Can we talk about René Girard ?
Can we talk about René Girard ?
Austin Murphy
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theatlantic.com
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Anthony Reed
this is the guy from Twin Peaks,Dale Cooper;not GIrard, OP.
Mason Torres
We can.
The only non-fiction writer more comfy than Girard is de Maistre.
Fight me.
Alexander Long
You probably don't read a lot of non-fiction.
Maistre (and his brother too) is god tier comfy, I must say, but there are a lot of other authors.
If you like these ones though, you may consider reading Tchaadaev and Ballanche.
Aaron Long
can we talk about Jean Giraud?
Grayson Campbell
...
Kayden Phillips
MAIRSY DOATS AND DOZY DOATS AND LITTLE LAMBSY DIVEY
Ryan Hernandez
summoning girardfag
Jordan Nguyen
summon the black hole and it appears.
please note that i haven't read much for the past couple of months and IRL responsibilities have slowly been sapping the will to live from me. i'm operating at about 38% of optimal girardfagging capacity, as recent posts might indicate.
shitposting on Veeky Forums, as always, is a pleasure.
i'm in a mood to ruminate about the clark/chambers idea of extended cognition also, of which i know very little, save that the idea that
>you think with the world
seems interesting. and maybe it can be tied in fruitfully to concepts of mimesis and rivalry and so on. the other day some user was wondering how to connect deleuze and girard's concepts of desire and i've been wondering about it ever since, maybe because it's hard to avoid thinking about desire metaphysically and not fall into a kind of a critical stance: you know, desires are good when i share them but not when they aren't. and since it is hard for us to talk detachedly about our desires, things slide into politics before they're halfway out the gate.
what fucks us up as humans is always other people, the incompatibility of desires, almost like we/they were gravitational forces. maybe desires experience a kind of torsion, that is: we really get our minds and bodies and desires stopped, or redirected, or put into acceleration, all at the same time. and neurosis happens when we feel we are being pulled in two different directions.
what happens, for instance, if you are your own rival? wanting one thing, doing another. i would have to go and check the books on this but i'm not even sure he talks about this.
>perhaps because it would probably sound silly to him
or maybe i'm just a fucking lunatic.
>no doubt about that
what role does context play in these kinds of questions also? take last night's epic ufc fights, for instance. is a middleweight fight still a girardian struggle? here is a perfect example of violence on display, honed to its finest edge. afterwards fighters usually hug it out. and the question of escalating violence is sort of a non-issue: fighters aren't permitted to grab a chair, for instance (that has to wait for the wwe). referees, drug-testing boards, and league rules and standards limit and contain violence. do two fighters *really* want to kill each other? if so, they don't really do it in the ring. the young mike tyson seemed halfway apologetic in his earlier matches.
how about capital? can capital and desire be separated? is capital always abstracted desire? don't we desire it because it is abstract, fungible happiness-potential distilled down to its essence?
so, stuff like this. RG is the boy of course and for anthropological stuff he's the champ. i'm just kind of all over the place these days.
Isaiah Lopez
any anons interested in a good article about extended cognition can read further here.
theatlantic.com
side note: kriss was a writer i enjoyed reading for years but he has recently completely demolished his own life and future prospects after a story about his sexually harassing a friend of his got out. deleted his twitter, banned from labor, released by all the publications he worked for, the whole shebang. he's basically vanished from the earth. he was a pretty interesting writer, although i was surprised to find out that his parents were relatively well-off. the cynical response would be to say, well, of course: it's all guilt-ridden shit anyways, feminists are all hiding something, blah blah. i guess.
anyways. the world of desire and its discontents. maybe it's a better idea to think that all these things mean something more than capital and acceleration, however much theory is good at explaining how astro-fucked we all are by what we have unleashed on the world, and the only response to which appears to be critique.
>and shitposting
>always there is shitposting
so long as scarcity leads to violence and scapegoating - a reliable prop bet - the future looks bright for RG studies. it would just be nice to think that it might look bright for other reasons instead. how that might come about i have no idea.
>probably education or some shit idk
it seems to me a bad idea though to be waiting for revolution. maybe - to go back to extended cognition - empathy is a better scene. thinking about capital rarely leaves little room for that.
i think i used to be empathetic once. then money got involved, shit got real and i've sort of been in a confused place ever since. now my confusion comes loaded with jargon and weird references but i think it's the same as it ever was. which is to say, mainly just fear. except now i think things really only just get fucking weirder and stranger as capital wakes itself up and we get further and further from knowing why except to say, Wait For The Machines To Tell Us.
but it's all connected...and even the tiniest meatbag microprocessor can no more reject it all than accept it all. so wat do? waste life in meme wonderland?
>4/10 ramble girardfag
>i know inner self. i told you, i'm in a slump
>perhaps you should consider kys
>meh. maybe later. i want to see the ending of GoT. also i still like the taste of food. and cigarettes
>god i hate you. so much. why couldn't i have been the conscience of somebody interesting. somebody with actual problems.
>*scratches* idk man. it is what it is
>how can any one man be so utterly boring and yet so relentlessly self-interested. how. how is this possible
>*belch* it's a blessing and a curse i guess
Michael Long
Regardless of whether desire is productive or consuming it might be helpful to think of desire as fantasy and ideology as collective fantasy.
Owen Baker
Life is infinite Jest. It’s so entertaining you can’t stop. Except for nirvana and suicide and kurt cobain.
Jackson James
>empathy and money
The law of the gift
Poison and medicine
Isaac Jenkins
Capitalism creates false desires. Technology has its own agenda. Gnon. The universe is a god-making machine.
William Cook
>it might be helpful to think of desire as fantasy and ideology as collective fantasy.
true. i have become infected with some kind of suspicion that fantasy = capital and now cannot unsee. so what happens is that on the one hand i feel the need to integrate, functionally, into a society which on the other i completely reject (with the caveat being that i know i have no real claim to do so, except that i have a funny suspicion everything runs on barely sublimated panic and generous scoops of dopamine). enter terminal neurosis.
>and Veeky Forums
the thing about capital and mimesis is that if we take the most hyperbolic stance - that a kind of unconscious planetary domestication of the human species is under way - there actually is no reason to think that this might not be, in the sense of violence, actually a good thing. i will never know why thiel gave RG the endorsement except perhaps by asking myself if he just concluded that, yes, humans were a couple of steps up the ladder from chimpanzees and we should not be deluded about this.
i often feel the same way, that capital is a kind of next-level jungle we have simply recreated for ourselves now in this incredible way. it may even simply be becoming an unwieldy term. or, as i was wondering in another thread, if we are going to talk about capital on anthropotechnic/posthuman terms or old-school critical terms: that is, by theory and literature.
i want a copy of pic rel so goddamn bad.
>Life is infinite Jest. It’s so entertaining you can’t stop. Except for nirvana and suicide and kurt cobain.
yup. i feel the same way about thinking about capital. entertainment unto death. now and again the buddha. it doesn't last very long though. i have no chill.
dat pharmakon
>Capitalism creates false desires
& we collaborate
>technology has its own agenda
sure seems that way
>Gnon
gnon
>also gnon
>The universe is a god-making machine
it fucking is. so, question: why the fuck am i such an ungrateful cunt about it
the universe is a god-making machine and still i manage to fucking act like a dick about it
and the answer is, because i have an irresistable monkey-urge to want to have things i don't actually need and want things i feel that i am supposed to want to impress people i honestly don't give a fuck about
>dem seed vaults
>dat svalbard
>dat icy solitude
>hnng
the thing is that theory really just is the greatest goddamn stuff to read, ever. it's just too fucking interesting. probably a bad way to pay the rent, but holy shit is it ever exciting to read. just to remind yourself that compared to some of the heavy hitters u don't know nuffin. and also because, subtly, their reality becomes *your* reality.
so to go back to extended cognition: i am forced to ask myself, sometimes, what kind of world would i actually *want* to project. 'think with the world' to me means, *don't refuse the world:* and that's actually sort of a novel thought for me.
Thomas Bailey
>Except for nirvana and suicide and kurt cobain
>Cobain
>suicide
Zachary Gutierrez
also here's an interesting case to put in the mimetic desire case-folder: Xi Jinping Thought.
trump *wishes* he could do this.
>from this day forward, i declare a new beginning of Donald Trump Thought
>he plainly cannot do this, although he would dearly like to
>and certainly bannon planned to
>ah those were the days
but the chairman can. he can simply tell you what your desires are by fiat. can you imagine how awesome this would be. to be able to have a Thought. can you fucking imagine. i am so envious.
>ywn have a thought so awesome it must be capitalized permanently
>and immediately studied in university departments that spring up overnight
>ywn have your Thought enshrined in a constitution
>ywn be able to walk into a room and ask hey how's it coming with my Thought
>>great boss it's really great. just wow. it really delivers. we've all been saying it was time for a new Thought and boom, you had one
>ok sounds good
the fun of one-party rule. i read a little about Xi and apparently he was largely a nobody for most of his political career. now he's arguably (?) the most powerful guy in the world.
>and a film about a chinese rambo beating up american mercenaries in africa is breaking box-office records
>& with the chinese version of top gun coming out this month
did he think the Thought, or did the Thought think him? i fucking love china sometimes. not sure if i want to live there but man.
this is only tangentially related to girard of course but i thought Xi Jinping Thought is just kind of a reliably amazing term to think about.
Dominic Ramirez
Find silence in noise. Find play in work.
They’re listed separately for a reason. Consciousness expansion is dangerous regardless.
What’s your enviros? Take advantage of the set and setting. Pay attention to your thought’s genetics and raise it in the proper ecosystem. I am in uni. Working toward studying this stuff in the major league.
Luis Phillips
Girardfag I must confess I feel a bit intimidated by your posts. I really have no background in Girard or critical theory and so it all feels a bit obtuse to me. I wish I understood it better.
Aaron Russell
>Find silence in noise. Find play in work.
i like sage counsel. learned this one from a really interesting poster here on Veeky Forums the other week:
>play the glass bead game
i know the literary reference but i had never really thought of just trying to do that as a kind of matter of course. not in a postmodern sense either. no haters in castalia. no cynics. no disaffected types bitching about capital
>not even fritz tegularius
and probably castalia would look like some well-lit and slightly less severe mies van der rohe complex rather than the lincoln cathedral. still tho.
>Pay attention to your thought’s genetics and raise it in the proper ecosystem
*super*-interesting.
>I am in uni. Working toward studying this stuff in the major league.
good luck my man. Veeky Forums seems to be full of interesting thoughtful anons these days. rumors of its death are premature i think.
>girardfag I must confess I feel a bit intimidated by your posts
do not for a hot second think that i am anything more than a halfwit pseud with a penchant for rambling better treated with antidepressants than critical theory.
>I really have no background in Girard or critical theory and so it all feels a bit obtuse to me
just read the man's stuff. or whoever. whoever you like. it is 100% not rocket science. also: i am what philosophy does *not* sound like. repeat: *not.* real philosophers and serious intellectuals are transparent and illuminating. i'm more like a drooling fanboy with a big foam finger and acne and bad breath.
>I wish I understood it better.
you will. girard especially. he's easy to read.
the Fun only begins when you try and
>pointlessly, impossibly, retardedly
squish them all together into deranged mega-theories that have you unable to say anything at all without referencing nick land like a basket-case. at which point the move is probably something like watercolor painting or flower arrangement.
so fret not user. i am the portrait of a filthy autodidact with a big yap and not a sexy uni-trained guy. it's not really confusing, it's just that you're getting this through a pretty illogical & sentimental mind.
you *can* Believe The Hype though. the big guys you hear about, time and again, *will rock your socks* when you read them.
so that's my Thought. 20C theory is a really fun adventure and i give it two thumbs up, would lose mind again. have fun with it.
>you will get to read Being & Time and watch heidegger overturn 2000 years of thought
>you will get lacanpilled by zizek and go on a rampage as you see objet a everywhere
>you will watch deleuze dissolve time and space into a blob of holy chaos
>you will consider the frosty and severe image of theodore adorno as if he were a frozen statue in hell, and the awesome contempt he had for his age that was truly worthy of a man who considered himself an heir to nietzsche
>you will feel the pain of having never attended wrestlemania with roland barthes
>oh the places you'll go
Jaxon Brown
and just to follow up on that thought, you know, i think it really would be great to have a good documentary film or something like this about some of the continental heavies today. more to try and show how they thought and saw the world. something that you could almost experience, virtually. to really be able to understand these guys, rather than criticize them or have to write papers on them. to just be in the head of baudrillard or whoever.
i don't know how this would be done. in a way, of course, it's sort of because we need art for these kinds of things: all of the big shots had philosophies of aesthetics in there, somewhere. sort of like schama's documentary did for picasso, caravaggio, &c. but for the big theory guys, so that they can be demystified a little bit.
the theory isn't i think supposed to have a kind of shroud of elitism or obscurantism hanging over it. nor does it need to come pre-wrapped with so much political sentiment. perhaps those things were once inevitable, if only because so many careers ultimately depended on having the right opinions about guy X or Y. but it would be cool if there was something like this that was just a fun and accessible introduction to the writers themselves.
the degree to which a lot of these guys are tied up with marxist stuff may actually have created a kind of impenetrability around their work that may no longer be required. noted popularizer bryan magee did this back when with a pretty fabulous series of interviews. maybe it's time for something similar but updated.
Magee/Copleston/Schopenhauer
youtube.com
>ywn interview nick land
>why even live
>i mean, it's not like i'm living now
>but you get the idea
anyways. guys who perhaps need to be demystified by some clever YouTuber - *particularly* since we are apparently now in the Peterson Era - lacan, foucault, derrida...and lacan we already know through those wonderful Pervert's Guide To films & zizek. but the other guys really could be - and should be? - household names. then in some order baudrillard, lyotard, deleuze, heidegger, and so on.
there are lots of these videos already on YouTube i know - so-and-so in 5 minutes. but w/ev. the point is just to say that what these guys left behind really isn't all that hard once you get a few names. and honestly it's fun as fuck once you can start to connect a few pieces. which is i think how it ought to be: no politics, no elitism, no obscurantism, no fuckery. just a dozen or so of the most balls-out pants-on-head retardedly interesting people who ever lived in the 20C.
Elijah White
however such a project would be conceived -
and it is pure fantasy i admit - girard gets the last episode, though. not only because he's the boy but because he's a legit interesting philosopher who comes after derrida and sort of follows that train.
if you were going to make a mainstream series about the history of continental theory in the 20C, you wouldn't put land in it or veer into acceleration or that too much. land will never be mainstream. and that is a good thing.
but i think we are living in a new time now. pic rel for instance is kind of an interesting quote: how appealing is pomo irony these days? not so much anymore. but girard is a kind of a nice way of suggesting that, you know, life goes on after derrida and the rest. the 20C is one long story of fragmentation and annihilation in many ways and today, of course, it's a pretty bewildering state of things.
'all art is incarnation' - that's quite a thought. even if you don't subscribe to his catholicism it's interesting to think that there is an alternative to infinite deconstruction (and that isn't the alt-right or an accelerationist wormhole...and i'm probably still more tempted by the wormhole than anything like nice, gentle, friendly, kind middle-of-the-road stuff.) but how about this? you feel a little bit weird thinking about putting a moustache and some shades on the mona lisa with a thought like this in mind.
girard gets the final episode. maybe because so much 20C stuff is aesthetics, is mass psychology, desire, consumption. or so it seems to me. and maybe
>not maybe
the age of terror and whatever else signifies that we are truly losing our collective minds over the horizon of where all that theory goes.
good old RG. just seems like such a curiously sane perspective to take. would be a good way to end a madcap adventure through dem signifiers.
Asher Scott
YOU'RE GOING BACK TO M________
Nathaniel Smith
i thought his description of how the dream-like narrative of Le Garage Hermetique came about was interesting - writing the first chapter, then forgetting it, then being required to continue the story without reference to it.