Girard vs. Guenon

>no mention of Bataille
r u kidding me niggaz

Bump.

how did he do it?Which work?

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

if he contradicts guenon just reject him and move on

>being this much of a fangirl brainlet

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

>contradictory
I mean contradictory with Girard's thoughts

where is girardfag?

brilliant post, entirely explains why RG is a guy

guenon's aight

sheesh

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

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

>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 Veeky Forums for a while. capital is placing its own inexorable demands on my life-time.

love to all. good luck out there.

Are you French?

no

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.

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.

>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.

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 ) 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...

>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.

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.

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?

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?

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.

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...

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: 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.

>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.

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.

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

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

>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

>>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.

Hi myrmex

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.

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

(cont'd)

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...

>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.

>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.

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

>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.

>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.

>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) Veeky Forums 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.

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.

>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".

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.

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

>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.

I'm just going to leave this here.

youtube.com/watch?v=esk7W9Jowtc

youtube.com/watch?v=BNkSBy5wWDk

35:12

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

so interesting. thank you kind user.

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

vkontakte.ru/renegirard

>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.

Nice thread.

Archived, and bookmarked. Great thread!

archive.fo/6sZlI

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

Thanks!

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.

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?

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.

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.*

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.

>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)

FUCK OFF GIRARDFAG, BREVITY IS THE SOUL OF WIT

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.

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

>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.
youtube.com/watch?v=3i6J2fcrKi8

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

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?

>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.

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

>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.

>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.

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

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.

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

bump

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

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

Why is that bro?

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

bump

kek. sorry

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.

girardfag where do you live

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.

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

that's too kind user.

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.

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

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.

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 Veeky Forums 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.

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.

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.

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.

What do you mean by this?

>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.

>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, user. 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...

>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

i'm wondering something else now, maybe interesting, maybe not, from this thread. it's there's something really fucking interesting about Veeky Forums 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.

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.

>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.

Ya. I wish I knew how to quit ya, Veeky Forums...

This post is very on point to why I keep visiting Veeky Forums. 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 Veeky Forums 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, Veeky Forums 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.

In what language did Girard write? English or French?

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.

>In many ways, Veeky Forums 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 Veeky Forums 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 () 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.

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.

>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.

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*

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.

“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!

"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.