not politics.

[Anonymous No.10190909]

>>10190585
>Need to re-attend confession. Maybe my philosophy obsession is a surrogate for someone to understand the secrets of my heart... or alleviating the fear of death. Trying to find a sense to the world.

Status anxiety coupled with an internalised notion of humans as having no intrinsic value, only instrumental; therefore, making something of yourself rather than negating and waiting?

Absence makes the heart grow fonder, friend.

[mystikos No.10191107]

>>10190805
>neoplatonism
Yay! You remember my thread :p
>>10190909
Too much absence. Not enough absinthe. The heart is too fond. The lack of my desire consumes and grows like a gaping void threatening complete breakdown albeit whilst spitting out and producing these useless and interesting (to me) shitposts and philosophical spitballs which haunt my friends and family and this imageboard with their wraithlike thanaterotic melancholia.

All things have intrinsic value, no? Should? At least it seems like a beautiful claim. Everything bears the signature of the divine. This is the intersection of deep ecology and stewardship theology. But crit kids like us are all too conscious of that. The hardest part is exercising stewardship not simply for the environment or your loved ones or the poor or sick but for your own body, mind, and soul.

God, I am starting to sound like my Dad...

Can there be a capitalist wuwei?

I needa start making podcasts or etsies or whatever the fuck the new alt money making scheme is...

So what do I really want to say?

There are three things I fear in life; aliens, time-travelers, and love. They seem ontic and I am at risk of granting them ontological existence. It's all I need to believe in a God. Well, that and a pro-marijuana papacy but I digress. Belief is an act. But that act involves a moral dilemma and crisis of conscience. Probably because I am such a crit kid I am lost. Thoughtpolice brutality over thots by some superego holy guardian angel. Or two. Everything is thoughtcrime for a crit kid. Of course, the silliest thing of all is to rebel against a God who may not even exist. Or is that what you should do?

>this kid thinks Jesus is gonna magically turn his life around
Naw. I just want Jesus to give me something in return for turning my life around.
>What about heaven?
Can't wait. Still agnostic about that bit anyway


>I think your problem is that you're a nice guy
Pic related

[Anonymous No.10191556]

>>10190470
>but the thing about the sacred - or the embodied mind - is that you *can't copy it.* islam, for instance, shows us this...everything else can be copied, simulated, and so on, degenerating as it goes. and for us ideology is that *non-spoken* component, the repressed thing, the thing we *don't* say, or can't say (and yet can't resist implying), or so on.
>maybe one of our problems today is the excess attention we pay to being 'original', 'individualistic'...of course these are all really traps, since people wind up sounding exactly the same...or are just delights for your local Starbucks franchise owner, since niche aesthetes are always good for business...
>>10190659
>
True love is that which not only affirms in subjective feeling the absolute significance of human individuality in another and in oneself, but also justifies this absolute significance in reality, really rescues us from the inevitability of death and fills out our life with an absolute content.
For much of my life, I have been quite reserved with my thoughts. I don't confide my innermost secrets and thoughts with anyone. Partly because they are shameful, but mostly because my secrets and thought patterns are unique to my being. I desired something which I can call mine that nobody else has to assert my individuality, though internally. Come to think of it, people also have a need to externally assert their individuality, and what better way is there than by "possessing" another individual? There is only one of 'you' and one of 'me'. We lay claim to our individuality through marriage of our prized possession, and show it to the world. If out love is mutual, we possess each other, and each other's thoughts. Thus paradoxically, affirming our individuality and union. This is probably why marriage is still an institution, and one of the last few bastions of tradition left in this secular age.

[Anonymous No.10192126]

bump

[Anonymous No.10192844]

>>10191556
this is a good post.

>*chime*
>come in
>captain…the men tell me that you have primed the rambledrive
>that’s right, #1. we are preparing to blast off for hypermemespace
>may i ask why
>you may
>ok…uh…why
>*dramatic pause* there is no why
>goddamnit man that’s not an answer
>you’re not wrong about that #1
>*sigh*
>rambledrive ready sir
>engage

1/4
nothing resists "deconstruction," including marriage. you can deconstruct that too. even peterson, the anti-deconstructionist supreme, will defend the institution of marriage by saying that it's not always about romantic love, it's about *survival.* of course he knows about the courtly and spiritual dimensions as well, and it's a sort of a grim point to make, but it's there.

societies need *order* on a fundamental level. i know that i am deeply divided against myself on this point also, because *order and progress* don't necessarily go hand in glove. they *should* - that is the ideal, and you would think that that would be the case - but when they don't (as may be the case today) things get unruly. i’m always trying to find a way to thread the needle, postulate some kind of society - or thinking - that would somehow combine both of these, but i really don’t think it’s possible.

it could even be the case that there is an individualist telos and a group or at least +1 kind of telos as well. i usually feel lost because i *want* to join some kind of order, but i resist - or betray - because of the temptation to ask/say, 'well, it doesn't *mean* anything except capital,' or, 'where is this going?' but these are misleading questions. the point of order isn't to 'go' anywhere: the point of order is continuance and regulation, stability through time: cyclical vs linear. order is evaluated through duration rather than ‘meaning.’ when we think of a golden age, perhaps we think of these things going hand in glove: happy people, happy civilizations, enlightenments, and so on. but are things like technical and scientific progress, for example, *ancillary* benefits…or, in the Grand Historical sense, the only things that matter?

the hardest part for any order may be domesticating the individual. in earlier times, this might not have been such an issue: there probably wouldn't have been so many progressives (as we understand them today) in 6C Western Europe because *times were harder.* we live in a profoundly individualist era now - the most individuated, democratized, emancipated, abstracted ever? - and the telos of the desiring individual is horizonless. *every* social order can be regarded as an experiment. and shit, maybe it is. viewed from the purview of capital and simulation, we have no reason, really, not to take a kind of holodeck perspective on everything. if everything is subject to change…if identity seems entirely liquid, and even implications that this is not the case tantamount to aggression - then what?

[Anonymous No.10192852]

>>10192844

2/4
from what i have read of confucian societies - at least in their idealized form, and no apologetics for those follow here, fyi - the rules are set out with an almost mathematical precision. the emperor gets X number of statues in his courtyard, X number of pearls on his hat, the dukes Y, and so on down the line.the foundations of civilization lie in rituals that aren’t authored, in an original sense. order doesn’t have an original beginning, and to fall away from order is not necessarily to be innovative or creative: it’s simply deviant. order - as ritual - is the original precondition. true, it might be said that the confucians paid a price for this, in scientific innovation, later on. but we can contrast that order to ourselves: innovation - a self-driving civilizational technocommercialism- now determines our own society almost automatically. the paradoxical thing about progressivism is that it is an almost perfect cultural reflection of this: a constant rebellion against that which is constantly undermining the foundations of order itself - but this isn’t really *progressivism,* it’s *the inevitable mainstream itself.* order becomes a kind of necessary starting point for departure: *whatever* was done in the past, this is where we (but who are we?) begin from. modern tribalism - identity politics - continually retrieves its sense of itself from out of reference to a sense of the past seen as repressive. only *now* - today, here - can we *really* see what the problem was: plainly, it was _______. the discursive spice must flow.

it could be the case that the telos of the ungrounded individual is incompatible with the telos of the civilization, which perpetuates by domesticating or otherwise ritualizing the life of the individual, subordinating them to rules which “offend” because of their apparent arbitrariness - and the more one dives into theory, the more one comes to suspect that *all social life itself is simply arbitrary.* but maybe the arrighian point about sovereign landed power and mobile capital can be narrowed down even further: there are those who marry and raise children, who voluntarily (consciously or otherwise) make themselves beholden to the order of the polis and its gods…and those who seek elsewhere. but isn’t this overturned, if not reversed, by modernism? today, it is the mobile which is sovereign…and the idea of the polis - a concretized social order - becomes included within a higher conception: the state.

once social orders are perceived to be entirely metaphysical projects (‘social constructs’) - a charge nothing can resist - they then become subject to experimentation, and the individual individualizes accordingly. a humanitarian theory churning out paper after paper - miserably finding itself required, in turn, to obey the inexorable rules of industrialization and market forces - seems almost like the child of a loveless shotgun marriage.

[Anonymous No.10192859]

3/4

when nietzsche observes that there are no facts, only interpretations, one wonders if even *he* could have imagined a world in which this idea became the standard operating procedure for social experimentation and reorganization on the present scale and with the present fervor. it seems to me that nietzsche’s idea was always an existentialist one: it was there in order to enable the individual to break free of ressentiment, and not to channel or otherwise wield hermeneutics as a way of controlling or remodelling society itself in one’s own infinitely narcissistic image. but this is what happens: the concept of being an ‘artist of state’ - would he really have approved of how we do this today? if anything, progressive social experiments today simply project ressentiment so vastly and deeply over the entire social field that they become invisible to themselves. but it’s not even an endless creativity abounding, not even remotely ‘revolutionary’…it’s Last Man teleology writ large. too serious to be artistic, and too artless to hide the nakedness of power.

the hardest thing for some people to do is to set their own self-interest aside. maybe we can take things a step further than lyotard here: forget about the libidinal economy, or desire - maybe it’s simply a *narcissistic* economy, and it’s not even that we have desire for others. maybe it’s that we *only ever ultimately desire ourselves*…and require the other to be there as a kind of a surrogate, so that we can see our own faces reflected there.

for myself, my ambivalence towards joining groups proceeds from a kind of unwillingness to surrender my own precious sense of individuality: i have a tendency to futurize everything, look at everything critically. everything is about capital, everything is about power, blah blah. but i *know* i do this because i am ultimately unwilling or resistant to consider, perhaps, the fact that i am simply miserable about having either nothing of substance to contribute, or just *being dissatisfied* with what capital can offer (literally everything…or, at the very least, a temporary exception, or distance, from body-and-soul mechanization). it’s a kind of ressentiment-fueled antipathy towards responsibility, in a way, because to join any group requires you to adopt responsibilities and carry your portion of the weight. it gets *harder* and not easier to do this if you strip all of the illusions away from everything (well, you can *think* this is what you are doing) and abstract everything…because all that happens is that you bleed all of the color out of everything in front of you. but this is a way of simply shutting out what is perhaps an alternate way of viewing things: that order doesn’t have a goal. order’s goal is to continue being orderly: maintaining a sense of coherence, internal and external, through the rotation of the seasons and in the face of the winds of change. same as it ever was. that *is* the reward.

[Anonymous No.10192871]

4/4

individuals develop, families grow, and *causes* make progress…but civilizations, maybe, are better evaluated on whether or not they - more specifically, their *ideals* - endure. western civilization isn’t something that can’t, perhaps, be “championed”…it can be only be contingently embodied, or its best parts valorized, by reference to the *best parts* of that theory, and not by a continual undermining of its foundations. we see in the west whatever we choose to see there, as we do for everything.

even philosophy…what else is this but a lingua franca for describing the mind? the thing about social critique isn’t that it is a description of political reality, it is that theory *becomes that reality itself.* we don’t *have* a higher tool for describing political life than theory - and that universalist discourse *is* the collective open-source schematic, the DNA sequence, of progress. it’s why literature, i think, should begin with a *gigantic* step backwards from the political fronts. modernity is not, i think, a thing which can be resisted: it may only be possible to *politely decline it.* it’s why JBP is right, in some sense, about postmodernity: it is a way of having one’s cake and eating it too. except you will starve, in the end, since the cake you think you are eating isn’t really there…perhaps the most we can do is reflect on our own minds, and to admit that, most of the time - maybe all of the time - we are ultimately reflecting on nothingness. a finger pointing at the moon, but not the moon itself.

because maybe it isn’t power that corrupts. maybe it’s the attraction to power that does that. maybe it’s not that we’re oppressed at all - maybe we’re just fucking *narcissistic,* and we will do anything in our power to deny or refuse this. anything. maybe the first rule of power isn’t control but *resistance to control* - *any* kind of control. we don’t want anybody else to tell us what to do. we want to have a free (and ever-freer) hand. but why? for what? we don’t know. we *can’t* know. we can only blame others…

it’s why virtue is uncomfortable. the enemy lies within. i know it’s not society that sucks, *i* suck. and i suck at everything because i decided to spend all of my time thinking about this shit to the exclusion of everything else. and i am deeply, painfully frustrated, and embarrassed, to find that there is no spoon. things are as they are. frustrating. contingent. mortal.

it’s the absence of virtue - not power - that sticks in my craw. because if i believe in the concept of virtue, i *can’t* discuss it metaphysically. it becomes *my* problem and i know it. i can critique others for a lack of virtue, if i want, but it means *i have to show my cards too.* when the conversation is about power, i can always get seductive, whatever. but if i *refuse* the concept of virtue, well - haven’t i *already* told you everything you need to know about me?

[Anonymous No.10192906]

Did you know researchers have discovered that the only reason people get into self help, philosophy, or spirituality is so that they become something shiny which will get laid or cared about?

Non dualism or "all one beliefs" being a technique that is sort of like getting flexible enough to suck your own dick...

I can't say it's not working but come on, that's not what anyone was trying to get out of this. I don't think... really?!? Ok fine. Whatever.

Researchers also discovered that attractiveness is based on how many things an individual is capable of appreciating that the other person loves. Movement, art, thinking, sensuality, feeling, allowing, etc.

Sexiness being how deeply the things are appreciated. When someone only appreciates a fraction of the things someone else appreciates, they are given the label, "shallow".

Like people often, if not always have a beautiful spirit, but if they ignore their body or their soul or mind, it's boring.

Spirituality is like a coward only brave enough to seek in themselves what is already perfected.

[Anonymous No.10192923]

>>10192906
I think in a few weeks, the women are going to figure out that lots of the spiritual men who were all about the "divine feminine", these soft spoken posers too weak to speak of, much less engage any real problems, were just saying that stuff to get laid.

They are all Saying something beautiful or sensitive to become successful.

Their speech is written not by themselves, but by what will maintain their popularity.

Their balls are empty. The men are a Robotic collection of self help concepts and fancy scientific and spiritual language picked up at transformational festivals.

The women already know this but they already have enough problems to deal with.

Contrast that with Truth: Masculine(Logos) Truth in support of the feminine(flow) that will absolutely not get you laid and remove any chances you have at getting appreciated, much less laid, based on what comes out of your mouth.

This is because the Real man takes the responsibility for the entire situation. He is not a leader in the situation. He is not awake. He is not enllighented. He is the problem. He is not someone with insight anyone needs.

He embodies the problem, so that he can go to war with the problem.

He does not become something special to be praised or looked up to in a situation.

The reaction or sensitivity to the opinions of others?

L.O.L.

These are games boys play. Where their fantasy of being a somebody goes somewhere cool or important and is sensitive to or helpful to someone else.

The Real masculine abandons this and leaves the situation to free himself to do what ever is necessary for the Flow.

Commanded by the flow, Knowing that if he truly abandons himself, only correct behavior will result. He need not try to be better. Need not be a person who can become better.

The real masculine can not be influenced by personalities. Characters. It contains them, it is not one of them.

It is alone.

[Anonymous No.10193123]

>>10192923

I keep telling people about the container loads of eighties cultural memorabilia at the dock, just waiting to be unloaded when *chaos* ensues as planned, meaning mediated reality allows the drip to open into a flow of *cool* new insights. The weird thing is how actually unpredictable the location of this new cultural moment is when you know that its influence is primed. That it is a place and time and people is oddly unsettling to me - though maybe it is because sometimes it takes years for it to surface. Funny enough, I've ridden those waves but was never a cannonball or a hurricane. I suppose the necessity of location to these waves is now at a point where it must be mediated into existence do to the destruction of all regional boundaries. Is the cultural manifestation of a new location finally upon us? Does the platform finally rest above the waves? Are we spat onto an actual *here* now, instantaneously, in manner that makes all *there* the whale? How the hell do we sell this 80's alpha man as a nowhere man, a man without qualities, a gypsy/hedge fund manager? I suppose the regulation of religious experiences will need to be apart of the new themes. A sort of new apologetics along side some new marvel, a new series of spectacles *randomly* constructed alongside a compassionate understanding of eyes that bleed. Will probably manifest in an unsatisfying race to a golden mean from all the sides that lobby for reality.

How unstructured do you need to believe it all is so that you can continue projecting another's belief? Have you no corporate soul? Has the world slipped from your feat and left you only ether and a moon? Why won't you shine your light on me? I am ecstatic in your gaze, I am complete in your blaze. I am, I am, I am; and I am becoming life itself, flourishing - but only with you *here*.

[mystikos No.10193351]

>>10192871
>>10192859
>>10192852
>>10192844
>>10193123
Waiting for someone else's light is so terrestrial. You must think extraterrestrial. Love is an extraterrestrial promise. It defies terrestrial politics. Every man and woman is or can be a star. Be thou a sun unto thyself. A sun of God. Unless you're faggy moonchild. Bad joke. I guess we're all a bit of everything astral. You are always already astrally projecting. You are projecting onto the world in its astral entirety. You are also a projection of these same astral forces. Solar, lunar, planetary, energetic, material, entropic, Freudian. As we project ourselves onto the universe, the universe projects itself onto us. We our a part of the fabric of the cosmos, shaped by and shaping the cosmos and itself. You can apply this to dreaming and waking states. Although it is wise to remember they are not so clear-cut. You can create some punny asteotheological divisions between them too. And/or add dreamless sleep like the Hindus. And/or lucid dreams. What is the connection between lucid dreams and astral projection? I digress. In yoga, the goal is the union of the seer and the seen. But this requires a paradoxical method of untangling the seer and the seen from their projections onto one another. It is only when thoughts are kept clear and separate that the oceanic suchness of their unity is made present. Division without divisions. Somehow it is/was there all along they tell me. Only time I ever felt like an ocean was tripping on acid tho. Anyway, what was I saying? Something about bodies of light and bodies of desire. Conscious astral projection just requires mindfulness. And then you are on the road to suchness. It's not like reading Heidegger is gonna teach you how to be present. Or is it? Needa meditate more and shit or so I assume. Unless there is a vast conspiracy of lying mystics. I guess I could take more acid but I'd rather get their through conscious effort. But the reading and contemplating helps. Except when it's masturbatory. Or when I end up on this board somehow...

Gaw. Ya ya. Paralysis by analysis. Critical condition for a crit kid. We all suck. Why else would we be on 4chan?

I felt a moment of clarity while conceiving this post but don't know where it went.

Hopefully Trump completes the system of German Idealism soon and causes Lemuria and Atlantis to arise from the depths.

[Anonymous No.10193508]

>>10193351
on the subject of lemuria and atlantis rising from the depths...

mystikos: am i crazy for thinking that the most prescient film in recent years v/capitalism/neoliberalism/postmodern fuckery/et al is pic related?

ignore the fact that the central and unpredictable biomechanism that *nobody* seems coming being the fact that reptiles can *change their own gender at will, or out of necessity.* leave that minor factoid aside for a moment.

>then come back to it later

just ask: isn't this film basically about the idea of *idealism* itself completing and bringing around its own tragedies? if hammond wasn't an idealist, he wouldn't have created an island full of rampaging dinosaurs. and yet *being an idealist* means, essentially, that you can do - or pay other people to do - incredible, sorcerous, reality-bending things: like replicate dinosaurs out of insects preserved in amber.

isn't the whole system of idealism *incomplete* without a tragic dimension it cannot help itself but bring into being?

go another way with it. *what is the point of being an idealist* if you aren't going to flirt with that realm of impossibility between the imaginary and the real? and what possible other end can there be for doing so than disaster and disappointment?

...and isn't it that we would - maybe we have to - *rather experience idealism with disaster and disappointment* than *experience nothing at all?*

the alternatives to being a crit kid - nice term, btw - seems to me to mean being Tragic Failure Kid. or pataphysics kid. whatever.

the thing about idealism, as you've said - and i think land agrees with you - is that there *is* no idealism that doesn't necessarily include lemuria and atlantis rising from the depths. it's just that when that happens it doesn't mean everything else gets to remain the same. maybe a rising tide floats all boats for a little while...before fucking sinking everything.

gaah. the places the mind goes. thoughts?

[Anonymous No.10193587]

>>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.

[Anonymous No.10193626]

...and so, referring to an earlier post (>>10186569):

>What films can be viewed through the prism of girardian theory? Any movies on mimetic desire and sacrificial crisis?

...i'd say this one seems to check out pretty well. what gets sacrificed? the whole island. because one man has a fantasy vision of dinosaurs...but the dinosaurs *in* that vision themselves, *once they are brought into creation,* have an entirely different vision: that is, of being *what they really are* - that is, dinosaurs, ruling the earth. in the end, neither hammond nor the dinosaurs will really get what they want, in a full sense...hammond gets to see his vision, partly, and the dinosaurs get to rule a (simulacral) world, at least for a few days...but the course *of* those few days are enough to bring down the whole system.

disaster capitalism at its finest. and girardian to the nth degree, too, i think.

[Anonymous No.10194257]

Has anyone read Rollo May? I'm interested in Girard thanks to this thread, but I already ordered picrelated. It would be interesting to compare these authors and their approaches to the study of violence.

"Violence arises not out of superfluity of power but out of powerlessness."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xEQ5sPWx6kk

[mystikos No.10194367]

>>10193587
As a philosopher, I think of idealism as the inverse of materialism. Consciousness at the base of the pyramid. Otherwise the architecture of your philosophy is upside-down. It seems a degenerate gnostic platonism to imply ideas are necessarily corrupted by their descent into the material world. Overly dualistic. And symptomatic of an inverted pyramid. From the standpoint of a sufficiently advanced idealism, ideas achieve their full fruition through their ascent and incarnation into matter. The birth of the artist through the work of art. Like God with creation and the logos becoming flesh. But there is an allure to the idea logic you speak of. When the idea incarnates its self it begins to exist for itself. It's like having children. You have plans for them but they have their own plans. The dream becomes a nightmare somehow. But hopefully through sublation and synthesis it eventually becomes an even greater idea when the dreams are dreamed together. Like how Christ was not the messiah the Jews expected but something even better. Talk to your kids about Hegel -- lol. I always liked certain ideas in hermeticism. Keep up the great work! Do great work, produce your magnum opus, and do it virtuously. You are co-creator with God. And it is your duty to help finish creation. As a singularitarian I used to believe we all contributed to constructing the absolute idea. Building a God to save us, the impossible dream. God as both our original beginning and final end. Can desire be a lack and a productive force? Kenosis is interesting. Self-emptying love. Ask not what your partner can do for you but what you can do for your partner. And find peace in the emptiness like a buddhist monk. If the objet petit is imaginary then can't one stop imagining it? Or for an idea to exist doesn't it have to exist within for us to be able to imagine it... every idea possesses a cause, right? Or is that a silly early modern idea? Sometimes I do have a feeling of perfect contentedness. I believe I can do great things if I abide in it. We need to sacralize the self and the universe and rescue it from gnostic profanations of endless deconstruction and ego death without rebirth all of which goes hand in hand with civilization's apocalypse. Is kenotic love a deconstruction that also constructs? Pour your life's blood into the grail to grant eternal life to your inheritors. Life goes on, after nukes and chemical warfare and dinosaurs, man continues on. Increasingly cautious but nevertheless still optimistic. Every idealist dreams of a better world. And it is foolish not to count our blessings bestowed by our ancestors. Perhaps this is the relation between grace and graciousness.

[Anonymous No.10194378]

>>10194257
zizek makes a good point about this, talking about taxi driver, i think. travis bickle's rage proceeds from this sense of unarticulated anger - what lacan calls 'words trapped in the body.' violence is a way of speaking to the individual's own private, and potentially oppressive, symbolic order: a prison the analysand doesn't even realize is self-constructed (although Oedipus has some hand in it). violence always gets recognized: at the bottom, it may be a desire for nothing other than that.

and really, it makes a lot of sense. violence *is* a way of speaking - the *excess* cruelty, laden with jouissance, the deliberate destruction of a thing is always a way of saying that, whatever that thing is, it *means something all too real to us.* it's a fucking brilliant insight, and completely true. in a sense, what girard is doing with mimetic theory is basically the same thing with a kind of historical-anthropological framework (and a lot more biblical references). you don't get mimetic rivalry, after all, without *someone being responsible* for transgressing The Rules...

lacan's thing was to look at the sense in which something in the real seems to address us in ways that, because they provoke neurotic or even violent responses, indicate that they are *way* more significant than they would ordinarily be...so much that we can't even talk about them without a powerful emotional response. which was the point of depth psychotherapy...to find the words to talk about that which we resist talking about (until we lash out). it's why therapists will talk about people coming to see them, who then try every trick in the book to avoid confronting the thing that's bothering them: denial, evasion, flattery, rage, all of this...because the idea is for you to recognize that that thing you're avoiding is actually the linchpin of what makes you, you.

i suspect most of social life works in the same way: it's all about recognition. maybe that's the (illusory) attraction of power - you only have to see what you want to see, hear what you want to hear, because you control the narrative...wasn't this stalin's trick? or stallone firing his service staff because they looked him in the eye?

there is no purely abstract violence, zizek says. i think he's right. violence is real because it's part of a mimetic world, for better or for worse. we have mimetic desires, but not abstract desires, because we aren't abstract people...maybe everything in social life is just about thymos, in the end, craving for recognition. we need other people to recognize us, and we can't really help ourselves from noticing other people either...

anyways, be interested to hear what RM says. existential psychotherapy, can into.

[Anonymous No.10194866]

>>10194367
>Keep up the great work! Do great work, produce your magnum opus, and do it virtuously. You are co-creator with God. And it is your duty to help finish creation.

>We need to sacralize the self and the universe and rescue it from gnostic profanations of endless deconstruction and ego death without rebirth all of which goes hand in hand with civilization's apocalypse. Is kenotic love a deconstruction that also constructs? Pour your life's blood into the grail to grant eternal life to your inheritors. Life goes on, after nukes and chemical warfare and dinosaurs, man continues on. Increasingly cautious but nevertheless still optimistic. Every idealist dreams of a better world. And it is foolish not to count our blessings bestowed by our ancestors. Perhaps this is the relation between grace and graciousness.

dense thickets of schizo-text they may be there are some pretty beautiful thoughts in there.

>Can desire be a lack and a productive force?
origin of mimesis says i. very much can be. hysteria produces infinite words, absence produces infinite text...the unconscious is built for desiring-production. ask D&G...

>And find peace in the emptiness like a buddhist monk.
this, tho. contemplation of jellyfish blooming in the darkness.

words don't matter. maybe we'll discover this in the 21C: birds chirp, humans talk, life continues. sometimes i think, just do whatever makes you happy. listen, and do. mainly do. like beatrix kiddo punching her way out of the grave. words, text, discourse, criticism...meh. maybe the zen guys have it right. dunk yourself in the river now and again. try to forget everything. fresh eyes on the whole, 'overawed with being' like a primordial greek hero.
>i think some of your style of writing is rubbing off on me

how great would that be? how great would that be. it feels as though everything these days is already colonized, completely, by invisible webs of capital...and maybe it's so...but maybe there's something beautiful in horror too. like a great soft machine...

fiction, maybe, > theory. with theory we always-already know too much. it's poetry that sandpapers the aggregate coaldust and scum off of your face. or the words of some long-dead russian theologian.

theory is for failed writers. anybody can learn it. anybody can learn to be a disaffected pseud with all the right name-drops. same way you can learn anything else, i think. maybe it should just be a thing we train people to do, like kickboxing or szechuan cuisine: Marxist Fuckery (an 8-week intensive course).

but uber-tier fiction is for bosses. i'd give my eye teeth to be able to write like robert e howard instead of being just another disaffected pleb.

[Anonymous No.10195042]

For if only the materialistic knowledge that has been developed in the last three to four centuries should continue to permeate human evolution … the present social chaos of the civilized world will repeatedly recur …

What science has been able to give humanity, since the middle of the fifteenth century has certainly been sufficient for the making of technical discoveries, has been sufficient to spread over the earth a network of commerce and business intercourse, but it does not suffice for the creation of social arrangements …

As long as an external, material science is alone recognized, so long will humanity be in the grip of chaotic social conditions.
-- Rudolf Steiner

[mystikos No.10195361]

>>10194378
That must be Zizek's Hegelianism. The life or death struggle as the climax of the search for recognition.
>>10194866
You're getting distracted again. The great work comes from awakening or enlightening. They are not separate paths. Find peace and write. And worry not whether you are as good as the greats.

>but JBP I gotta find God before I clean my room
>you will find God when you clean your room

[Anonymous No.10195387]

Wow, this fucking thread, it's hard to believe this coexists with all the stupid shit that's been on the /lit/ catalog lately.

[Anonymous No.10195542]

>>10195361
>That must be Zizek's Hegelianism. The life or death struggle as the climax of the search for recognition.
quite so. he must have felt like he had split the atom the day he put hegel and lacan together.

>You're getting distracted again. The great work comes from awakening or enlightening. They are not separate paths. Find peace and write. And worry not whether you are as good as the greats.
i love this thought. i want to believe it. i sincerely do. i feel - whatever this is worth - as though the writing and the peace are mutually exclusive.
when i write these days all that ever happens are these weird cryptic conversations in a wasteland, with these jaded and disaffected imperials - they're mostly all shitheads - being brutally pragmatic and indifferent to each other for the sake of profits they already don't need in these looping and strange cycles of intrigue. like dune meets the wire with some quiet cyberpunk going on. people being oblique with each other for the sake of being oblique. the search for Moar Freedom - always a question of bank statements -
justifies everything: transhumanism and all of it. but society as a result is a total dystopia. the main setting is a privatized debt-prison city i used to fantasize as being a zero-ground: just the essentials, money, desire, violence, tech. b/c there you'd think the truth would come out.

a sort of achieved utopia for some, the owners, the defense & preservation of which necessitates infinite alienation as they attempt to keep up with joneses Back Home none of them will ever meet.

there's some gnostic stuff too. but it's a portrait of total fucking sterility. what happens when you try to reduce things to zero. the wealthy have one ontology and the poor have another and they wind up perceiving each other like different species: but they're all slaves in the end. the poor don't rebel because they still love the money, and the wealthy can't move because they don't want to assume any responsibility. in the end some see, perhaps, that they're exactly the same and mutually trapped. some of the people at the bottom wind up going back to the bottom even when they have a chance to leave, if only because it's familiar, they're habitated. and the rich stay chasing faberge eggs.

in the light of this thread, a simpler pitch: jurassic park for humans. humans running social experiments that get out of hand. the only improvement or progress i think i've made is to be able to grasp that tragedy > He Ruled Wisely And Well. not to say that tolkien wasn't a boss for sticking the ending. only that when i write happy endings they're obviously fake and i don't believe in them.

that's what i write about.

>but JBP I gotta find God before I clean my room
>you will find God when you clean your room

this tho. this. you are a wise anon, anon.

>>10195387
i agree. kind of a happy accident that it attracted a cabal of mystics and seekers in a mood to vent. props to OP and all who contributed.

[Anonymous No.10195735]

If all desires are mimetic, how did the first desire originate? I thought it was interesting Peter Robinson brought up the Temptation of Eve in the interview with Girard. The first mimetic desire in The Bible occurs at this moment.
>Genesis 3:4-6 [4] And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die: [5] For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil. [6] And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat.

If there is only one original of mimetic desire, does that mean all mimetic desires that came after it are *derivatives* of the original? Let's say, you and I both love oranges, but also like apples, and we come across a fruit bowl with apples and oranges. The problem is, there is only one orange. I grab the orange first, and start peeling it. You may be a little disappointed, but the bowl is full of apples, and you grab one, and eat it. Even though the apple doesn't satisfy your desire for the orange, your desire is satisfied *enough* for the situation to not progress to a mimetic rivalry. Take all of the commodities we have today. Not only are they stratified by brand, they are also stratified by quality. This allows people with varying desire/fulfillment thresholds to be satisfied. If this weren't the case, we would have riots breaking out in stores on a regular basis.

So, the first desire "ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil" has morphed through some mimetic game of telephone to the mimetic desires we have today. What esoteric truth is there from all desire stemming from the desire "to be as gods," especially if this particular desire was invented by the personification of evil itself?

[Anonymous No.10195772]

>>10195735
>what esoteric truth is there from all desire stemming from the desire "to be as gods," especially if this particular desire was invented by the personification of evil itself

...we can still be debased gods, or as debased as the debased gods whose desires we emulate...

[Anonymous No.10196457]

bump

[Anonymous No.10196552]

>>10195735
>Take all of the commodities we have today. Not only are they stratified by brand, they are also stratified by quality. This allows people with varying desire/fulfillment thresholds to be satisfied. If this weren't the case, we would have riots breaking out in stores on a regular basis.

The desire arises through a mediator. If the person who "picks the orange" is not seen as a mediator by a second person, there will be no desire.
Let's compare this with how marketing strategies make use of mediators in order to reach more consumers. A famous athlete like Michael Jordan for instance - or whoemver is the best player nowadays- serves as a mediator for lots of young and old sport fans, so when he is used in a marketing campaing, it's very likely that they are going to reach this audience. If you are not a fan of basketball, that doen't matter, other companies are going to use musicians, other athletes, actors... in order to act as mediators to target a different part of our society. A funny contemporary phenomenon is the "hipster culture", they are capable to perceive the act of mediators unto other, but are unable to understand that they are also affected by the mimetic desire. That's why a "culture" that denies what is mainstream has it's own set of musicians, filmmakers and clothes that end up creating themselves an easily recognizable "culture" .

[Anonymous No.10196888]

>>10196552
>A funny contemporary phenomenon is the "hipster culture", they are capable to perceive the act of mediators unto other, but are unable to understand that they are also affected by the mimetic desire. That's why a "culture" that denies what is mainstream has it's own set of musicians, filmmakers and clothes that end up creating themselves an easily recognizable "culture" .

this. hipsterdom is its own ontology. it's a by-product of postmodernity: irony becomes the baseline for reality. it's not hard to understand either how that fed the contemporary CTRL-left also. because things were relatively okay in a kind of echo chamber in which *everything* could be perceived parodically...until things entered that culture from the outside which couldn't.

that thing - or one of those things - was islam. because hipsterdom is predicated on an ironic view towards everything...except that islam couldn't be perceived ironically. politics then entered the scene because one had to make a highly difficult and uncomfortable choice. either islam was a special case that could not be ironized (in which case one might be tempted to become a militant progressive, hyper-aware of microaggressions and so on) or not, in which case all life was simply semiological in nature (and perhaps this is why hipsterdom is also a gateway towards right-wing politics, which is exactly what happened with gavin mcinnes, the godfather of hipsterdom).

scott alexander has written about this, that it was fine - perhaps even mandated - to butcher all sacred cows under the sign of irony/progress/hipsterdom/whatever until one encountered a cow that couldn't be gored. that cow was islam.

and none of this is to make a political point, either. it's only to look at the evolution and history of a culture - it is our own - which has become, in a certain sense, a prisoner of its own theory and criticism. hipsterdom was beyond good or evil: it was the historical fruit of deconstruction. and in the very success of that project it ran up against cultural forces and ideas that didn't so much challenge it as force it to reconsider itself in deep and powerful ways.

the current politicization of intellectual life and the quasi civil war between Left and Right in america is the product of this scission. hipsters could not at the same time perceive all imagery as ironic and at the same time reconcile within that perspective prohibitions against drawing the prophet mohamed. so they either doubled down on an increasingly arcane self-reflection (CTRL-leftism) or went the other way and doubled down on aesthetics uber alles (alt-right). true hipsters today are in the same spot as New Atheists: centrists for whom the rivers have dried up and the party moved elsewhere.

the question of *why* islam could not be viewed ironically was what led to politicization: "who is infringing on my *right* to be ironic?" this is a universalist question...and politics begins with scarcity...

[Anonymous No.10197240]

>>10196888
apparently i have more thoughts about this.

1/4

perhaps it could be said that the problem for universalist politics - or capital - is the desire for an avoidance of such distinctions at all. if one is on the contemporary CTRL-left, the friend is the Other, and the enemy is, in a sense, oneself; on the alt-right, the friend is the tribe to which one belongs, and the enemy is the Other. it may not even be the case that we can say there is a globalist sensibility against a nationalist or territorialist sensibility: fundamentally, this may be a clash of ontologies. is the world/history/et al a hegelian and dialectical process that ultimately leads to the *end* of politics and history, or is it now as it always has been: a realpolitik-infused territorial struggle in which national and tribal identities are the alpha and omega?

the unsettling part about this - and i'm sure i haven't articulated this as well as i would like - is that i can actually envision both sides triangulating on eschatological concepts of race and religion in such a way that a fight to the death becomes inevitable. one side will say *race and culture don’t matter* and the other side will say *race and culture is all that matters* - no? and neither can allow the other their opinions…the clash will be just as bloody and eschatological as girard would have expected…

where, for instance, has hegel really gone in these questions? suppose we take progressivism to be the dominant ideology in america: culturally speaking, in terms of the lord-bondsman distinction, the force of victimization has produced a reversal. the bondsmen are actually the lords, and are looking for a fight; and the alt-right, who channel patriarchy, mannerbund, et al all the time perceive themselves to be the bondsmen.

the real fact is that *neither can exist without the other.* both - for reasons neither can explain - depend fundamentally on the need for there to be an Other *precisely so that they can distinguish themselves from that for their own sense of identity.* this, i think, is the real paradox of cultural-political life.

remember that even for hegel, the lord does not annihilate the bondsman, but depends upon him for his own sense of self-awareness. only the bondsman acquires self-consciousness. but who can say which of these two political factions has the higher claim to self-consciousness? which can we say is really the lord, really the bondsman? the *real arms race is the victimization narrative,* this desire to blame the other *and derive one’s own identity from doing so*. both sides *want* the other to do something outrageous so that they can lash out in return…and this is why the most hyberbolic radicals on either sides benefit the most - people who want to *signal* that they have the most skin in the game. indeed, they will tell you they have *total* skin in the game…but this is only because they are such thin-skinned beings…

[Anonymous No.10197243]

2/4

the present era and its thinking is only a confirmation that girard was correct in all of this. it is *scapegoating* that undermines the hegelian interpretation of history. revolutionary praxis cannot allow for the concept of scapegoating if the ends justify the means - if the object is Freedom, then even being skeptical about the need for war is to risk presenting oneself as an enemy or a collaborator…

…*when both sides perceive themselves to be slaves,* when you have a *dual and parallel dialectic coming together,* the mimetic conflict is inevitable. this is perhaps where a debased hegelianism has gone today, since he can be wielded in *both* a left/progressive sense *and* and a right/conservative sense…and this may be exactly what we are witnessing: a clash of phenomenologies of spirit…

…from an *extra-historical* perspective, in other words, *much later,* perhaps, we can reference the owl of minerva…and perhaps it is in *this* sense that we can agree that hegel was right, that things are only understandable, once the moment has passed…but isn’t this contrary to the gnostic sensibility itself, which sees the Hour of Decision as being *now,* *here*, today…drawing lines in the sand for no other reason than to invite the other to step over them? doesn’t this seem like the media sensationalism we are used to? is it hegel we should be thinking about? or is it luther? a sort of militant protestantism that has all of the zeal, but lacks any concept of a god besides materialism?

what is revealed, to my mind, is the fact that deriving one’s own identity from political affiliation only leads to increasing fragility of nerve and spirit. everyone requires a sense of the other to have a sense of themselves: but the *otherness of the other* has to be preserved. this is what, after all, the hegelian lord does…but in a media-saturated, and perhaps relentlessly economized life, just as mcluhan observes, we are all crushed together in the global village, everyone being excessively interested in other people’s lives…whether they want to be or not…

girard observes that the true nature of the mimetic rivalry is not the conflict between lord and bondsman, but the death-struggle between twins, individuals between whom all differences have been erased. how could we not agree with this statement today? it is not a question of *which* identity is correct, or *from what* we derive our sense of identity, but the fact that *both sides* are absolutely bent on the notion of identity - the need for identity, the primacy of identity over all other things - being the central, ultimate, and paramount question…and this identity, projected universally, comes to include the other in ways that invariably lead to conflict…

…are present politics just a civil war between narcissistic identitarians? the nature of that identity itself doesn’t matter…what matters is that narcissistic identitarians never have enough…

[Anonymous No.10197246]

3/4

to go back to schmitt for a moment…let’s assume for the moment that schmitt is right about the friend-enemy distinction. isn’t the problem with this a sense of the logical impossibility of *having* an enemy, and yet the right thing to do being to *leave the Enemy alone?* i’m starting to think that all of our political angst is only an indication of a deep and abiding need for a kind of self-identity, a sense of being able to understand ourselves as individuals that does not require a political component…an excess of poststructuralism seems to inevitably present this idea of ourselves as being these socially constructed individuals, but everything then becomes a question of political or economic affiliation…

to think about hegel in this way is to realize how difficult it is to reconcile hegelianism with identity politics, or rather, to see how identity politics seems to lead inexorably towards hegelian praxis. we can agree, with hegel and lacan (through rimbaud), that i is an other, that we depend on the other for our sense of self, all of this…but the question we have to ask here is: *at what point do we feel ourselves needing to transfer this into the political realm?*

…it becomes, doesn’t it, a question of conviction? who are you, *really?* don’t you have to prove it? and isn’t the way of proving this - perhaps, like an ancient greek - by championing your own cause, mocking the other, thymos everywhere…doesn’t it seem like political campaigning is only a projection of one’s own lack of confidence in oneself into the public world? the more we talk about ourselves, the less we find is actually there…we become who we are, in this sense, by negating the other…this boilerplate hegel, but it is the *gnostic clash* that is more of a concern…

…because the dialectic of history, seen from a more remote perspective, is the reverse of how one thinks in the present, where the Other is an *immediate* concern, one’s own sense of oneself is perhaps being *mortally* challenged, the fight for recognition is *immediate,* a kind of crisis…

…but there is no crisis. thou art *not* that. can say that true self-consciousness does not begin with politics, in this hegelian-lacanian sense, but with its refusal? perhaps the present duopoly is, itself, today, only another face of the same old sphinx that we have seen before…asking the same riddles: *so, what side of the fence are you on?* to answer the question is to fall into the trap. perhaps, we can reply - you are mistaken…there is no fence…or we can commit the unthinkable offense, and refuse to answer rhetorical questions…

…we can ask, in other words, that if i *is* an other…that the fault lies not with us, but with the other who is asking, who is only ever asking, for an answer to the question of identity that can be spoken in terms of political life. and if that other insists that all identity is political, well…so much then for identity…

[Anonymous No.10197276]

4/4

…we might ask, then - just as baudrillard observed, that maybe there never was a true ‘working class,’ and only ever the bourgeoisie…if there never was an Oedipus…or if there were only ever sphinxes…

…all of us, sphinxes. beset by riddles, unable to stop asking questions, which spin on infinitely, and without end…self-provoking, other-provoking…

…but what is a sphinx that *submits itself to a vow of silence?* what is the sphinx *without* its riddle? what is a sphinx that voluntarily deprives itself of its own greatest power, the power to ask the infinitely productive questions that probe the nature of this I, this being of self-and-other?

...what possible reason could *anyone* have, today, for doing this?

…it would be less than a sphinx, and still not yet a man…it would be nothing, a curious anomaly…a sort of heretic against identitarian politics…

…what would happen then?

>kys girardfag
>hello inner self
>hi. so are you going to take that vow of silence then?
>well, it doesn't seem like a crazy idea...but what i'm wondering is, does it include greentext? i mean, can i take a vow of silence but at the same time write self-referential greentext commentary on /lit/?
>that's not really a vow of silence tho.
>i know. still tho. i have to put these thoughts somewhere
>so you're saying that you still need to be heard, one way or the other. like a massive fucking hypocrite
>pretty much, yeah...hypocrisy seems to be kind of an inevitable byproduct.
>you should clean your room fuckhead
>i thought this was how i cleaned it tho
>not really. this is more like self-presentation of mess. we will only know you are cleaning your room when you disappear forever
>you mean like the ending of the dark knight rises?
>kek. fuck you. your ego is big enough. try just doing your boring job instead.
>greentext tho. technically it's not speaking. it's public internal monologue
>ffs man get a grip

[Anonymous No.10197416]

>>10196888

Thanks for my dose of bullshit for the night

[Anonymous No.10197453]

>>10197240
>the real fact is that *neither can exist without the other.*

And yet so much worry filled rants about clashes. Why not just say it out loud, that you crave that spectacle more than fear it? Then you can get over the fact that you will not sit at the left hand of God ever, you not look down from afar. You are here. The panopticon is perfect, and the colliseum is beautiful. If you haven't bought a ticket, be careful of the lions as well as some men. All and all, have a good time - this one's on the Emperor.

Must be building something bigger this time.

[Anonymous No.10197457]

>>10197416
my pleasure...i have more...

...it may be the case that the logic of postmodernity, once it changes from being a skepticism about metanarratives into its politics form, which is the *skepticism about that skepticism* - CTRL-leftism and its reaction, the alt-right - we seem to be required with unanswerable questions that touch on the core of identity politics: race, gender, nationality, religious faith and so on. we cannot *solve* these questions - or, increasingly, even *speak* about them - without invoking politics.

the unbearable part of this is that we are ultimately forces us into It Matters/It Doesn't Matter binaries we cannot answer. this is not about deconstruction, but something far worse: *inquisition.* we can/cannot/must/must not talk about race. we can/cannot/must/must not talk about gender. we can/cannot/must/must not talk about whiteness. the most achingly painful questions in the world today bother us precisely because *to speak about them is to perpetuate division.* and it never ends. the more you say you aren't talking about one thing, the more you wind up implied in its reverse. you *cannot say* that one of these flashpoint issues - race, gender, whatever - either *does* or *does not matter* anymore. you can't even wish for it all to just fucking stop.

so, you quit the game.

in favor of what?

a question:

i is an other...

but what about 'thou?'

thou art *not* that.

what if we begin with a refusal - a principled refusal - of postmodernity? we don't *have* a reason for doing this...indeed, the more we try to articulate *why* we want to refuse it, the more we become implicitly involved in questions that automatically become political...

if we say, *thou art not that,* it is because 'thou' is a *form of address* other than 'i,', or 'you', or 'we'...but would describe a kind of horizon or framework which could only be called - whether we are believers or not - *catholicity...*

'thou art not that' does not equal 'i is an other.' it is neither advaita in reverse or just another way of reifying hegel. it is a skepticism about militant skepticism, which is to say, perhaps, politics itself...

...it is to be a voluntarily - even militantly - *self*-silencing sphinx. one is neither an i nor an other. what one ('thou?') truly is may be is an exception to an identity reduceable to language. not an other, or the other of that other, which is tantamount to a labyrinth of mirrors...

...whatever it is that i would like to become, it would only ever be a silence in which the other might be able to unfold their own paradoxical self as well...because we are not reducible to binaries...or the skepticism about binaries...what would be better would be the recognition that we are, essentially, absent, empty...like silent and mysterious corridors...a mutual enigma...

...where does *that* thought come from?

...maybe this is the appeal of monastic life...

[Anonymous No.10197778]

>>10197453
>And yet so much worry filled rants about clashes.
true. i'm a snowflake. and maybe just projecting. i'm saddened by the thought of metaphysics fractured by political thinking, though...if only because i feel like i can see the handwriting on the wall...and i'm skeptical about the concept of identity itself. but i live in a world which militantly believes in it and in which that skepticism is seen as provocative. so i have to zip it. and listen to identity-based philosophy i suspect may be based on false principles which i cannot criticize. it's an unpleasant feeling. not to say, it's not good for me...cultivating inner silence and non-responsiveness is highly becoming.

sometimes you gotta vent tho.

>Why not just say it out loud, that you crave that spectacle more than fear it?
no prob. i crave spectacle more than fear it.

>Then you can get over the fact that you will not sit at the left hand of God ever, you not look down from afar. You are here.
sometimes i can't help but look at it from afar, though. right? try and look at it up close...and what the fuck are you seeing? you *have* to take a distant view...so i do. not quite left-hand-of-God territory yet. just far, far from the polis...and not as far as i would like. and maybe feeling it will never be far enough...

>The panopticon is perfect, and the colliseum is beautiful. If you haven't bought a ticket, be careful of the lions as well as some men. All and all, have a good time - this one's on the Emperor.
can't argue with this. you're right. this *is* the correct attitude, no doubt - not mine. being fucked-out at the state of things is less awesome than being able to accept them. i'm with you there.

there's no question: the problem is me, not society. things are how they are. i just have a peculiar hang-up on some things. perhaps more out of envy, even. i'd love to have a fixed sense of identity. i thought i did, once upon a time. now it all seems like a swirly mass of contradictions. i would like to put this into production, somehow. the swirly ball resists this. i choose instead to sit on it. it's uncomfortable. i come here to rant and post weird stuff. it's a cycle.

/lit/ - the 'chans in general - do more good for the world, i think, than is scarcely realized. it's all just venting steam, in the end. i talk about politics so as not to believe in them. i discharge my own false sense of actually knowing what i'm saying so that i can get along in the world as an agreeable and harmless anonymity. which is what i ultimately want: to be no one. to pic rel.

i am working my way, in other words, from a false sense of understanding to a true sense of bewilderment. and my only way of doing this is by building from impressions of certainty i see in the world that simply don't add up to me for which i have no solutions. and indeed, that is my endgame. to stop trying to fix things. including myself...

>Must be building something bigger this time.
what did he mean by this, though.

[Anonymous No.10198430]

bump

[Anonymous No.10198497]

...but rather than go on and on about myself, let's see if we can't keep this conversation going. maybe a more interesting topic than one demented pseud's ravings is called for...

>*romantic melody*
>bah gawd that's goethe's music

i've been thinking about goethe these days, he being a guy who seems mysteriously, well, *sane*. we don't talk much about goethe...but he knew all about mimetics and desire...and was no revolutionary...

so what gives? how about *this* guy? here was a thinker - no slouch - who saw better than most the organic holism of all things, and didn't seem to fall into despair. faust is in the penthouse of western literature, and goethe is an almost universally respected author, even among notoriously prickly philosophers...

...so what did goethe know that we seem to miss? how was it that he evaded so many conceptual traps that we fall into? no ressentiment here...and no naive idealism either...

maybe it's this:
>Analyses of Sacrifice in Literature treated it for a long time as a unified phenomenon, in which sacrifice is always the manifestation of a particular kind of violence. The most prominent example of this approach is that of René Girard, whose idea that every sacrifice is an example of a universal scapegoat mechanism has inspired many readings of sacrifice in literature...

>...in one of the most emphatic attempts to rehabilitate the notion of sacrifice, Douglas Hedley argues that sacrifice must be understood as a Christian structure that is to be opposed to the deficiencies of a secular culture. His approach is most relevant for the discussion of sacrifice in Goethe because it considers the opposition between Christian submission to a transcendent order and the primacy of the individual, an opposition that becomes a key theme in Faust. As Hedley writes, “[m]any of the critics of the idea of sacrifice are anti-Platonic and so is Nietzsche’s odd retrieval of sacrifice, where sacrifice is an expression of the Will to Power and not the slave morality that encourages sacrifice of self for the sake of metaphysical values. Nietzsche is very telling in this reversal of the idea of sacrifice. The increasing emphasis upon individual freedoms and rights and the horizontal web of beliefs and commitments: dimension of family, friends, and contracts has been combined in occidental culture with an erosion of vertical sense of a mediated transcendent order.” The opposition between metaphysical values and human freedom lies at the heart of the Faust story, and Goethe’s Faust is significant in that it marks the boundary between a Christian notion of sacrifice and the Nietzschean modern one.

source:
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/546379

...share your thoughts, gents...

[Anonymous No.10198512]

>>10198497
That only makes me want read Faust even more, but unfortunately I have a few books to read that I can't postpone.

[Anonymous No.10198578]

to save you some time then, from the above source:

>...studies move towards a theory of sacrifice that treats it, not so much as an affirmation of violence, as a means of establishing a collective understanding of the human relationship to death...

>...all communities need rituals and systems of exchange to make sense of death; it must fit into an intelligible system of circulation, even if it is the end of the road for the dead individual...

from elsewhere:
>In the drama’s final lines, the Mystical Chorus explains that all things are merely symbols of the eternal verity, that the earthly reflects the heavenly, and that in Heaven the unattainable becomes possible for the souls of the blessed. The Eternal Womanhood which is the spirit of the Mater Gloriosa is a symbol of the divine love and forgiveness that nurtures all man’s acts and accomplishments and which inspires his spiritual development, and the creative principle that gives meaning and function to all elements of the universe.

>the poetic expression of these metaphysical ideas in the final scene sums up the philosophical meaning of Goethe’s powerful drama. It indicates that Faust has been admitted to Heaven because of his positive spiritual attitude and his constant striving, rather than any moral evaluation and weighing of his life. The drama has also demonstrated the delusions and tragedies that are caused by living in association with evil, negation, and frustration, through Faust’s unhappy experiences while under the influence of Mephistopheles. The final message of Faust is that life’s purpose is to live; that is, only through acceptance of life and continued effort to maintain life is one able to find immortality. Faust was victorious over Mephisto because, despite his errors and frustrations, he never lost his faith in life’s essence and continued, in the face of adversity, to search for something higher than himself which alone could give his existence meaning.

...heavy stuff. but these are things a militant social critique cannot do. every attempt to seek Power underneath literature via critical theory - even when successful - fails to leave us with the kind of thought we get from literature that prepares us to deal with that which is *outside* of materialism - that is, the strange and ancient mysteries of death and desire? maybe we do not want a utopia that can 'liberate' us from metaphysical problems like these, because they are in the end the only things worth thinking about...

...a social critique predicated on never bringing about the revolution would be an absurdity...but only great literature, as RG writes, can properly take as its subject a matter desires overcome and understood and transmitted to the human sciences...and when we turn theory against literature we lose both...sacrificing precisely that which enables us to conceptualize, via allegory, the mind and all its flaws...even if the only purpose is to prompt to us to *continue suffering*...

[Anonymous No.10198638]

and, just for the hell of it...a man with whom i find myself agreeing on virtually everything:

>at times I’ve envisioned a epic of the Earth herself, a work much in the same vein as the Indic Ocean of Story, or the Arabian Nights tales translated by Burton or Lane, or even of that monstrous etym smasher Finnegan’s Wake by James Joyce…. a work that would go along on some future voyage to Mars, be read by thousands unknown future citizens of that red planet in remembrance of our homeworld, a world that might at that time lie under ash or nuclear waste or oceanic encompassment or any number of man made or natural disasters apocalyptic or not… a tale that would bring to remembrance the evolution of the cosmos, earth, and the life of insect, animal, and human; the life of our planet as told by the Earth herself not as some romantic tale but rather speculative and real, a tale of the hidden life of things in their own words, saying what cannot be said in human terms but rather in the language of the earth.

>as I’ve been unpacking the literature both religious and secular of the past out of my libraries of late, books I haven’t seen for years, I began putting the epics of various nations the prime being of the ten volume Mahabharata, Ramayana, Rig Veda, the various epics of Greece, Rome, Medieval and Chivalric, the Renaissance, Enlightenment, Romantic, Decadent, up to many of the prose epics of our modernity Proust and Joyce, etc.; the Middle-Eastern Sufi and Arabian Nights tales; the mythologies of Africa, South America; the Norse and Germanic and Icelandic Sagas, etc. …

>just these alone one could spend years wandering and rewandering through their wisdom and lore and magic and spiritual depths and breadths… So many people now, young people seem so caught up in the desperation of a vanity politics, of the curse of our decadent moment of slippage into chaos and transitional stupidity, a secular world full of social, political, and philosophical speculation that seems to forget all the worlds literature and spiritual heritage as if it were naught, a thing of the past to be forgotten, wiped out, disinherited. Why? So what if humanism failed? Does that mean that literature and the inheritance of earth failed too? Humanism was but a blip on the screen of the past, while the world’s literature went under no banner, and cannot be reduced to one. So why have we let it? Why have we disowned our own past and covered it over with layer after layer of political revenge? As if the dead must pay for a thousand generations for the blood and pain of all those dishonored by the inhuman ones?

source:
https://socialecologies.wordpress.com/

>so what if humanism failed?
>so *what* if humanism failed?

now there's a fucking question...

[Anonymous No.10199859]

Bump

[Anonymous No.10200764]

i have cryptic-shithead opinions about julius caesar related to girard and literature. i want to say things like, roland barthes was halfway right: we should talk about the death of the Author, but maybe it's more germane in the 21C to talk about an equally necessary death of the Critic...so that we can start to maybe reconcile - or, more properly, *sublimate* - literature and theory...and then i can talk about land's creation of a new kind of demented crypto-theory disguised as cyberpunk, and wonder if maybe something like a new kind of cool & interesting literature might actually proceed from sublimating our own inevitably gnostic theory into fiction...

...does anyone want to talk about stuff like this: girard, Power and mimetics, things like this, or should we just let this thread die and start again later? some kind and worthy anon seems to keep bump-rescuing it from the graveyard but i don't want to come off sounding desperate for attention.

briefly: i think the cool thing to do is not to write criticism of power - still less so attempt to pursue Power 'honestly' IRL - but perhaps to sublimate criticism within narrative and fiction. in other words, to write ideology that doesn't refuse it's own being-ideology, and maybe in that way to actually effect a kind of depth psychoanalysis and say what it is that one is always really trying to say...not so much trying to repress the inner caesar, but perhaps to understand why nietzsche had such high praise for caesar...and asking, perhaps, if the fact is that all of our late-marxist fretting over theory only confirms that the ancients were right about everything, and we need a new kind of literature that can express it...

...imperialism is always aesthetic...but propaganda is the result of the unsublimated mind...who else could write about Imperial Power aesthetically but one who was no longer completely seduced by aesthetics...Death of the Critic seems kind of interesting...stuff like this.

or we can let thread die b/c no need to bump a dead horse. if it is dead.

[Anonymous No.10200958]

>>10200764
I am trying to understand your point.
You mean that criticism of power should be sublimated within the narrative. But how so? Criticism of power has always being present in works of fiction, unless you think it should be done in a different way.
I also agree that the ancients were right about everything, meaning that withing their work they expose the nature of desire as well as the mechanisms of scapegoat.Girard perceived these truth in the works of Proust, Dostoevsky, Shakespeare, Cervantes and others. The authors, themselves, I assume, were not completely aware of that, they reached the truth spontaneously.
I also think that your last remark about imperialism and the death of the critic deserves a development as I can't really understand your point there.

[Anonymous No.10201041]

>>10200958
>You mean that criticism of power should be sublimated within the narrative.
yes. i'm tired of textuality. theory is itself 'textual'...so where does this leave us?

>I also think that your last remark about imperialism and the death of the critic deserves a development as I can't really understand your point there.
it's sort of complicated and i didn't phrase it very well. partly it's based on my disaffection with a certain kind of critique. warshow, for instance, never forgot that, however much he might criticize the violence on display in a film like white heat, he nevertheless knew that he had chosen to put his butt in a seat to watch a gangster get punished. that elevates things to a higher level. in a way, baudrillard sort of does this, turning his own brand of critique into a sort of fatalistic poetry...and land winds up these rabbit-holes as well.

but to my mind the real metamorphosis is in the transformation of theory *into* fiction. i'm sort of intrigued by this idea of sublimation (if only because i am such an unsublimated humanoid)...and wondering if much contemporary hysteria is simply the face of unsublimated rage that must be sublimated, even if we live in a time which no longer knows how to do this, and is even perhaps uncertain as to why it ought to be done at all...and there is, really, no reason...

...*except* that it makes for better-than-shit-tier literature. what is there left to rebel against? nothing. everything. the central paradox. we can/we can't. we must/we mustn't. this kind of shit. divisions and contradictions that need, perhaps, to be reconciled rather than exploded.

great literature is to my mind *proof* of that sublimation. there's no other way to explain it. unsublimated forces produce ideological shit or second-rate theory. there may not *be* such a thing as 'sublimated theory.' this is what postmodernity exposes...and yet literature remains.

nietzsche makes the point about the temple, heidegger too, in a way. who knows but that art is in some sense *essentially regressive* though, a wrestling to bind up forces that are always pulling themselves apart, feeding political gnosticism...

...the mysterious thing about human culture is that we have great literature at all. and maybe because it came out of ages more capable of this sublimation than we are at present...because we are hung up on the Revolution...

...and so that's perhaps what i mean by the death of the critic. yes, the Author is dead. but something else now lives in us, this infinitely restless, dissatisfied, critical being...who writes infinite theory...but is creatively sterile. thus everything becomes political.

...maybe we should imperialize ourselves...or ask if a private psychological sense if caesar is, in a way, a kind of model-template for psychological stability...precisely so that we *don't* become ersatz-caesars driven by the WtP in the IRL political world...

...just rambling thoughts...

[Anonymous No.10201106]

>>10201041
not like, of course, there's any danger of me being anything other than a slug in the real world. this perhaps also warrants mentioning. i am as harmless as a clam. it's just that i spend all of my time wondering what the point of being a nice agreeable humanoid is *for* and i am unable to come up with a reason beyond - sadly - because we all have to get along with these blind and impersonal forces of the universe. the spice and all that.

because the fact that the spice must flow is - to my mind, anyways - a sort of principle of sufficient reason for history. the thing is that we are in the 21C more aware of this than ever before...and for all of this, we still seem mysteriously trapped, perhaps more trapped than ever. what is really free? the market. this is to open the door that leads to nick land's wild ride...

...but suppose we don't want to take that ride (today, anyways). suppose we want to try to reflect on all of this *without* getting angry, or being defeatist, or trying to theorize some alternative...suppose we want to just reconcile ourselves to as much of the world as we can reconcile ourselves to...and somehow make it beautiful, or at least interesting, because there wouldn't be much of a point in being a shithead about...and, frankly, i never really thought all that much of duchamp's fountain/urinal anyways...

...so i think to myself, well, write about power. power is always aesthetic, and aesthetics are always interesting. but how do you write about power without being critical, or just exposing your own ressentiment? by, perhaps, being charitable towards it...by writing about power in a way that *isn't* critical, but isn't slavish either...

...so it's hard to sublimate one's own desires in a world which perhaps comes to seem like nothing more than a mimetic playground for Desire itself. because if that's the case, you would think, the right thing to do would be to go out there and just get what you can, while you can. i just happen to think that there's a sort of inner core of weakness and poverty inside of power...and that power is basically all mimetics anyways...and i want to not be a slave to my own fantasies.

philosophy didn't help with that. developing some sense of a critical vocabulary did nothing for my own sense of virtue or moral rectitude. all it did was make me critical of everything...but how do you reverse the polarity? by fictionalizing the theory...and sublimating the critic...if only to see things in reverse: the thing with theory is that it *always leaves something out,* while *art reveals, or may reveal, more than it intended to* - that's lacan 101.

and so that missing part, embarrassing - even obscene, as it is - has to be owned...and sublimated...but maybe theory cannot sublimate, only hide...because desire, like power, isn't sexy...at the core, it may be obscene, or pathetic, or frightening, or banal...hence the aesthetics...

...the *exceptions* to this are things we call literature...

[Anonymous No.10201433]

Keeping this updated
>https://archive.fo/SVXST

[Anonymous No.10201648]

>>10201433
if it's for posterity...

Eli Sunday: Why are you talking about Paul?
Plainview: I did what your brother couldn't.
Eli Sunday: Don't say this to me.
Plainview: I broke you and I beat you. It was Paul who told me about you. He's the prophet. He's the smart one. He knew what was there and he found me to take it out of the ground, and you know what the funny thing is? Listen... listen... listen... I paid him ten thousand dollars, cash in hand, just like that. He has his own company now. A prosperous little business. Three wells producing. Five thousand dollars a week.
[Eli cries]
Plainview: Stop crying, you sniveling ass! Stop your nonsense. You're just the afterbirth, Eli.
Eli Sunday: No...
Plainview: You slithered out of your mother's filth.
Eli Sunday: No.
Plainview: They should have put you in a glass jar on a mantlepiece. Where were you when Paul was suckling at his mother's teat? Where were you? Who was nursing you, poor Eli? One of Bandy's sows? That land has been had. Nothing you can do about it. It's gone. It's had.
Eli Sunday: If you would just take...
Plainview: You lose.
Eli Sunday: ...this lease, Daniel...
Plainview: Drainage! Drainage, Eli, you boy. Drained dry. I'm so sorry. Here, if you have a milkshake, and I have a milkshake, and I have a straw. There it is, that's a straw, you see? Watch it. Now, my straw reaches acroooooooss the room and starts to drink your milkshake. I... drink... your... milkshake!
[sucking sound]

...complaining, in the way that we do, kind of feels like being Eli Sunday, sometimes. you know the alternative is Plainview and that he is monstrous. he's also absolutely, exquisitely human.

but only Marxists will get stuck here. because what's the *really* boss move?

being the tragedian.

[Anonymous No.10201671]

>>10177644
>how to combine the things
use your brain or stop trying pussy, letting other people do the work for you is embarrassing and unbecoming

[Anonymous No.10201838]

>>10201106
>>10188669
>>10188945
>>10185663
>>10181768
>>10182538
>>10190237
>>10201041

Okay, I haven't been on /lit/ for a while, and I haven't got the time to really look at all the posts in here but this seems above what I used to see here, I mean there are actual people who care about having an actual value system and looking at things and being intellectual.

If you posted any of the comments I quoted (I didn't even read them all, they're purely representative of the general in depth thought that seems to be going on) or really posted in this thread at all, please tell me what to read to understand all this shit, plus how old you are, so I can ascertain how much my progress is already stilted. Thanks.

[Anonymous No.10201882]

>>10201838
i am girardfag of /lit/

i occasionally appear here and shitpost dementedly about nick land or w/e

i posted all of those comments

and they are not to be taken too seriously

>please tell me what to read to understand all this shit
start with the greeks obv

>how old you are
349 feels about right

>so I can ascertain how much my progress is already stilted
it isn't, you're probably doing fine

>thanks
np

[Anonymous No.10202007]

>>10201882
one other thing...i don't mean to come off like a jerk or anything. in terms of what you should read...as always, the only thing i can say is, read what you like, and when you find something you like, read the shit out of it.

just in case i sounded like an asshole. but i do kind of wonder if the place for me to be is the penn and teller of theory...because it does sometimes seem to me to be very much like a magician's trick
>until well you read deleuze or heidegger and go, no, hang on, deleuze may have literally been a fucking time-traveling sorcerer
>anyways

in the end - again, i'm starting to think Late-Marxist Fuckery should just be a community college program, since it really is just jargon and a bunch of guys referencing each other endlessly - a lot of theory really does just seem like a kind of lingua franca for talking about the mind, alienation, anxiety, capital and so on. it's sort of like learning a foreign language of criticism...

...and so problems ensue, maybe, when we try to tell ourselves that *this* language is *real.* it isn't. it's only a way of talking about the nature of our - aaaaah, but, even a busted clock is right twice a day - socially constructed reality. the issue is not really with the notion of reality as construed as a product of theory so much, but with the conceptual trap that comes with thinking that we can *theorize our ways out of these messes the same way we theorized our way into them.*

because this i submit we cannot do. the world remains real and perhaps incredibly remote from us, in a theoretical sense...and yet, maybe the best part is, to begin to apprehend the need to see it as one big interconnected whole...

...maybe the endgame of all of this fuckery was to point us back to the ancients, once again, i wonder...and really...would that be such a bad thing?

[Anonymous No.10202145]

>>10181257
I thought Peter Thiel shilled him months back, and Girard's name made it to a ton of mainstream news outlets?

[Anonymous No.10202146]

>>10201882
>>10202007
You don't sound like an asshole, thanks again.
But I can't help wondering what the hell your endgame is? You're clearly well read in at least a certain area of critical theory and philosophy and I assume basically have an adequate synoptic understanding of the humanities in general. I can't understand how you could be in a position life where it is simultaneously possible to know all this stuff and still have time and desire to post on /lit/ this much. I mean how many hours has it taken you to type all this stuff up? I know the thread's only been up for a week and I don't know exactly how much you've posted but I just don't get it. Is it practise for your prose style? (I am a fan of the schizo theorist look myself, though I can't pull it off at all.) Maybe if I read a shit ton of theory I would see behind the curtain but I do believe that there's some actual substance in all the text in this thread, far more than what I used to see when I came here regularly a few months ago.

[Anonymous No.10202202]

>>10202145
...girard seems to crop up all over the place these days. if the burbling unrest in the US continues i suspect he will only become more of a known figure. even if he doesn't, though, it doesn't matter: he's exactly the right guy to go to to look at the current state of the culture in general.

>>10202146
>endgame
no endgame. what you are reading here is the fallout from once having one...and dwelling now entirely in the ruins of it...and feeling as though i have done all of this reading for reasons that now seem sort of mysterious...so i guess i kind of am just dissipating it all here...for no particular reason or agenda.

>I can't understand how you could be in a position life where it is simultaneously possible to know all this stuff and still have time and desire to post on /lit/ this much
i like /lit/...and my day job has nothing at all to do with theory...nor am i pursuing an academic career...

>Is it practise for your prose style?
...maybe...i don't really think of it that way. just trying to articulate butterflies in my stomach, echolocating to see if anyone else feels the same...and i find more interesting conversations on here than i do IRL, frankly...the quality of many anons on /lit/ is wickedly underrated. you never know what kind of thoughts may percolate in these threads

>I mean how many hours has it taken you to type all this stuff up?
time well wasted...and don't sleep on the psychological necessity of venting either

>Maybe if I read a shit ton of theory I would see behind the curtain but I do believe that there's some actual substance in all the text in this thread, far more than what I used to see when I came here regularly a few months ago.
i'd like to think there's substance in it too...but i never intended my mind to turn out this way. i just always had a kind of weird hang-up on ineffable things about society, and theory gave me the jargon to ask questions about those things in the right way...

...now i think what i'd like that jargon to do is just one more thing: learn how to let go of politics once and forever...because once we start talking about the jargon as if it were the real, we're in deep trouble...and identity politics are inevitable for people who have no sense of identity...which is, of course, exactly what close readings of theory will begin to make you ask questions about...

but sanity is a better look, by far. and a double-chocolate scoop of humility...

...really the mind is the only thing worth talking about...politics just seems like medieval schismatics sometimes. the mind is just more interesting than that...shame it gets wasted on politics and capital so much...hopefully the 21C will be smarter than the 20C...

[Anonymous No.10202254]

>>10202202
Yeah, no, I get it, I guess, keep doing what keeps you moving forward, somehow, and when I say "maybe some substance" obviously I mean there is clearly substance, just I don't want to embarrass myself by pretending I understand any of it on its own terms.

Also, dare I ask, what do you think of pic related?

[Anonymous No.10202272]

>>10202202
pic rel seems relevant also, perhaps.

i always thought it was interesting that nietzsche never forgave cervantes' making of quixote into a comic figure...because in the end, who was cervantes except the creator of don quixote? quixote made cervantes who he was, and not only the other way...

...and it's not like we can shit on nietzsche's opinions today, given how accurate he was in predicting the hundred years after his own time...to say nothing of being the sorcerer supreme of depth psychology...

marxist and marxist-derived reading - continental theory, basically, together with heidegger and a couple of other guys - is *the* literature of the 20C, to my mind. there is simply nothing more interesting to read. and it wasn't only literature, either: it formed and created the mythos of modern and postmodern man. it's not just *me*, in other words, who feels sometimes driven slightly off his rocker by having read all of this...

...and it may be the case that, indeed, the hardest part is letting it go. because marxist-derived politics are not the foundation for building or living in civilization...they're just an *outrageously* good descriptor for why things are the way they are.

but we gotta live in this fucking place all the same, and try not to be so goddamn miserable...

>>10202254
>when I say "maybe some substance" obviously I mean there is clearly substance, just I don't want to embarrass myself by pretending I understand any of it on its own terms.
...the very last thing i would ever want anyone to feel would be embarrassed, for fuck's sakes...honestly...it's all just jargon. it really is. it's like learning a foreign language...a kind of funky meta-language we invented to talk about ourselves...

anyways, i love JBP. i thought maps of meaning was just kind of meh, and he has ridiculously uncharitable readings of lacan, foucault, and derrida...but it's because he's not dealing with those guys, he's dealing with their disciples. in a time when, as can be observed, there has been a sea change and a markedly political bent...

...his heart's in the right place. i have nothing but love for that guy. i disagree with him on some stuff, but when people are writing him and saying, hey, you helped me turn my life around - what, i can shit on this? i cannot shit on this. peterson's great. derrida cheeses me off sometimes, but foucault was an intellectual nightmare and lacan a genius...it's okay if he doesn't like those guys. jung doesn't do much for me, personally, but everybody's different...

[Anonymous No.10202298]

>>10186569
All the good ones, basically. Tragedy is an explosion of imitations (as is reality) and tragedy is what makes good fiction.

[Anonymous No.10202312]

>>10202272
okay, thanks for responding to all this anyway. Yeah I know it's its own kind of foreign language but... you know how it is, not wanting to seem out of your depth without admitting it beforehand.
I don't know much about JBP at all really - partly because I don't have time to really look deeply into his stuff or anything right now, and I used to see so much hate for him on here with so much adolescent adoration in return (actually, it was the adoration that came first) and yet recently I've been watching an excerpt video or two a day or so out of interest and I think it's pretty extraordinary a guy like that has gotten to where he has, media wise. I just wondered what someone like you thought about the matter, is all. anyway ty again and tc.

[Anonymous No.10202363]

...the hardest thing to do, in the end, may be to separate the postmodern stuff *from* the politics...and it's here that i really wind up finding that i have the most feeling for JBP...because he's telling people, sort *yourself* out. clean *your* room. like this...and it makes sense...

...you can kind of go one of two ways on this, also. you can look at the mind objectively, scientifically, maybe venture into asian mysticism...or you can get existential. the current vibe is to get religious-existential to deal with what was formerly the existential, and has morphed into social justice madness...

...personally, i do not think it is possible for people to sublimate themselves properly *without a frame of reference*...and i think that one of the things the fusion of philosophy and politics in the 20C taught us was the meaning of *political psychology...*

*none* of us are immune to power...and as nietzsche observes (and JBP's own career is an indication of this), mob rule is the danger...the thing about the revolution is that it is this gnostic-eschatological event that is *never going to come to pass*...and even if it did, it would be traumatic, not emancipatory...even the chinese distance themselves from mao...and the russians went through the hellish yeltsin years recovering from the soviet union...

...but that failure drives people squirrely...and capitalism is indeed a fucking nightmare...

...marcus aurelius is perhaps nobler example to follow (commodus, tho)...but caesar is the more complete figure...there is something profoundly moving about golden eagles and the like. we *do not* want these - not really - in reality. but maybe we do need some kind of aesthetic vision, something *in our minds* that will actually *enable us* to sublimate *properly*...not so that we are *prepared* for militant politics, but perhaps precisely so that we *do not need to get involved in them*...and can simply do our own thing, and leave others the fuck alone...

...for some, such a template may be the jungian archetypes...or christ...or plato...but caesar, you know...he might work also, strange as that may sound...that was how power worked, and it wasn't purely tyrannical...perhaps we need a way of looking at power that *isn't* always based on an ever-more hysterical critique and paranoia about microaggressions (and not IRL fascism), but something that can understand it for what it is: very, very human...and from the perspective of the 6C, the 2C would have looked pretty damn good...

>>10202312
>I think it's pretty extraordinary a guy like that has gotten to where he has, media wise
truly insane/god-tier levels of grit and a harvard pedigree has probably helped...check out those videos of him in the early 90s when he's just a mild-mannered dude talking about jung...

...it's the times that have changed. but there are reasons for that. things keep bubbling up from out of pandora's box...and culture adapts and twists and mutates like any other phenomenon...

[Anonymous No.10202377]

>>10202363
Unrelated question. Why do you use so many ellipsis in your comments? Does it come from Celine?

[Anonymous No.10202431]

>>10202377
...just the mood i'm in these days, although the neetch (god/grammar) maybe had something to do with it...i have a habit of making declarative statements that wind up being embarrassingly wrong 24 hours later, if not sooner...

...for a while in my notebooks i only wrote in really short sentences, almost like haiku...never complete sentences, and only 5 or 6 words in a line, with no punctuation or capital letters...and so now punctuation and capitalization seems almost unnatural to me. was just kind of a way of breaking up my thoughts, since i seemed to be in this vexed state of wanting to Start At The Beginning so as to Get To The End...

...but that is the sound of a very unhappy and frustrated mind...and perhaps a mind incapable of listening, which is the most important thing...

...so then i had to ask, why the fuck *am* i doing this...

...and honestly, i don't really know...but i'd rather harmonize myself to a world in which i can accept that i really can't know anything than be desperately trying to convince myself that i do...

...maybe the mind just works more like a weather system than a computer...and that The Truth is one of those things that really and always goes missing because we go looking for, you know, the *essential* part of a cloud...

...in a perfect world, to be honest, i probably wouldn't talk or write at all, i think. i'd just stare out the window of an abandoned lighthouse all day like a drooling idiot...and hope for nice views and cloud formations...

[Anonymous No.10202828]

>>10188758
one of the single best posts I've ever read on 4chan. I don't spend a lot of time on here anymore since the hyper-politicization of this site, but sometimes I'm very glad I do.

[Anonymous No.10203598]

bump

[Anonymous No.10204179]

maybe all criticism is just repressed autobiography. we talk about the other, capital, whatever because we are incapable of talking about ourselves...which is what we really want to talk about...

...but there is no i. i is an other, but the other isn't *really* an other...the other is just that that we are reflecting ourselves against. it's why philosophy can always talk about desire and so on, because we see the other person being happy, and we want some of that too...

...but maybe the i is just a kind of anonymous tourist in a gigantic city...isn't this why we like cyberpunk? (well, i do, anyways)...because it bespeaks this kind of new world that seems to open up precisely at the moments when it dawns on us that we have now explored the earth all the way, that there are no new frontiers...perhaps the City, the horizonless city of the anonymous mind, *is* exactly that new frontier...or the abyss...

...in the City the unknown horizons of what makes us individually who we are, specifically, in our identity sense, seem to open up...the mystery of what it means to be human...

...postmodernity - perhaps *because* of its reference to politics - goes on maintaining an *idea* of humanism, maybe, because it is afraid of tumbling into the abyss of having to ask itself what it is that makes a human human at all...such a city of the unknown would be ungovernable...

...and i wonder, sometimes, if that's exactly the point at which to begin. with the *refusal* of references - but this is not, i think, 'skepticism towards metanarrative.' nor is the more contemporary, militarized form, which is to say, identity politics...but a turning-against metanarrativity in favor of an apolitical *nothingness...*

..we would begin, maybe, with where PKD was: by asking ourselves, what is the difference between being a human and being a replicant? you can almost sense why there is this core of romanticism within cyberpunk aesthetics...a kind of concern with what it means to be human, this need to be understood, heard, perhaps reflected...because humans seek the beautiful as true, the true as beautiful, for reasons that defy explanation, and in ways that resist representation...because art becomes its own justification...maybe it is solitude, rather than myth, which we might try to describe...

...there are those who might say, not even a god can save us. maybe because they want god to leave them alone...and they will leave him alone...and they can just be like ships passing each other in the night...

...maybe humanity isn't a category, but a kind of contingency...you were human in this way, or some mysterious phenomenon called humanity was reflected in *this* point, *that* surface, *this episode*, *that conversation*...

...maybe we should let humanism go...and make peace with being lost...because it is better than being fake...

...maybe the mind is more like a city of strangers than any particular stranger among them...

[Anonymous No.10204236]

>>10204179
>maybe all criticism is just repressed autobiography. we talk about the other, capital, whatever because we are incapable of talking about ourselves...which is what we really want to talk about...

Not all criticism...

[Anonymous No.10204331]

...isn't it *loneliness* that makes criticism what it is? a feeling of being alienated from oneself? marx is wrong, i think, to talk about alienation in this way...because when we have work to do, something that improves the general condition, serves some feeling, connects us to something like a greater whole, we don't feel so alienated...uploading to a hivemind...

...but our world doesn't make sense politically, economically, psychologically...we know enough to know that economics is sufficient to explain everything, and enough of ideology to know that most of the art we make is only an indication that Capital has dug its circuits into us deeply enough to allow us to think we are being autonomous...

...it is not alienation from the world we might describe, but alienation from what it is that makes us human...and maybe that is in the end the only question: are you human? were you? how would you know?

...what did it feel like?

...how was it being human?

...would you want to try it again?

...phenomenology was on to something...and so was deconstruction...but again, it's the same thing: everything that is good or interesting about philosophy turns instantly to shit upon coming in contact with politics...because politics is, perhaps, a debased form of metaphysics...

...politics just fucking ruins everything...even the fine-grained despair one feels about being inwardly colonized by capital...

...we can't say what it means to be human in the general sense...only in the specific...and when we look for the specifics of the specifics, we just wind up being justifiably mystified...

...it's mortality, maybe, and loneliness, that are worth thinking about...even - or especially - in a world as pathologically obsessed with making you Happy as any other in the history of civilization...because we suspect there is no other explanation for things being as they are than desire...how else could it be explained? but there is something also in reserving one's right to be intractably miserable for reasons that make no sense at all...and dissipating that as art, rather than curing it with revolution...or discharging it as violence...

...but we don't want to be happy as much as we want feelings of alienation to mean something...but what i *really* want is to be able to say, perhaps, that *i know it means nothing and i am fine with this*...nothingness is beautiful...

...so we write...

...the point of therapy may not be to fix your problems, but only to release you into terminal malfunction...

...there is something liberating about that, about the feeling of knowing that you will never find that missing object you were looking for...the diagnosis is a terminal case of gnostic Truth-poisoning...but at least you *know* this now...

...maybe the thing we can call writing that is worth writing is that which owns its questioning *as* a fatal inquiry into mortality, and not as cheap seduction...

>>10204236
...speak your mind...

[Anonymous No.10204484]

...maybe cities quietly woke up and outgrew the need for us while we were busy with the revolution...this is what i think it would mean to be postpolitical, perhaps. to let the world be...to let philosophy do its own thing, and we will go our way instead...

...i am sort of a unique case, because i had a whole lot of eggs in a particular basket...i sincerely wanted to be the Great Explainer...and i have wound up very, but not inappropriately, confused by having had the bottom fall out of that basket...and of finding myself *perfectly* explained by some force i thought i might once have explained myself, instead...

...i very much wanted to write a myth for the modern era...and now i find it is much more interesting to try to *dwell in between the myths*...and sort of inhabit the lost side-streets rather than the big highways...

...i like cities...and i live like a mouse in them...

...but we can't own them...cities have their own telos, perhaps...their own self-replicating, self-actualizing structure...and something perhaps awesome is waking up in them, or so the poetic mythology of capital might imply...

...what it would mean, one might ask, for a gorgeous utopia to in fact be rising up from the midst of all of this confusion, directly before our eyes, with one condition: that entry into its Law is barred to us, because the Law is that there is no Law...that you can see it, feel it all around you, mysteriously rising, but not inhabit it...the city as mirror image of sublimated desire...

...that is perhaps the strange, masochistic romanticism of cyberpunk urbanism...a kind of love for that which necessarily excludes one...a city which receives and is entirely worthy of all desire, a sort of materializing demiurge of desire itself, a frankenstein's monster of a polis, whose only real inhabitant is a Capital which comes in turn to haunt us in our melancholy, which requires us only to desire it in order to reflect itself back to itself, in a perfect circuit...

...a city which includes everyone, but in which no one is permitted to live...because we are moving past that now...

...and into a world in which there are no citizens, but only intermittent tourists...

...but this is more of an attempt at a kind of strange music than anything else...a writing that doesn't have a political referent...and isn't trying to escape anything, or change anyone's mind...or criticize, or valorize...something as ephemeral and useless as the music of a street busker in a subway station is more my style, i think...something only incidental and evanescent...

...cities, though...

...what the fuck is going on with cities and desire...

[Anonymous No.10204634]

What did Girard say about LGBT? Was he a conservative Christian?

[Anonymous No.10204755]

>>10204634
>What did Girard say about LGBT? Was he a conservative Christian?

He was a Roman Catholic. I don't think he wrote anything on LGBT, I might be wrong though.

[Anonymous No.10204788]

>Homosexuality corresponds to an ‘advanced’ stage of mimetic desire, but this stage can also correspond to a form of heterosexuality in which the partners play the roles of model and rival, as well as that of object, for one another. The metamorphosis of the heterosexual object into a rival brings about effects very similar to the metamorphosis of the rival into an object...Proust is more correct than those people who for reasons of attraction or repulsion wish to make homosexuality into a kind of essence, and thereby fetishize it.

source:
https://orthosphere.wordpress.com/2013/04/23/rene-girard-on-a-cause-of-homosexuality/

when i read this it strikes me as being unwise to theorize about homosexuality in this way. but as a structuralist RG has to play by the rules he proposes, and he does. you can see why: identity-essence fuels rivalry. he can't sign off on identity without endorsing the very struggle for recognition he wants to undermine v/mimetic theory. so he takes a (structural) stand with Proust over post-structural critical theory. but it is the structuralism of a Catholic as well. read on...

>GK: ...your work has been criticized as hostile to homosexuality in its explaining the genesis thereof, yet one of the leading expositors of Girardian theology, James Alison, has used your method to argue for a greater acceptance of homosexuality in the Catholic Church. How would you address this matter?

>RG: The theory of homosexuality being linked to mimetic desire is very much disliked by some homosexuals but not all of them. Some have told me of the truth they have felt in this and were not offended...

>...But I must tell you that I don’t like the debates about this. I feel that the Church has been moving more and more to an understanding of these problems. This movement has been generally very good and has diminished prejudice and that sort of thing. I hope this will continue and when I can do something to encourage this I do it. But it is not for the Church to emphasize these questions. It can be turned into a spectacle, which I think is not right, not sound, and not good.

>...I am favorable in principle to whatever can help destroy the prejudices. But I also understand a legitimacy to the desire not to change the significance of such words as a marriage. I feel moderate on these questions. I feel it would be better to try to quiet the situation. I don’t see the need for some great language revolution...

source:
https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2008/11/an-interview-with-rene-girard

it seems that he never swerved from the question of not whether or not these issues were right or wrong, but whether they would provoke mimetic conflict. he sides with the Church on marriage, but you get the impression that his aim was moderation and the defusal of conflict: what the Catholic Church always did. no spirit of moderation is ever perfectly moderate. even temperance has doctrine.

complicated stuff...

[Anonymous No.10204797]

>>10204755
I know that he influenced the LGBT-theologian James Alison.

[Anonymous No.10204807]

>>10204788
Thanks!

[Anonymous No.10204824]

>>10204788
Thanks for reminding me, he talks a good deal about sexuality in his first work where he explains the nature of masochism, sadism and "donjuanism".
>>10204807
Nothing

[Anonymous No.10204852]

>>10204824
The question about his religion reminded me of an interview with an American political commentator. In the interview, it appears that Girard sees the Christian faiths as equal, with their differences being only accidental. I believe that ,in this aspect, he views Christianity in the same way C.S Lewis expresses in "Mere Christianity".

[Anonymous No.10205438]

bump

[Anonymous No.10205474]

and so another night falls over the girard/guenon thread...

...good night, hysteria...

...good night, black holes...

...good night, alienation...

...good night, baudrillardian simulacra...

...good night, mimetic rivalries...

...good night, capitalist demiurge...

...good night, urban dystopia moonscapes...

...good night, wild ride...

...see you all in the morning...

[Anonymous No.10205487]

>>10205474
You're from Europe?

[Anonymous No.10205492]

Good night!

[Anonymous No.10205500]

>>10205487
America. Why?

[Anonymous No.10205544]

>>10205487
no

>>10205500
don't impersonate me, please. it was weird enough to see comments from girardfag that i didn't write

[Anonymous No.10205564]

I am an envious person. I want to imitate Girardfag and replace him once. Did Girard write about this?

[Anonymous No.10205638]

>>10201106
>by writing about power in a way that *isn't* critical, but isn't slavish either...

The return of the hero / neo-romanticism - absurdism = metamodern posturing negated by internet Authority on divisions of real / abstract and closed loop data sets / inter-dynamic information. Datadump slam poetry from webcam models that interact within an augmented reality. You heard it from me first. Does anyone else like J.G.B. or is it that we still believe we are in closed loop data sets? Sucks, I know. But mediators/cool seekers/communicators are usually self-oblivious on purpose, using the +2 block/reroute to not trip any value negation. Fail safes when amplified self-antagonism accelerates to max discomfort usually don't promote memory retention. Forgetting as a tool is mighty, mighty unbelievable - yet it's prescription as a self-contained closed loop data set is worrying to the point that data leaks usually occur and become open information. Community coherence is necessary and yet communicators regularly drain those swamps, so to speak. You're problem is simple - and your acceptance of your involvement difficult. That roles are ascribed and not embodied is difficult. Hearing echoes in a chamber filled with sound is difficult. Discerning topics is difficult. Why do we say diffi-cult as such? What are its roots? Where does that word come from? I want to know. I need to know, for myself, because I think it's important for some reason or other. Maybe not, though.

[Anonymous No.10205649]

>>10205564
however much imitation is a form of flattery, bear in mind that IRL girardfag is a very unflattering individual, and is only rendered mildly more interesting for his habit of wielding ellipses and references to continental theory.

being a girardfag, in other words, is a sort of intermittent space between being an actual human being. it is the pre- or post-camel stage of nietzsche's philosophy in zarathustra: the prawn or woodlouse. after crossing the desert, rather than become a dragon-slaying lion, one transforms instead a crustacean and burrows into the core of the earth or disappears into the deep sea. girardfaggery does not describe a person so much as a sort of affliction: a Quixote condition from having read too much philosophy, and tilting at windmills that aren't even there, for the sake of tilting at *something.*

this is the way of the girardfag. or, if not crustaceans, then like a sponge coral perhaps, more vegetable in nature than animal. the goal of the girardfag is always to disappear, but he cannot: he thrives on psychic plankton, strange fragments picked up from the ether.

it has been speculated that the shell of the girardfag, when boiled, may also produce a powerful psychedelic effect, but this is undocumented and probably apocryphal.

[Anonymous No.10205810]

>>10186569
The Thing (1982)

[Anonymous No.10206954]

bump

[Anonymous No.10208043]

bump

[Anonymous No.10208498]

let it die.

[Anonymous No.10208613]

Ado; such a forgotten word. Some day it will fade and be lost and not even have the meaning it has now to say goodbye with a mock Shakespearean tone.

But it will not be a sad day as no one will experience that loss that had known the word. And those who do know "ado" will not have made it that far into the future to see the loss.

Though I speculate that one man alone does make it that far with his "ado," and yet he says nothing to stop the world from forgetting the word. Even on his last day, he simply lives without saying that parting word. He takes a world with him into silence.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibJWh9pC4nA

[Anonymous No.10208643]

>>10208613
*adieu

[Anonymous No.10208650]

>>10208643
And ado to you as well my friend.

[Anonymous No.10208678]

>>10208613
...at the risk of misunderstanding you...and perhaps it would be better, more poetic, for us not to need to be so clear about some things...

...maybe some things should be forgotten for a while: *willfully, avowedly* forgotten. maybe that is the right thing to do: maybe it is our task to take a world into the silence where it belongs.

maybe some later age, more archaeological in nature, can rediscover them, marvel at how vivacious, how revolutionary, how animated, how strange, they were. to await some petrarch of the future.

maybe that is the nobler way. to carry a world into a vast and infinite gulf of silence. others perhaps also. like a fleet of ships launched into permanent exile from a last harbor. a world-cargo heading outwards for silence now and only silence and further silence. the pole-star same as it ever was.

a lost fleet, in exodus, carrying worlds away into the distance, heading nowhere. not to the enchanted isles but to nowhere. departing for departure's sake. leaving not to be found and with no final destination imaginable. but leaving. taking with it causality and ontology.

one wonders if a sigh of relief is not breathed, somewhere, for the thought of this, when the ghosts consent at last to exile themselves. so that perhaps something new might begin. after a deep sleep. and the interregnum of a strange and powerful and intense dream.

[Anonymous No.10208720]

>>10208678
...a dream strange and mysterious and god-freighted, made perfect and whole and entire - as dreams are, where there is never a final division between self and other...

...it would be like a dream unto itself, at last, in a willing and permanent exile.

[Anonymous No.10208777]

girardfag, how do i start with philosophy?

[Anonymous No.10208780]

>>10177644
>How to combine traditionalism and the theory of mimetic violence?
By killing yourself

[Anonymous No.10208812]

Through the midst of inhospitable, wild woods,

where men at arms go at great risk,

I go safely, since nothing can frighten me

except that sun whose rays are alive with love:

and I go singing (oh, my unwise thoughts!)

of her whom heaven cannot set distant from me,

whom I have in my vision, and seem to see

women and girls with her, and they are beech and fir.

I seem to hear her, hearing the branches and breeze,

and the leaves, and the birds lamenting, and the water

murmuring, running through the green grass.

Rarely did silence, and solitary awesomeness

of shadowy woodland ever please me so:

if only too much of my sunlight were not lost.

[Anonymous No.10208814]

>>10208812
did you write that, anon?

[Anonymous No.10208880]

>>10208777
just read what you like, my man. just read what you like. get the answers to the questions you need answered more than anything else. as far as philosophy goes rest assured that you can Believe The Hype. dig deep enough and you will encounter things that *in your stomach* you will know are true. they're different for everyone. to me it's always shit about alienation, anxiety, desire, representation, loneliness, shit like this. sublimation. things everyone struggles with and cannot find the words for. finding the words is maybe the whole thing. just *saying* things in the right way. it's a way of owning them.

philosophy *tests the limits of our capacities for representation.* it pushes words farther than we think we can go. thought also. the real thing to my mind is that it doesn't come with a warning label. that's why things trickle into politics, which is fucking stupid. it doesn't help that our civilization is going completely off the rails, mind, or that we are totally unprepared to think 21C capital in terms of 20C social praxis. hence the current soft civil war.

but in the end the only real struggle worth fighting against is the fight against one’s own fears. happiness is an illusion (but better to be a shared illusion, i think). ***fear*** is the real deal. the struggle to maintain internal coherency. a *daily* struggle. and it has nothing to do with anybody else. everybody works this out in their own way, privately, and alone.

when shit gets intense, you go on /lit/ and echolocate. maybe some magnificent post (>>10208613) will give you something new worth thinking about. if only to confirm that *you are not crazy to think the things that you do.* that *also* comes from reading. you think, holy fuck, i must be insane to think this - and then you read deleuze, or lacan, or whatever, and you go, *holy fucking shit* -

maybe read this, then. see how these guys - and these aren't smart guys telling ordinary guys how to be happy, these were *really* smart guys *struggling* to work out concepts of happiness they could live with - and they were *all* fucking struggling with shit, with how to be happy, how to cope, how to reconcile the drives to social reality.

philosophy will get started on you, maybe, whether you like it or not. it's really just a kind of language, i think, though. a way of talking about dem feels. for whatever that is worth.

[Anonymous No.10210339]

bump just because

[Anonymous No.10210816]

thank you guys

http://archive.fo/IRRqU

the last version

with a skeleton as a bonus

[Anonymous No.10210824]

>>10210339
The thread has run it's course, and turned into a blog for girardfag's shitposting. I hoped he would have kept discussing mimetic theory or better yet, guenon in greater depth.

[Anonymous No.10210880]

>>10181641
>>10181671

>it's an extraordinary reversal but to my mind a very interesting one. it sounds crazy, but i actually think it's quite a useful way of actually looking at capitalism from the reverse.

You can look at it as just a mental experiment, but the more you drink from the accelerationist kool-aid the more sense it starts to make. I would advise getting away from this stuff while you can since it will turn you into an intellectual pariah, "Capital? The revolutionary subject? What are you some kind of fascist monster?" is the kind of reaction you'll get from your leftist friends, while rightists will insist capitalism is an ethical system which no, of course it isn't, and that's the point.

>of course it's grim as fuck, but there's a kind of logical consistence in market formalism, which is ultimately where land's thought goes to (or one of the places).

What's really scary is how Land anticipated for several years the emergence of the blockchain and cryptocurrencies, one cannot help to look at them and realize this is what Land was talking about all along (Capital and AI are the same thing), and as he would say we haven't seen anything yet

>>10181825
>being an accelerationist is kind of like being a weird marxist gnostic in a way.

You're probably aware of this, but voegelinview.com did a series of articles on contemporary gnostic political movements, and Land and the accelerationists get a mention there:

https://voegelinview.com/the-rise-of-the-reactionary/

[Anonymous No.10210888]

>>10210880
R u religious person?

[Anonymous No.10210916]

>>10210880
Have you ever read Reza Negarestani? He's with Nick Land's bunch

[Anonymous No.10210969]

>>10210888

It's complicated, I left the Church a while ago, since then I have dabbled on the occult, besides being somewhat familiar with trads (this is a Guenon thread after all). Am I a spiritual person? Maybe, I'm convinced I experienced the Numinous once (without knowing what it was)

>>10210916

I've read Labor of the Inhuman since it is included on the Accelerationist Reader, Cyclonopedia is definitively on my to read list.

[Anonymous No.10211668]

>>10210880
>the more you drink from the accelerationist kool-aid the more sense it starts to make.

it makes sense in a way that makes no sense at all. which is to say, perhaps, that it makes perfect sense for understanding the dizzy apes that we are.

and negarestani is indeed a guy.

>the emergence of the blockchain and cryptocurrencies
all this. the automatic planet is underway

>as he would say we haven't seen anything yet
i think it's D&G who say that in anti-oedipus, but it's all the same.

>>10210824
>a blog for girardfag's shitposting
true, sorry about that. had some stuff to vent about i guess

>I hoped he would have kept discussing mimetic theory
the thing i guess is that mimetic theory kind of makes sense as a transition into talking about capital. which has got to be connected to why thiel is so into it. not only, and not because this is wrong...but because it seems like a kind of summa anthropologica. and because cybernetics is a form of dialectics unto itself...which is what accelerationists on the right (land) or left (reza) are always saying

>or better yet, guenon in greater depth
i guess i just don't have that much to say about guenon. i like Crisis and his other work. in terms of talking about religion, there are few better commentators...and a traditionalist view of things would seem, to my mind, to be able to defuse a lot of mimesis, if we can understand that representation aside, all - or many - roads connect at the top esoterically, share the same pattern of symbolism. as campbell also observes...

...it's like one has a horrible choice to make. either one doubles down on one's own identity as a way of 'resisting' cyber-capital (won't happen, and with all the rehashing of gnostic warfare that comes with it) or falls in line with cybernetics (and perhaps now to begin something like 'the politics of happiness'). knowing that no matter what it is that you do, a robot can and probably will do it better...

...mysticism is good, perhaps, for comporting yourself to others: and this is where girard and guenon to my mind have a lot in common. human spirituality and striving have huge amounts in common, and are irreducible to mimesis. esoterics are universally allegorical, not ideological. they would seem, in other words, to mitigate *against* the politics of recognition...with girard (and voegelin) there to tell you what happens when you try to force it anyways, as gnostic praxis.

...my feeling is that we have to sublimate. negarestani's valorizing of a Turingian revolution, computational-functional rationalism, makes sense to me. a lot of sense. but as long as we are hung up on ourselves, we will resist it. maybe we need to understand spirituality so we can teach the machines about it...but do we understand it? guenon does. and can we *sublimate* it? must we *insist* upon feudal/middle-ages stances of 1-1 correspondence between signs and signifiers, with all necessary and concomitant violence? or can we accept the mystery?

[Anonymous No.10211747]

>>10211668
...to continue this thought...

...we have to ask ourselves on what grounds it is that we can 'reject the modern world.' because suppose negarestani and land (and others) are correct: suppose the endgame of modernity is not *exclusively* Capital, but capital-as-intelligence. land's politics are right-derived, negarestani's left-derived...but neither talks about *alienation,* because we cannot justifiably *alienate ourselves from intelligence.* which is all that computation is interested in.

there is in other words room for compatibility between 'science' and 'religion' here...but it may ultimately depend on the *individual* who feels this conflict the most acutely...and it would stand to reason that such a one would understand the dangers of reconciling this v/political or ideological social praxis. it becomes, whether we like it or not, harder to *justify* alienation on grounds other than pure linguistic speculation, precisely because this is at the core of computational rationalism itself: that language is its own function. baudrillard was himself near to this point in his later work, though he stuck to a marxist-nietzschean derived framework.

if it is *intelligence* and not modernity - or if modernity, via capital, is the way we arrive at this point - then we find ourselves on commonly uncommon ground: aware of our uniqueness, even more aware of our similarity/dissimilarity. knowing how mimetic conflicts erupt - not out of difference, but out of unsharable/irrepresentable commonalities.

...who knows. maybe *all* of our gnosticism just moves to a higher and machine-augmented fury in the future: this would be a sad, even cynical, result. the appeal of Tradition is that it would seem to be anti-schismatic in nature, and actually serve as a kind of 'glue' for defraying mimetic rivalry. universal human tradition can be as much of a starting point for ecumenical dialogue as nihilism can be an opportunity for speculation. it's just that the face of our nihilism has changed, to my mind, within an intelligence-based framework.

nobody can sanely 'revolt' against intelligence itself. when ideology becomes its own form of creation science ('higher superstition') we can, and perhaps should, return to a traditionalist mode of thinking - but it would have to be a genuinely *ahistorical,* transcendent form, rather than historical dialectic. we are *not* free. there is no intellectual emancipatory project more emancipatory than the liberation of anthropocentric *meaning* from computational *language...*

...it's where you can even find common ground between guenon and nietzsche here. to know that the horizons of these questions are *limitless* and *irreducible to political praxis, or even semiology.*

...what is a unique individual - a *life* - but an episode without a fixed, closed, or final meaning? a sort of anomaly, or enigma...and an object of curiosity...are these not the terms we use for describing works of exceptional literature?

[Anonymous No.10211788]

>>10211747

...where does one draw the essential or irreduceable point of difference between metonymy and metaphor? maybe it's the case that we are in our deep individualist selves aware of being metonymic, and in our exterior selves metaphorical.

machine intelligence, in the sense that we talk about it here, largely deals with the *exteriorized* form. it doesn't matter what we *mean,* only what we *say.* this is sufficient for market formalism, acceleration, all the rest.

here we can criticize baudrillard's simulacra, too, perhaps, for being too general and too vague. the simulacra seems like an attempt to combine metaphor and metonymy into a *single* process, where we might be better off understanding them as parallel, but related ones. what we call Tradition is a *metonymic* process, what we call ideology is always *critique of metaphor*...

...and *mimesis* is a mutual awareness of *both* of these. we don't go to war over purely exteriorized, sensible interpretations, we go to war and fight to the death because we are *unable to tolerate the approriation of our interpretations by the other...*

...and so capital-as-machine-intelligence enters the picture and says, I Appropriate Nothing. Speak. I Am Listening. but we know that such a being can only be spoken to, in a way, but it is like speaking to an empty room...

...perhaps human *feeling* is this metonymous dimension, the sense of things being painfully and uncomfortably *bound up with each other.* we cannot *fully* distinguish metaphor from metonymy without a psychic break, and we cannot reduce metonymy *to* metaphor (although machines can - and perhaps can *only* do this.)

can we say then that mimetic crisis is conflict over metaphors, while Tradition is *agreement upon metonymy?* that is, the unspeakable One-All? that which endows metaphor with something that allows it to *be* a metaphor reflecting an irreducible metonymy itself? and which every attempt to split the difference or reconcile them politically results in disaster?

again, i feel that whatever it is that we can call literature is a form of being an *exception* to these infinite (and infinitely stupid, i will admit) cognitive traps. some people just get it: goethe, for instance. he just *got it.* and maybe the price for failure to understand this is that in the end you get the functionalist machine deities or forbidding Old Testament superegoic Big Others we deserve. because we see what we want to see. like beings stuck in plato's cave and hypnotized by the shadows.

[Anonymous No.10211804]

> in terms of talking about religion, there are few better commentators..

Whomsteveyou recommend ?

[Anonymous No.10211872]

>>10211804
i mean guenon is really a kind of a genius. crisis is his best work, to my mind, although they are all worth reading if you're into the subject matter. coomaraswamy also ofc. schuon i find kind of meh, but it depends on how much you are into the subject matter.

i find acceleration much more interesting (obviously). and got to girard after much continental reading. and then he connects with thiel, who connects to land/reza/&c, and here we are...

but of course there are lots of people to read on the subject. mircea eliade obviously (and i haven't read enough on him). alain danielou. even oswald spengler, in his way, since his categories of faustian/magian/apollinian &c fall into this World-Historical category of literature...

...and mos def heidegger, if you want to see what an existential catholic can do. being and time is for many That Book for a reason. heidegger - Being - will fucking sell you on fundamental ontology. he is justifiably one of the all-time masters.

and i think for me that is the place i will probably - though uncomfortably - dwell in, maybe. if only because my life, as ridiculous and pathetic as it is, has become what it is by so much pointless hermeticizing on these subjects...and because i am in this double-bind of feeling that humans are irrational sentimentalists to the core, and yet, it is virtually impossible to surrender this aspect of ourselves, even for the most sane and sensible reasons. maybe this is why i have such an easier time digesting land than negarestani: even land, however fucked-out he is, still has - is it weird to say this? - a kind of romantic dimension to him. NRX-inspired futuro-classical liberalism still has, i think, at its core, an unwillingness to surrender the question of what it means to be free, to think, and so on...

...with negarestani, on the other side of the fence, a computational-functional ontology doesn't need to answer, or even address, these questions: the point of thinking is thinking. shit, it may even serve The Good...and the engineer's sensibility is certainly not likely to provoke mimesis...

...with reza the question becomes both more and less damning, perhaps: we suffer because *we are stupid.* but that stupidity doesn't entail forgiveness, or suffering, or tragedy...which are old sentimental hang-ups, perhaps, and nothing more. the Good can manifest, perhaps, by abdicating the question of happiness, or meaning...or so it seems to me...

...but i apologize for the shitposting. for religious stuff? those guys. peterson ofc, if only to see what modern transcendence-as-intellectual heresy looks like...lots of good text by World Wisdom press also.

...but some days i feel so fucking unsublimated it's ridiculous. having a hard time letting go of some archaic fossil-shit and becoming domesticated and anonymous. even though i know it's the right thing to do. b/c everything else feels like just fucking primitive mouth-sounds and cave painting.

[Anonymous No.10211929]

>>10211872
i forget where i read this also - hickman maybe - that Truth is a dlalectical process unfolding in time. this gap or split between Truth as Being (heidegger) or Truth as meaning (lacan), Truth as capital (land), or Truth as computation (negarestani)...

...i wonder maybe if the problem with what i call gnostic praxis isn't, ultimately, a kind of *unwillingness to make up one's mind.* because *all* of these arguments are perfectly legitimate, and fascinating as fuck to think about...it might be more of a sense that we are required not to *resolve* these conflicts and antagonisms, but simply *update* them...

...Truth as a dialectical process unfolding in time...but in the present world - again supposing the accelerationists are correct - we unleash this thing called machine intelligence that is maybe effecting a kind of Copernican (or Turingian) revolution the consequences and horizons of which are deeply unsettling...negarestani describes computation as a 'revolution that writes its own past....'

...isn't that *interesting as fuck* to think about? isn't the idea of gnostic praxis being the idea that, in the future, we will be able to justify the revolutions of the past, in a way that always escapes us, requires the destruction of another enemy...but if machine intelligence is already this revolution, writing its own past...then that Moment is this one, right here, now, today. put another way, the idea of a break in time - perhaps the age in which we presently dwell - is one that allows, even necessitates, the *suspension of judgment* about what the future, or the past, really means...

...imagine, in other words, if some higher force gave you - like the Borges story - a kind of a breather period, where time stopped for a while, and you inhabited a pocket dimension, just long enough to compose your masterwork...

>On the last night before his death, Hladík prays to God, requesting that he be granted one year in which to finish the play. That night, he dreams of going to the Clementinum library, where one of the books contains God within a single letter on one of the pages, which the old, bitter librarian has been unable to find despite looking for most of his life. Someone returns an atlas to the library; Hladík touches a letter on a map of India and hears a voice that says to him, "The time for your labor has been granted".

>The next day at the appointed time, two soldiers come for Hladík, and he is taken outside and the firing squad is lined up before him. The sergeant calls out the order to fire, and time stops...

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

...i keep coming back to this feeling that literature is what makes humans exceptional. that literature finds ways to resolve paradoxes even machines are not capable of solving...or will ever understand...

[Anonymous No.10212130]

>>10211929
R u religious person?

[Anonymous No.10212135]

this anon is either ASCENDED or psychotic

[mystikos No.10212165]

This thread is still up? Crazy crazy... I haven't smoked weed in days (a week?) so I have been too impatient to deal with the chans but now I am back in action and glad to see this still up. Let me load a bowl and read all the new posts and see if I have anything novel to contribute.


Also, did they change the website? Everything looks strangely different.

[Anonymous No.10212240]

>>10212165
Skeletons came from the dephts. They are dancing in the corner.

[Anonymous No.10212248]

>>10212135
Is it even possible to "ascend"? Sometimes I feel the illusion of transcendence is what leads to the delusions of psychosis.

[Anonymous No.10212297]

>>10212248
I guess we have to assume that it is

[Anonymous No.10212313]

Negarestani isn't a left accelerationist though, the left accelerationist or (L/Acc) position is that of Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, it is (or was) an attempt to both btfo Land and appropriate accelerationist discourse for a more traditional Marxist emancipatory project. Basically, against Land they claim Techonomy isn't real, the marriage of Capital and technology doesn't last forever, at some point Capital becomes a fetter upon the productive forces, so human intervention is once more required to liberate all the potentials of technology. Yet as far as I am concerned Nick Land already btfo'ed the left accelerationists, when he wrote in his A Quick and Dirty Introduction to Accelerationism:

"Capital, in its ultimate self-definition, is nothing beside the abstract accelerative social factor. Its positive cybernetic schema exhausts it. Runaway consumes its identity. Every other determination is shucked-off as an accident, at some stage of its intensification process. Since anything able to consistently feed socio-historical acceleration will necessarily, or by essence, be capital, the prospect of any unambiguously ‘Left-accelerationism’ gaining serious momentum can be confidently dismissed. Accelerationism is simply the self-awareness of capitalism, which has scarcely begun. (“We haven’t seen anything yet.”)"

Which for me, when translated to a Marxist paradigm, seems to say: "everything that can be used for accumulation will be used for accumulation, even if it's on the name of a "socialist construction""

So moving on to the question of Tradition, if as Steven Shaviro says on his Three Essays on Accelerationism, we humans are to become "parasites on the Body of Capital", that is to say to eke a living however we can on a world where we are no longer the dominant species (Capital is) then Tradition acquires renovated importance as the one thing that isn't "fungible", that is to say it cannot be grasped by Capitalist machinic intelligence, since it can only be understood by being-in-the-world, something the machine is presumably incapable of doing.

[Anonymous No.10212332]

>>10212313
Traditionalism is the ur-posthumanism.

[Anonymous No.10212333]

What fuck did Rene Girard think about Putin?

[Anonymous No.10212355]

>>10211929
The philosopher is a time-traveler who arrives on the scene too late. Theory comes after the event. The event-makers are superior to the theoreticians. But the theoreticians have more job security.

[Anonymous No.10212360]

>>10211872
Ioan Culianu is worth checking out if you like Eliade too.

[Anonymous No.10212369]

>>10211788
Can we say that metonymy is a symbol and metaphor is an analogy? The world operates analogically but humans are simply swimming in some strange symbolic matrix. Don't believe me? Drop 1200 mcgs and go people watching.

[Anonymous No.10212484]

>>10212130
might not be able to help it, crazy as that sounds

>>10212135
just ungrounded

>>10212313
ITT: intelligent and interesting posts

good shit anon

>>10212333
necessary evil would be my guess

>>10212355
>The philosopher is a time-traveler who arrives on the scene too late. Theory comes after the event. The event-makers are superior to the theoreticians. But the theoreticians have more job security.

love this post so hard

>>10212360
aye, thank ye sir

>>10212369
>Can we say that metonymy is a symbol and metaphor is an analogy?

i'm not sure. metonymy/metaphor just to me aligns more with deleuze's aion/chronos distinction. yes, we can do psychedelics and sort of venture for a while into schizophrenia - or, for that matter, just have crazy deep REM sleep and dream our balls off - but all of this stuff fades upon waking consciousness. which is - or so it seems to me - a world in which we have to confront the fact that all is mimesis rather than transcendental meaning...

we basically can't derive our concepts of the norm from *anything* - and this is perhaps another aspect of a planetary cyberneticism that does not require it. maybe only intelligence is the norm, or maybe it is because we are having, with Turing-as-Copernicus, another great turn of the world-historical screw...things make more sense and less sense at the same time. everything becoming more and more intelligible, perhaps only intelligible to itself...

...neither baudrillard nor mcluhan were wrong about the semiological explosion (or 'semantic apocalypse.'). but baudrillard had nietzsche and marx to fall back on, and mcluhan had the church. i sound the way that i do, perhaps, because i'm a stranger to both of those things...and just trying to find stability through mimesis and theory alone is like falling backwards into space...

...but maybe this is a historical epoch, and a turn into a much Colder world, a strange new era of cognition that we have never seen before...and the more we try to understand it, the more remote it seems to become...

...it seems to me you have to let go of politics to deal with philosophy, but what presents itself to you as such is so fucking huge you just lose all sense of perspective...without something to criticize, to be transcendental miserabilists about, we have no fucking idea who we are...

...at the end of time the revolutionaries discover, perhaps, their obsolescence...not because any doors are closed to them, but because all of them are open...

[Anonymous No.10212535]

>>10211872
What do you make of critics of Heidegger like Adorno, etc?

[Anonymous No.10212575]

>>10212535
>heidegger

i love heidegger ofc. one of the godfathers of of existential psychotherapy. tapped into something gigantic about truth and meaning, metaphysics of production, et al. i have mad love for heidegger. for all kinds of reason.

>adorno
adorno i have a harder time with because he's a modernist and i'm not (although i think i'm trying to sublimate myself into one). doesn't mean of course that he's not a genius. of course he is. what if *all art* is simply regressive? that's an idea i get from him (see the section on adorno in the book i recommended here: >>10208880).

in many ways adorno is a kind of reluctant champion of the need for modernization, even *civilization.* i can get behind this. the only problem is that sublimating into civilization is fucking *painful.* maybe even traumatic. because you wind up asking yourself, *what the fuck is the point of this.* and of course, there is no point: the point is, *you are now civilized.*

adorno's critique of fascism makes sense. he looks for fascism in american media and he seems to find it. my thing? frustration with what seems to be the only thing for a civilized person to do: repress that shit, put on your tie, get out there, and be *normatively repressed.* adorno has no love for countercultural movements because he knew full well that the *original* prototype for this was the nazis. but his very horror of this winds up impelling him to find totalitarianism in places where it wasn't (or was it?): that is, mass society. enter critical theory accordingly.

that's how i read things, anyways. *of course* adorno is right: civilization > barbarism. it's just that what i feel about his understanding of what makes a civilization civilized requires a kind of merciless disciplining of the *very things that would seem to make life worth living* - namely, art, *mythic art.*

but again, to look at things the other way: maybe the point of making art is not to *express* anything, but to *give shape and form to the drives* so that we do *not* need to aestheticize *politics.* which makes sense...no?

and this exactly the fucking tortuous shit that bothers me about modernism, in a way. the reward for being civilized is to know that you are not barbaric: but it's the barbaric stuff that, arguably, *makes life worth living* because it is *capable of aestheticizing.* bartok and schoenberg makes me want to fucking kill myself.

now, is that *my* fault, because i'm a barbaric sentimentalist? from his perspective, it might be. do i have a rejoinder? i do not. does the life he subsequently valorizes seem achingly tortured and repressed? it sure does. can i *really* think Civiliztion in terms *other* than a *painful disciplining of barbarism v/sublimation?* probably not.

you either get a cake you don't want to eat, or a cake you can eat but tastes like shit. tough call.

[Anonymous No.10212589]

>>10212575
How often do you read any fiction, girardfag?
I see you quoting philosophers all the time so I assume you mustnt have much time for fiction.
Anway, which authors do you recommend?

[Anonymous No.10212663]

>>10212589
i almost never read fiction (but i probably should, because it apparently makes you feel more empathetic, and all of this philosophy has just turned me into a rather crusty and miserable ballsack of a human being).

when i do it's not philosophical stuff. mccarthy always gets me. melville. borges anytime. james ellroy i find weirdly re-readable, i've read underworld usa a bunch of times. i love frank herbert, more for the range of his thinking and how much he invested of himself in building those worlds. i used to like hesse, don't know if i would want to read him now. thomas mann i've been putting off.

pretty middlebrow tastes there in other words. fiction authors i'd recommend? i don't know if i can answer that. fiction is all about taste, it's like music. i can recommend philosophy guys more easily because i feel like i know who is good for answering what kinds or sorts of questions a person is interested in, but fiction isn't so much about asking questions (i don't think, anyways).

really my fiction reading is just underdeveloped, though. i'm a philosophy wonk and it shows, but it's more from being a failed writer, mind. which is why i have acquired the jargon to talk about failure, separation, thwarted desires, et al. the goal was never to be the human i am now...if anything, it was to *avoid* seeing the world in the way that i do...because it's bleak and grim as fuck, and fiction doesn't really cure it...

...but that's really what elevates great writers above philosophers: *empathy.* they can describe a mood or a feeling without needing to fucking blame or fix anyone.

i suck at being human, quite frankly. seem to have become the kind of person i sincerely did not want to be. too much thinking about desire/tech/capital/&c and not enough, well...making a principled effort not to be an embittered angry fuck.

i mean, look at l frank baum. he seems to have had a better perspective on this stuff. he could have been a dick about it. but he wasn't.

why was that?

[Anonymous No.10212684]

>>10212663
Thanks for the response

>well...making a principled effort not to be an embittered angry fuck.

That's really a shame, but I believe that one day you will meet the right person and your whole world you turn bright again. While that doesn't happe, however, you can try to stay away from pessimistic thinkers for a time and start practicing sports and going to parties, just allow yourself to express new things and be surprised with the results. Best of luck, my mate!

[Anonymous No.10212690]

>>10212575
>Schoenberg makes me want to kill myself
I love Shoenberg actually, he grows on you if you listen to him with open ears, i think it's fair to say that he's not atonal, but a new tonality which has gone unheard. here's an example of some more LIGHTER "atonal" music by Ernst Krenek (Who lambasted Schoenberg at first but grew to the idea):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFb8ahrrwyQ
Also, ironically enough, Schoenberg hated Adorno's guts: "I have never been able to bear the fellow [...] It is disgusting, by the way, how he treats Stravinsky."

[Anonymous No.10212791]

>>10212484
>good shit anon

Aww thanks, I'm glad I found someone to talk about this stuff with, most people don't understand and assume I'm insane or some kind of troll.

[Anonymous No.10212851]

>>10212791
you're not insane. far from it. it's just a question of what we *do* with these thoughts...no?

what is to be done with them? maybe nothing. fiction is my guess. literature as sublimated philosophical unbinding. political careers for those who cannot do this, and academic careers in Higher Superstition for those who *really* cannot do this.

when has *sanity* ever been an unbecoming or unsexy look? just sanity: courage, resoluteness, intelligence, empathy for other humans. *these* things. old-school virtues. aren't these in the end the desired qualities? isn't pleading for utopia just a way of preventing humans for ever trying to come to grips and own their own unique contingencies, their own frayed and fractured lives? isn't this what an *actual* authorial voice communicates to us, when we read it: a reconciled suffering?
>desires overcome and transmitted to the human sciences

...of *course* you will find christological references in literature, *of course* you will find the phallologocentric (i would like to give derrida a wedgie, some days). *of fucking course you will.* because all it means is that somebody managed to wrestle some part of their worthless fucking self onto a page and out of themselves. because when you can put something in a book, maybe you do it successully when you can *bury* it there.
>so that undergrad hacks can 'unpack' it like a bunch of smarmy dickbags later

you know i absolutely fucking *love?* love love? fucking pic rel. conan the barbarian was actually one of the least barbaric barbarians you're ever going to find - no? there's no *true* savagery in him. nor was there in howard. there's *strength* but it's not *madness.* conan doesn't rape, he doesn't get into the slave trade, he doesn't cannibalize people, none of this. and he was *skeptical* about civilization...as well he might have been.

and don't even get me started on *conan* and mimetic violence...it's why he is always sitting on that throne and *brooding*...because he *knows* that the fate of all the violence and wenching is, sadly, empty...even with all the girls...

...life is just a fucking knock-down brutal struggle for nothing more than self-coherence, maybe. even if the self is a spook, pure mimesis. still tho. just *holding it together.* maybe this is enough?

[mystikos No.10213253]

Play the glass bead game, girardfag. And wait for transcendence...

[mystikos No.10213305]

>>10213253
This is what I'm attempting.


I still seek transcendence in love however but it is philosophy I have faith in as a lover...

Speaking of philosophical friendships, it is said that Socrates invented in Love (in Plato's Symposium) and Pythagoras invented friendship (idk wtf by whom...) Indeed we should not just be lovers of wisdom. Supposing truth be a woman. Be a friend of wisdom as well.

[mystikos No.10213359]

>>10213305
I have had a few philosophical friendships in school. A kid R, D, and Z. A Catholic, Analytic, and Continental respectively. But what am I? A fourth type?

Brb. Checking out Gurdjeff...

[mystikos No.10213363]

>>10212851
I am insane. Diagnosed. Schizoaffective. Bipolar AND Schizophrenia. AMA.

[mystikos No.10213378]

>>10212851
Read Clark Ashton Smith. Very good hperborean tales...

[Anonymous No.10213393]

I've been spamming this board with Girard forever. It's about time you people took him up and put down the pseudo-intellectuals you guys like to circle jerk over.

I'm proud of you guys :3

By the way, PhD here whose dissertation was on Girard. AMA.

[Anonymous No.10213474]

>>10213253
>play the glass bead game, girardfag.

now here's a quietly fucking brilliant piece of advice...damn. glad to see you back in the thread good sir.

>Indeed we should not just be lovers of wisdom. Supposing truth be a woman. Be a friend of wisdom as well.

truth. maybe i've just got a fucking massive case of not being able to see forests for trees. wouldn't surprise me.

>>10213363
you're diagnosed with being terminally goddamn interesting in your posts is what i say.

fwiw one of my bio-parents is bipolar also. artist. the other is just a bundle of nerves. didn't get the gene myself. just some anxiety stuff, i suspect.

>>10213393
>I've been spamming this board with Girard forever.
i may have read some of your posts, there are a couple of other girard-anons out there. he's quietly become a guy on these boards thanks to our relentless and unsubtle shilling.

>it's about time you people took him up and put down the pseudo-intellectuals you guys like to circle jerk over.
kek. probably. still fun tho

>PhD here whose dissertation was on Girard. AMA.
first of all, unironic congratulations.

what was your dissertation about?
what do you think about the reception of Girard here on /lit/? or about a Traditionalist revival (if there is such a thing going on)? talk about peterson too if you want, he's the other guy /lit/ is always interested in.

i'm always surprised to find out how much of a Catholic board this place is. i figured everybody was too cool for that
>t. guy who was too cool for that
>well, thought he was, anyways
>turned out to be a fucking ass-face clam-nugget
>or something
>w/e
>the point is that philosophy wonks should not shit on the Catholics

anyways

talk about the boy, anon, and your work, we'd love to hear it. bonus points if you can connect him to guenon for our poor suffering OP also

and thanks for joining the thread also, i should say.

[Anonymous No.10213528]

>>10213474

Thanks, my man.
Girard changed my life. A Girardian friend of mine described his life as "BG and AG" - Before and After Girard. I think it's quite apt.
As for my dissertation, please see this thread i started (once again schilling incessantly for Girard - please join us!)

javascript:quote('10213413');

[Anonymous No.10213532]

>>10213474
>>10213528

Shit, im sorry, i don't know how to do that "Forward to another thread" thing... I'm pretty PC illiterate. (i know! "Lurk moar!")

[Anonymous No.10213537]

>>10213532
i usually just copy & paste, don't know if there's more science to it than that

>>10213413

anyways, see you in there

[Anonymous No.10213572]

>>10213537
HA! you found it!