How come lit never told me about this dude? I had to learn about him from some forum for silicon valley dickheads...

also, fwiw, you can be a Heideggerian without being political. Felt that warranted mentioning. It's really me who has gotten sucked into politics and the last thing anyone needs is to talk about Heidegger and the war and so on. I just read an intro to Heidegger last week - it was an Xmas gift to a friend - and it just reminded me of how much I like the H-man. Being is just the cat's pajamas. But that's for another thread.

>focus man, focus! *slaps self*

maybe his will help: Girard's thought that religion *dismantles tragedy* in the way that *tragedy dismantles myth.* It's almost like a judo-flip on Nietzsche. If the tragic mode is *not* as self-aware as that understanding which is revealed by the Gospels, what then? It's a huge, huge idea.

And Girard has no real social project either. Zizek will borrow Lacanian ideas to critique capitalism, and Baudrillard is to the end still I think a Marxist - why else would he tortured by the simulacrum? - but Girard goes to another place: that all of this is done in the shadow of the Gospels, which is what we have to come to terms with. Stull crazy after all these years.

If you're into social progress - or Dionysus - that's cold water indeed. But I think he's convinced me. If there is one thing I am sure of it's that human beings are mimetic. But, contra Zizek, we can't abolish capitalism or rein it in, because it is through this wonky simulacral society that we come to understand ourselves. What makes Girard important is that he understands how delicate and fragile this society becomes when it goes to war, which in a constantly desiring society, such as ours, is virtually all the time. And the weapons only become more powerful, just as we become, perhaps, more alert to all of this: historically, philosophically, psychologically, and so on.

Anyways. That's really enough from me for one night.

>And Girard has no real social project either.

that in itself is refreshing and makes him interesting

No doubt. I mean, in fairness there *is* the above-linked foundation. And it's not like he would be against the idea of us going to church on Sundays. But he's not threatening anyone with punishment himself. Nor is he railing capitalism or championing any marginalized social groups.

I think Lacan really nailed it with object a. Totally. And Z is to me too consistent about this to ignore. What bothers him is the infinite tail-chase; and it's why I don't go in for Derrida or phalllogocentrism
or whatever else. There is no vantage point on which to do what Derrida says except infinite recursivity and misunderstanding and mistranslation. But the Tao already does that. Ressentiment is also a huge, huge problem. On a slightly more political note, I really don't think its right for Evil Europeans to be blamed for everything. It kills me what is happening to Peterson right now, for instance. I watched his New Year's thing and it was incredibly sad. But it's part of the times, I suppose. The infinite mutations of political romanticism and dialectics.

So lots of stuff is getting blown up real good now. Academic politics suck but let's face it, so does the alt-right. It's their time to shine but what at best is going to be the result? Vengeance perhaps. Some deserved, some undeserved. And no end of scapegoats.

I'm a universalist at heart. My family was pretty cool and my life is a mess now because I fucked it up trying to be a fedora-tipping edgelord with a shitty continental answer for everything. But really I had no solutions. Nobody does. I get super-salty about modern academia but SJW stuff and redpill stuff are both aspects of mimeticism, tribalism, and primitivism. And I think Girard understands that stuff about as well as anyone I've read. He's a good look all around. Religion really does I think deserve a second chance.

Especially if Islam is going to continue to make headlines...radical Islam is like Frankenstein's Monster for the political left. But that's /pol/ talk.

Sorry for the long posts gents, Veeky Forums is not my blog but this stuff is this user's favoritest thing, even though it feels like a diet of shredded glass sometimes. That wasn't the original plan...

If this thread is still here tomorrow and anyone cares I actually have a theory about mimetics and witchcraft that I'd like to share. Girard explains the whole world...

>tfw thought this said "mimetics and warcraft" and then realized it didnt

Yeah, let's hear it, when/if you can.

I just checked out a copy of Gary Wills's "Witches & Jesuits: Shakespeare's Macbeth" last night. Don't know what he's on about, but the title intrigues me.

Thanks for posting user, but you're skipping too many steps in your discourse at times and even though I'm familiar with what you're talking about it still feels like hobo rambling occasionally. Not that continental philosophy in general doesn't run into that risk constantly anyway.

> What bothers him is the infinite tail-chase; and it's why I don't go in for Derrida or phalllogocentrism

In my experience Lacan is no different. If you ask enough questions you'll get an infinite tail chase justified by the fact that object a cannot be grasped anyway or something similar (muh Real, muh Symbolic, etc.).

> I get super-salty about modern academia but SJW stuff and redpill stuff are both aspects of mimeticism, tribalism, and primitivism.

What's scary is that people openly promote tribalism today. There's no attempt at discussion or universalism, just endless paranoia and friend-enemy thinking. Carl Schmitt feels more relevant than ever.

I want to ask you two things, maybe they're even related, but you'll have to explain step by step since I'm only familiar with Girard's theory of mimesis (mostly the scapegoat stuff) and nothing else about him.

1) What is his theory of desire in short? Maybe compared to other thinkers since I'm familiar with the others you mentioned and some that you didn't mention (like Deleuze).

2) You mentioned that judo-flip on Nietzsche, but I'm not sure exactly in what way tragedy dismantles myth or how the Gospel tragic mode's self-awareness fits in. As far as I know, for Nietzsche myths, insofar as they are still "incarnated" rather than just old folk tales in dusty tomes, resist tragedy as a sort of affirmative Death Drive (in Freudian terms). So it's like Zizek's notion of Death Drive as Undeath, except "positive" and "desirable" so to speak, rather than disruptive and pathological. Or maybe Girard was aiming at something else and I'm missing the point.

bump

> Scheler

Give me the tl;dr on Scheler. He seems incredibly overlooked. Heidegger thought he was great. Scheler thought Heidegger was deeply flawed.

Is Scheler similar to Girard? I think the Polish pope did his thesis on uniting Scheler with Christian ethics. And I guess Edith Stein was his discipline.

Not OP, but I'm slightly familiar with Scheler.

> I think the Polish pope did his thesis on uniting Scheler with Christian ethics.

That's not too hard, Scheler was as far as I know a christian. He even wrote a book defending it against the Nietzschean concept of ressentiment among other things. I haven't read much Scheler, but from what I remember he had some theories of applied phenomenology that were really appreciated or something like that.

one final bump in case OP shows up

>What's scary is that people openly promote tribalism today.

For a hack Mcluhan sure got it right.

Hi user, I'm the notablog-Girardfag. I'm working on an answer for your extended question because not only do I want to share what I can but questions like yours help me to understand these guys in super-awesome ways I might not ordinarily have thought of. I basically can only repeat myself at this point in marginally more interesting ways. So I'll be back laterish with a more in-depth response. In the meantime tho...

>it still feels like hobo rambling occasionally
Kek. No doubt. I can’t even get mad and and I find your honesty refreshing. I am what I am. Picture me like a demented wasteland scavenger hunchback who owns a weird rag and bone shop under a bridge that sells mainly trash and maybe one or two mysterious things that aren't.

Continental philosophy has a lot of bullshit in it and if it is going to maintain even a tiny sliver of credibility in the next century it is absolutely necessary for it not to be deconstructive but conform in some sense to the rules of the game(s) that humanity is going to continue to play with itself. But I think we are seeing that there *are* "rules" and we *do* want them and to know them. And both the rules and ourselves are mimetic all the way to the bottom. I'll have more to write about that.

Basically it came to me from that story about the African soccer team that used witchcraft to score a goal. My feeling is this: witchcraft 'works' because *curses are mimetic.* If everyone believes a curse works, then the curse really does work. It always-already works by a sort of collective confirmation. This is more of an issue in superstitious societies and cultures, but it's only because there the mechanisms of mimeticism and scapegoating are more immediately apparent. The scarlet letter works in New England as well.

Witchcraft is total mimeticism. You can't logically disprove that a curse has no magical power if you are the recipient of a curse and now everyone shuns you. No one is immune to collective shaming, but resisting proves that the curse has magic power. And it can't be ignored within that society. So it's a kind of spin-off of conspiracy theories but it all has to do with human psychology basically. We will always look for reasons. cursing somebody else is basically like putting a down payment on fatalism. It's all seduction and mimeticism. Magic works in magical societies, but it also keeps and maintains an order of magical thinking which leads to group cohesion. and ultimately scapegoating, blame, and so on.

Nobody wants to be cursed, but everybody *does* want to live in a society in which magic - that is, the presence of the divine - remains real, even if it is only through the essentially lottery-driven mechanism of curse-laying itself. It's not even that profound, really. But I think it makes sense.

Anyways gents to be continued, I'm looking forward to it.

> If everyone believes a curse works, then the curse really does work.

I agree, but I'd add that it also works in some sense if only the cursed believes it. Like you said, the temptation to look for reasons is constant so even if he lives a normal life with an average amount of suffering he will still attribute that suffering to the curse. On a social level it's basically mass confirmation bias, similar to individual confirmation bias.

> Picture me like a demented wasteland scavenger hunchback who owns a weird rag and bone shop under a bridge that sells mainly trash and maybe one or two mysterious things that aren't.

I recently started reading Anti-Oedipus (I plan on reading Girard's review of it right after) and the image you described reminded me of a passage from it:

> Henri Michaux describes a schizophrenic table in terms of a process of production which is that of desire: "Once noticed, it continued to occupy one's mind. It even persisted, as it were, in going about its own business. . . . The striking thing was that it was neither simple nor really complex, initially or intentionally complex, or constructed according to a complicated plan. Instead, it had been desimplified in the course of its carpentering. ... As it stood, it was a table of additions, much like certain schizophrenics' drawings, described as 'overstuffed,' and if finished it was only in so far as there was no way of adding anything more to it, the table having become more and more an accumulation, less and less a table. ... It was not intended for any specific purpose, for anything one expects of a table. Heavy, cumbersome,it was virtually immovable. One didn't know how to handle it (mentally or physically). Its top surface, the useful part of the table, having been gradually reduced, was disappearing, with so little relation to the clumsy framework that the thing did not strike one as a table, but as some freak piece of furniture, an unfamiliar instrument ... for which there was no purpose. A dehumanized table, nothing cozy about it, nothing 'middle-class,' nothing rustic, nothing countrified, not a kitchen table or a work table. A table which lent itself to no function, self-protective, denying itself to service and communication alike. There was something stunned about it, something petrified. Perhaps it suggested a stalled engine."

> Anti-Oedipus (I plan on reading Girard's review of it right after

Link? All the big critics of Girard that I've encountered have been Deleuzian. But, as far as I understand Deleuze, there's a strong undercurrent of anti-monotheism in D&G.

It seems the critique is from "To Double Business Bound" but I can't find a copy online beyond this quote:

“If true desire is unconscious and still crushed by repressive codings, even in capitalism, how do the two authors know it exists? It is especially the delirious forms of schizophrenia that inform them, since these forms explode suppression in order to free true desire. In this delirium, all effective attitudes, all structural positions, all conceivable and inconceivable identifications appear juxtaposed, without exclusion or totalization of any kind, in perfect openness and readiness to accept constantly new forms....The authors certainly do not intend to exclude the Oedipus complex, at least at a certain moment in the critique, but they want to include it and absorb it on the samegrounds as everything and anything, dispelling its full import through an excessive inclusion, so to speak."

Not bad.

>deleuzian

is there something better than anti-oedipus? i read some if but i couldnt help but think "cool but thats just like your opinion, man" like i can't get away from thinking that it's just this one random dudes wacky interpretation of reality...what explanatory powers does it have really? also, i feel like after 1950 it's too late to be writing anti-capitalist stuff so shit that just comes down to bitching about consumerism or whatever falls flat with me

Oh shit boys it’s Girard time again. Fire the hobo-engines!
>hobo engines ready, fuckface
>engage!

1/4

>1. What is [Girard's] theory of desire? Maybe compared to other thinkers...

That desire is fundamentally triangular: it involves subject, object, and *rival.* The subject never *really* perceives the object of their desire in a total vacuum. There is always an other. We only think we are alone. Desire is *not* dyadic.

In this regard Lacan (and Heidegger, and others) has already done the heavy lifting. It is Lacan who writes that desire is the desire of the other, full stop (and he gets this originally from *Hegel's* passage on the lord and bondsman in the PoS). However, for Hegel this is a *violent* and dyadic struggle between master and slave, subject and object. Karl Marx had no problem embracing this, but Girard is no Marxist. Nor is he a Nietzschean or Heideggerian.

Girard knows that there are *two* struggles going on, one private and one cultural. Mimetics links all this up, the individual to the other, and that in turn to history and anthropology. For now it is worth mentioning here what Zizek has talked about as well: the role of violence in analysis. The hysterical sphinx punishes with death; the Grand Inquisitor - and Stalin himself - do likewise. He notes all of this in the Pervert's Guide, with John Nada and his friend and the sunglasses. There may be something essentially necessary about violence and existentialism, but I would say that we know today that it always *fails* as political/ideological violence. And this failure would be intolerable *unless it were made sacred and repeated.*

Girard is not a revolutionary. In Things Hidden he writes

>Nothing is more difficult than admitting the final nullity of human conflict...*all* modern ideologies are immense machines that justify and legitimate conflicts that in our time could put an end to humanity. The whole madness of the human being is there. (p.31)

Now *to me* I think the long chain of thinkers that I have read, which lead up to Girard, have been *obsessed with art* because beauty bothers them, even torments them. And fortunately this lines up with your question. The world is not a matter of indifference, and people have been hypnotized by beauty, desire, and art for a long time. These things are always bound up in the end with the deepest possible intimations and understandings of self that can be imagined.

cont’d, always cont’d

2/4

>Maybe compared to other thinkers...

I actually like to tell this part as a kind of a narrative, because in a way maybe it is. All these guys ping off of everyone else. The story of the perpetually crumbling Modern Subject and his wanderings in the 20C is one of the greatest stories ever told. It's still being told. We are all descended from that subject. My take is reductive but I think sound enough. And I feel for some reason that it has to be re-told time and again…partly symptom, partly history…

So Schopenhauer sees art as a release from a world of blind suffering. Nietzsche feels he has not gone far enough; one should become a work of art oneself. For Heidegger, this insight seems to complete metaphysics, and hand the rest over to technics and the concealment of Being. But for Heidegger the world is not a matter of indifference, and that the characteristic mood of "authenticity" is *anxiety,* in particular about the future. We know how Heidegger feels about poetry and art. Openness to Being, rather than will to power. But Heidegger after the turn feels that this is now a sort of infinitely evanescent twilight.

So Lacan then takes this in a different direction. He turns things towards a question of desire and selfhood: we desire. And out of this comes object a. Deleuze, as you know, turns *against* Lacan, claiming that desire is not repressed at all but manufactured, like a machine; that desire is kaleidoscopic and everywhere, *amor intellectualis dei.* Baudrillard rejects analysis and turns back towards Nietzsche, saying basically that capital leads to a free-floating desire which spawns the hyperreality now stand ingin for the real. And that is essentially what Zizek is perpetually criticizing, just as Heideggerians today have in a sense to continually distance themselves from Heidegger's legacy, while poststructuralists continually try to dissemble.

Everyone is terrified of violence, anarchy, and what has been let loose.

>McLuhan was a hack
Everyone’s a hack, to some degree. All you need to do is produce one workable concept so that you get an asterisk beside your name in the Gallery of Hacks later on. Baudrillard seemed to like McLuhan.
>fuck you user, Baudrillard was a hack too
>tfw so we beat on against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past

cont’d & cont'd

The Nomadology chapter from A Thousand Plateaus is pretty cool but in general its more of the same, as far as I can tell.

I think they asked some valid questions but its a dead-end philosophy and everybody knows it. Some lieutenant/military strategist/whatever in the Israeli military was into D&G and used their concepts to fight Palestinians by getting the army to blast through walls instead of walking in the street.

Pretty neat but I don't know if a war machine using D&G concepts kind of totally invalidates their philosophy or not.

3/4

>You mentioned that judo-flip on Nietzsche, but I'm not sure exactly in what way tragedy dismantles myth or how the Gospel tragic mode's self-awareness fits in

Because this is what Girard writes about. The ways in which a central and essential nullity of collective violence repeat themselves in human culture and human understanding. The tomb is the foundation of culture itself, and the tomb stands for the concealment of violence.

>Nothing is more difficult than admitting the final nullity of human conflict...*all* modern ideologies are immense machines that justify and legitimate conflicts that in our time could put an end to humanity. The whole madness of the human being is there. (TH, p.31).

It is violence which supplies the origins of culture, preserves that culture, and also destroys that culture. Mimetic theory is a theory of desire which understands that violence is the inevitable result of people not being able to share objects *and* not being able to prevent themselves from imitating. In BttE he will draw the conclusions about Clausewitz and modern states, the logic of the duel: conflict, the need to have the last word, to respond, to pre-empt, to launch the doomsday device - all of these are mimetic. Violence creates the world as collective murder and scapegoating, but it also destroys the world precisely by following the rules of its own mutually self-destructive logic. There is always going to be a *reason* for violence, but beneath all of this is a higher-order understanding: that those reasons are essentially null.

So tragedy shows up the essentially violent aspects of myth. The furies hound Orestes for killing his mother, just as Klytemnestra was obligated to murder Agamemnon for murdering their daughter, just as Agamemon was obliged to sacrifice Iphigenia during the war. Oedipus kills his father; Ahab kills the whale, but in so doing sinks the entire Pequod, save Ishmael; the Judge kills the kid; insert example here. There is a brutal but seemingly *fair* aspect of violence in tragedy, because - well, it’s interesting to think about, isn’t it? We kill because the gods seem to be too far away, and yet we kill *on behalf of* reasons that seem more or less indistinguishable from the divine, or the ideological…we kill in order to hope that someday we will not have to kill again. But that day never arrives. It is only deferred by more killing…

>I'd add that it also works in some sense if only the cursed believes it.
You’re right. That’s the thing. But the cursed one knows that mere disbelief will not suffice. Nobody is transcendentally immune to shame. Not being ashamed will make you look *ignorant*…and you can see how things will progress from there. We’re not disagreeing tho. And the distinction between mass/individual confirmation bias is spot-on, and highly germane to this thread.

I spoke too soon, it's difficult to find the article online. It seems to be indeed from "To Double Business Bound", entitled "Delirium as System".

I think I have a passage from it as well (not sure if it's the same article, but it's about Anti-Oedipus):

"Freud is everywhere in a legitimate and official capacity in those aspects of his work that are explicitly called upon because they can be used against the Oedipus complex or have been judged at least detachable from it. Deleuze and Guattari summon a good Freud, who in their eyes is better than the evil Freud of the Oedipus complex. They want to divide the great man against himself. But the expulsion of Freud by Freud never takes place. The work remains impregnated with Freud, especially where he is violently repudiated. The Freud chased out the front door slips in the window, so much so that at the end of this Freudian psychomachy he is entirely or almost entirely reinstated, a Freud in particles, perhaps even molecular, a Freud that is mixed and emulsified, but nonetheless Freud."

>Baudrillard seemed to like McLuhan.
hack reconize hack, i guess

4/4

So Girard will say that the Gospels *reveal* rather than *hide* the truth of this.

>Tombs exist to honor the dead, but also to hide them in so far as they are dead, to conceal the corpse and ensure that death as such is no longer visible. This act of concealment is essential…men kill in order to lie to thers and to themselves on the subject of violence and death. They must kill and continue to kill, strange as it may seem, in order not to know that they are killing. Murder calls for the tomb and the tomb is but the prolongation and perpetuation of murder. (TH, pp. 164)

But for Girard the Passion makes all of this *explicit.* Nothing is concealed or hidden in the Crucifixion. It reproduces the founding event of all rituals, which Girard believes is connected with every ritual on the planet.

>The Gospels themselves, in their own subversion of sacrifice, disengage the hypothesis of the scapegoat and transmit it to the human sciences.

Christianity is not incapable of understanding its own violence; rather, it understands it better than arguably any other form of sacrifice ever has, and sacrifice and violence are mimetic cultural processes that basically underwrite all of human civilization.

>If human being ceased imitating, all forms of human culture would vanish…primitive societies repress mimetic conflict by prohibiting everything that might provoke it but also by dissimulating it beneath the major symbols of the sacred…(TH 9, 17)

So we are destined, in other worse, to imitate; but mimesis leads to conflict. There is no ideological solution under the sun which can function without violence. All we can do is try to understand the cyclical nature of this stuff.

>*slow clap* not your blog, faggot
>sorry?
>not. your. blog. you did it again
>ok, but come on, it’s a good story
>we’ve heard it before tho. it’s always the same. you ramble.
>*begins to apply clownish face paint* i also do birthday parties
>meh. w/evs. read this. this user knows this is you:

>It was not intended for any specific purpose, for anything one expects of a table. Heavy, cumbersome,it was virtually immovable. One didn't know how to handle it (mentally or physically). Its top surface, the useful part of the table, having been gradually reduced, was disappearing, with so little relation to the clumsy framework that the thing did not strike one as a table, but as some freak piece of furniture, an unfamiliar instrument ... for which there was no purpose. A dehumanized table, nothing cozy about it, nothing 'middle-class,' nothing rustic, nothing countrified, not a kitchen table or a work table. A table which lent itself to no function, self-protective, denying itself to service and communication alike. There was something stunned about it, something petrified. Perhaps it suggested a stalled engine

>maybe that's all of us tho

Yeah, I got that sense a lot when reading A Thousand Plateaus. They attack "materalist psychiatry" but not really.

Back to your question
> is there something better than anti-oedipus?
Not really related but you might like Paul Virilio's work. He's another French Catholic (although his Catholicism isn't really present in his work) who was friends with Deleuze but not really influenced by him and is basically a total technophobe who keeps saying "there's no brakes on the technological accidents train." He's pretty bleak.

Maybe Benjamin Bratton, if you liked that weird systems shit D&G were doing.

>Paul Virilio

oh yeah virilio was mentioned a little in one of the design class i took, but i went to a weak school that rarely made us read primary sources, what of his should i read?

Girardbro. What are your favorite works of his?

Is Peter Thiel a good reader of Girard?

Is Paypal Girardian?

> But, as far as I understand Deleuze, there's a strong undercurrent of anti-monotheism in D&G.

True, but for Deleuze at least it's always a matter of pragmatic "who are you when you believe?" sort of thing. Basically Nietzsche's method of dramatization. Long story short, it's not so much about religious dogma as it is about interpretation and evaluation of given religious principles, what "forces" (in Nietzsche's terms) come in contact with said formulated principles. Some people go full on fire & brimstone and see sin and failure everywhere, some just relax with a cup of tea and treat sermon as a social outing, etc. and this is more important than questions such as "Do you believe in God?" which Deleuze considered non-problematic in the sense that they don't problematize the issue but rather just shut the interlocutor's mouth and label him. Basically such questions end discussion rather than start them and are in this sense reactive.

> is there something better than anti-oedipus?

A Thousand Plateaus. Not even memeing, ATP was written in part because Deleuze and Guattari, along with pretty much everyone else around them at the time, were dissatisfied with Anti-Oedipus and the compromises they made in it.

What? I'm saying D&G is animistic polytheism. Like I said before, all the biggest critics of Girard I've encountered have been Deleuzean and they advocate against monotheism and for atheism in general. Using Nietzsche to argue against monotheism as a form of debt enslavement.

> I'm saying D&G is animistic polytheism.

Maybe, but it's not like Deleuze had primitive altars in his backyard (although it wouldn't surprise me if Guattari did). The beauty of theology is that you can pretty much reconcile these things however you feel like it. The history of Christianity certainly has its fair share of heresies over how the Trinity can be one or whether God is outside of Being or encompassing Being, etc.

I wouldn't be too quick to dismiss stuff like their insistence on Artaud's "To Be Done With the Judgment of God" for example as mere atheism, that would be missing the point. Neither should Deleuze's critique of the priestly class be reduced to monotheism bashing. Again, it would be missing the point (reactive forces, power vs puissance, etc.).

If labels help you define their ontology that's fine, but there's a limited usefulness to them.

I still like them, sort of. I was just pointing out that I think they're pretty opposed.

Short answer: all of them. Everything I've read. He does not lie.

What I've read:

-Desire, Deceit and the Novel
-The Scapegoat
-Violence and the Sacred
-Battling to the End
-The Girard Reader
-Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World
-Mimetic Theory (Palaver)
...and I'm waiting on a copy of one other....

Longer, crankier bit:

What else can I say? He's the boy. He does apocalypse and eschatology and that is where it's at for me. Postmodernism is dancing on the edge of the crater and trying to ignore what's there (or, rather, what isn't). The revolutions of political romance/gnosticism end in bloodbaths or in the foundation of paranoid dystopias, like necropolises. Life today is like the Hallmark shrine at Ground Zero that everybody fixated on because the ruins were too much and too big.

I have had my face fully and not partially rocked by a line of thinkers: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Lacan, Deleuze, Baudrillard, Sloterdijk. And now Girard. I was never a Catholic before and I'm still not one now. But to me he's the end of the line because he's going back *properly* to the beginning. There is no substitute for the whole shebang.

I think eschatology is where philosophy is at. Baudrillard talked about pataphysics, the science of imaginary solutions. But there are so solutions when they are inscribed on the quarks and atoms and electrons of civilization: human mimetic process. Today, that's capitalism.

Nick Land's hyper-capitalism is undead Sith-Marxism. NL loves the blockchain and I know why. But more than this he wants collapse, disaster. But disaster doesn't change anything. Disaster never changes anything. Humans were disasterrific from the start.

Girard takes the bloom off the rose at the heart of the death drive. He's not as introspective as the Neetch - nobody is - but of all the philosophers I've read he's the guy I find I agree the most with today. I love Heidegger to death. But authenticity is over. *Real* postmodernity will mean *mimetics.* Not deconstruction. Or phenomenology. Don't even get me started on SJW stuff. Or its double, the alt-right. All this is to miss the forest for the trees. Everybody was so hot to get off the train as soon as Nietzsche proclaimed the death of God and all the academic horseshit you see going on today is just hysterical water-baling among idiots who have given up on trying to appropriate Marxist fantasies so utterly mutated at this point that they are scarcely recognizable. Planetary civilization is now all about capitalism but is still and always will run on desire, violence, and mimesis. And they work *better* when people stick their heads in the sand and pretend they are so different...

This is why we need great literature.

fucking quality post, my man

wish Veeky Forums was this quality all the time

thank ye kindly, i appreciate it. Veeky Forums is the coolest

Hey girard/hobo user, what do you think of Carl Jung?

this is why i still come to lit occasionally, to recharge my will to read, day to day it's easy to get sidetracked with "practical" reading like technical books, or business/investing books, etc. i'm always reading something, but if i don't stop in here occasionally my list start to trend towards "utility reading", lit gets me in the mood to tackle more challenging things

Your curse explanation sounds essentially similar to that made by the church of Satan to defend their gimmicky rituals while remaining self-declared atheists

Haven't read him all that much, tbqh. I opted for Lacan/Nietzsche. Jung was too kind for me when I was really super stuck-in with philosophy. I was still on that Frankfurt School/Baudrillard/whatever trip: civilization is all a joke, power, be übermensch, fuck you, blah blah. I wanted to learn the dark Gallo-Germanic arts of scorn and rebuke for kittens and sunshine. Was fun for a bit until I realized that life included me too and I really couldn't be completely indifferent without sounding like a talking colostomy bag with a penchant for Heidegger. Pseuds talk too much, drink too little and are rarely called cunts when they deserve it.

>tfw and now you are this guy, wasteland scav-bot & eschatology wonk
>tfw talking a lot while dangerously sober, have you learned nothing
>brb
>aah
>still better than before tho
>moving on then

Anyways Jung is somewhat kinder and gentler than that from what I understand. I'll get to him soonish. There's still too many damn books to read...

patrician exodus of Veeky Forums towards a smaller but more consistently high quality Veeky Forums 2.0 when?

Sounds about right. Collective mimetics works as long as everyone is involved. It's how cults function. Worth mentioning also that Witchcraft is part of a much older, bigger system: African masks and mythology is incredibly interesting.

I mean, black metal and stuff like that is no joke either. That so much black metal comes out of one of the most friendly and progressive nations in the world is also interesting. What constitutes a religious rite and so on is hardly a simple question. But when you have complicated music and poetry and all of this it's definitely something other than the kind of gimmicky power-of-suggestion stuff we're talking about with the Church of Satan. There's no *shame* in the same way at a concert (or, at least, there shouldn't be, I would think).

And in the case of the soccer game I think you do want witchcraft off the field. Partly because it's cheating (although you have to wonder if it would work, say, at the World Cup against, I don't know, Poland), but partly also because refereed sports are a good alternative to the tribalist violence they obviously simulate (and which are a necessary vent for civilization).

Sports are neat like that. Sloterdijk dislikes them. Baudrillard hated exercise itself. I wonder what Nietzsche would have thought about the Olympics...

> Pseuds talk too much, drink too little and are rarely called cunts when they deserve it.

By those standards, D&G are the most authentic intellectuals ever. They wrote extremely dense, drank a lot while brainstorming and got called cunts (or something along those lines) a lot.

>imitation is the source of rivalry and conflict that threatens to destroy communities from within
No it's not. The source of conflict in human societies is competition for resources.
>Because we learn everything through imitation, including what to desire
No we don't. That's complete blank slate idiocy.

Another charlatan selling the magic beans of a Grand Theory of Human Nature that he came up with out of nothing. I'll grant you that it gives pleasure to intellectual pseuds (as ITT) to discuss him, however. Makes them feel smart.

>a rene girard thread
omg can this year get to a better start

not sure if lazy troll or just uneducated mong wandering from another board

They really fucking are! You'll hear no great criticism of those guys from me. AO & ATP are truly handbooks for revolution. I'm sure they did a lot more than drink. And Guattari's life was a total mess. But their work is some of the most anti-totalitarian stuff ever written. Deleuze was no pseud. And some people still argue that Guattari was the real genius there. But D&G, like Nietzsche, are legit revolutionaries. It's partly why I think their disciples are such a mixed bag: their thought resists being turned into philosophical programs. It's too bad Baudrillard doesn't get the same regard, but maybe he brought it on himself. Could be.

On the other hand, systematic application of political philosophy does seem to tend invariably towards totalitarianism. Sartre loved his regimes. Badiou loves Mao. Zizek is a sort of Gramd Inquisitor himself but ultimately he loves democracy, as fucked as it is by capital, but we understand how he works now too.

I am a universalist at heart. I don't have so much anger as disappointment. My grandfather was completely awesome, a beloved small-town doctor with six kids who all loved him and turned out all right. He liked travel and deep-sea fishing and he was in the war. Just a swell guy. But those kids were part of the Great Deregulation of the 60s - 00s which we are now realizing was more than just a phase. Capitalism is only picking up steam and I think the future looks very grim. Not unsalvageable completely, but 100% not in terms of more individuality, difference, deconstruction, etc. But it is very, very hard to take a universalist approach these days for all kinds of reasons: SJW stuff, academic politics, just the state of the economy and the world itself. And general exhaustion with life and criticism.

There are aspects of the redpill movement that I really admire: namely, the respect for the past and a historical perspective. It's often co-opted by fascist interests but the failure of the left to recognize this is really what will bite them in the ass: people don't want fascism per se, they just want a correction of a *deterritorialization* so massive it seems to be getting completely out of control. I like Confucius and Laozi as well, but I don't really want us to become China. Just to have a sense of what is there in the middle. I always hated the middle because it seemed mediocre, crass, commercial, or just boring. Now I feel differently. But nostalgia and sentimentality are not good looks either, and often involve their fair share of cruelty as well.

uneducated mong

Not an argument. Desire as entirely memetic is just prima facie absurd and flies in the face of mountains of scientific, historical, anthropological evidence. Why do homosexual men desire other men? Because it's genetic, not memetic. But rather than accepting the obvious reality, chinstroking and dickstroking each other to some "philosopher" makes you feel smart.

This is why people disdain intellectuals: they are easily duped.

>I like Confucius and Laozi as well, but I don't really want us to become China.
Convert to Catholicism already

>Because it's genetic, not memetic.

orly? link me to the paper identifying the gay gene? also, i guess that makes it ironic that one of the biggest promoters of girard in the united states, peter thiel, is a gay man.

that's twice in this thread that i seem to have been exposed despite my never-ending wasteland screed. first as an unserviceable dehumanized table-object and now as a latent catholic

goddamn you Veeky Forums

i thought we were supposed to be anonymous here

how did you see through my ten-cent disguises i bought at the continental gift store

rargh

>orly? link me to the paper identifying the gay gene?
Mate, you have access to the limitless amount of information on the internet, go explore it. I found ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7581447 after 2 secs of googling. Fact is the preponderance of scientific evidence agrees that homosexuality is largely inherited. Girard would be laughed out of any profession where he actually had to prove his ideas, fortunate for him that philosophy is full of charlatans.
>also, i guess that makes it ironic that one of the biggest promoters of girard in the united states, peter thiel, is a gay man.
And that is relevant why?

Oh, and I see Landanon is posting his substanceless word-salad blogposts as per usual.

>ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7581447
ok first of all there was controversy around the study linking xq28 to homosexuality, but moreover, do you suppose genes determine if gay man is more attracted to leather bears, or fairy twinks? do you think there is a gene for people who like to get into tight latex suits and get their ass hammered by giant dildos? so you think there might be problems with finding genes for a social construct like "gay identity"? now as a "scientific leftists" i'm sure you'll be quick to say race doesn't exist, but you are sure homosexuality does exist biologically, you feel no contradiction in this?

I can't tell if you're baiting or not, but I do know that there's at least one user who frequents Veeky Forums who has told me that he enjoys the pleasure of shitposting in philosophy threads about books he has not read. I have responded to this user at length in the past and found out later on that they were trolling for shits & giggles. I have feeling that this thread will look like a juicy & delicious target for a good ol' fashioned memeing.

The fact is I honestly didn't care, because I like talking about this stuff. So for what it's worth, calling philosophers charlatans is a tell for me now.

I'm not saying you're that guy. All I'm saying is that when there's so much that anons are prepared to give away for free it's actually counter-productive to try and bait it out of them by being a retard about it. More flies with honey than with vinegar and all that.

>do you suppose genes determine if gay man is more attracted to leather bears, or fairy twinks?
Irrelevant. If first-order desire is not memetic, Girard's theory falls apart no matter thr nature of second-order desire (and notice that I do not claim that *no* desire is memetic, merely that memetics cannot explain most or even all desire). Anyone who takes Girard seriously has the critical thinking skills of a lobotomised chimp.
>now as a "scientific leftists" i'm sure you'll be quick to say race doesn't exist
Irrelevant (even if I were). The obsession with race in a completely unrelated context is amusing though.

>Veeky Forums achievement unlocked: Got a Bad Reputation Round Here

Veeky Forums achievements when?

Anyways I'm not Land-user, dammit! I mean, I know that's what you call me, but Nick Land is not the philosopher I plan to be attached to forever. My boy is Girard, and the same six guys I always talk about.

>I tried...I tried to explain Nick Land's ridiculous philosophy...oh god how I failed...oh the shame...do you...do you want me to try again? I don't want to try again...don't make me go back in Nick Land's head...it's so c-c-cold in there...

Anyways, my posts are long af, no doubt. But substanceless? Nah. Rambling, but not substanceless, There is substance and I ramble around it. And not so much word salad as a

>continental breakfast

>inb4 kys, etc

Not an argument. If your defence of subscribing to a patently incorrect philosophical theory is "some guy once told me he was a troll!" then I feel sorry for you.

Ah, sorry user, I don't want to be mean. I'm sure you're a nice bloke IRL. It's just that can't stand airy philosophising is all.

It's not patently incorrect, and it's not my defense either. Mimetics lines up pretty nicely with a whole lot of other theory. It's not airtight. What is?

Here's the thing that makes me suspicious. You're the guy who came in here, guns blazing. This is an argument? What is there to argue about? You dislike continentals, I don't. Calling them charlatan or saying their work is patently incorrect doesn't convince me. And I'm not interested in trying to prove it to you under a constant suspicion. I could give a fuck about arguments. If you're not interested in the findings, that's fine.

Not An Argument is a Molyneux tactic. Except what he fails to understand is that *not everything has to be an argument.* Like this, for instance. Because busting in and saying This Guy Sucks is *also* not an argument. It's not even a claim. It's just silliness.

Argument doesn't settle very much. Understanding is better. You know who had a pretty good understanding of that? A guy named Rene Girard.

All good kind sir. I hate it too. And I am sincerely working on trying to get my own shit down to scale so that a relatively simple question doesn't require a 4-post monstrosity to answer. Economy and precision are always good looks and I genuinely hate to feel like I'm shitting the whole place up. It's the curse of continental thought: clouds of nonsense.

Someday we can finish that conversation. I'm disappointed I couldn't give you a better explanation!

>Mimetics lines up pretty nicely with a whole lot of other theory.
No, it doesn't. Not sociological, not anthropological, not evolutionary theory. No-one in any of those fields supports Girard. That's my entire point.
>It's not airtight. What is?
Nothing in the realm of philosophy. Which is why the discipline is a dead end.
>What is there to argue about?
My criticism of his assertion that all desire is memetic, which I have provided evidence against. Don't be disingenuous.

dude, but your only evidence it was that "conflict comes from fighting over resources" ok but do you suppose diamonds or oil are genetically determined desires?

Like, imagine if an engineer defended his plan for building a bridge by saying "sure it's not 100% accurate, in fact it might collapse at any moment. But what *is* accurate in this world of ours?".

what if the engineer said "well newtonian mechanics don't hold at the subatomic level, so we shouldn't build bridges because the theoretical framework we have isn't 100% accurate"

but girard isn't building anything, he's not a marxist, he's not telling anyone how to live or organize their community

No, my evidence was the genetic basis of homosexual desire, unexplainable by memetics.

it's more explainable by memetics than genetics brah, your chromosone study has a lot of holes, i guess you could say it's not "100% accurate"

I have more to say about this, but I thought I might try something different first.

I'm glad you've raised this, because it's completely indicative of why Girard matters and why I read him. We have now created a situation of mimetic rivalry: the object is Girard's reputation, which neither of us can share. You want to undermine it; I want to defend it against your attack. We may be approaching a zero-sum situation, because this would seem to be a thing we obviously cannot both share. I don't really want to shrug and say, meh, whatever, and you want to feel convinced that Girard is not worth discussing and that philosophy itself is a dead end. Or any number of other things.

I feel that I should make this plain. Because this is my issue with debates in general: their zero-sum nature. When the stakes become high enough, neither side can afford to give any ground. On the internet, in this thread, we can now go back and forth, but in a certain sense we are obligated not to let the other person have anything. We are invested in this, and maybe even we feel that this thing is being watched. Maybe it is. Maybe it isn't. This is precisely the kind of situation that leads to mimetic back-and-forth shitposting over the final word and which of us can get to say how little he cares for the other's opinion or stick to his own guns. Veeky Forums has thousands upon thousands of these threads that degenerate this way.

I feel like this is worth saying. In part because unless we are prepared to find common ground somewhere, this conversation is very likely to follow exactly the sort of logic that Girard talks about it: if we are both following the logic of the duel, then in the end *neither* of us wins. We both feel disappointed.

Now, granted, maybe you will take this as a confirmation that you were right the whole time: I can't really know for certain. But I am certain that I will feel disappointed because I feel the same way. Because it's my problem with debate: it's like a conversation with loaded weapons. I learn very little from debate because I have to be aware of not saying anything that you might use as an exploit against me. And the whole time - the whole fucking time - I will be wondering this question:

Wouldn't it be great if I could learn something from this person instead of trying to prove to them what I already know to be certain?

There's literally a think tank for world peace based on Girard's theories ravenfoundation.org

a think tank dedicated to world peace? damn what a bunch of assholes! will these continental pricks ever fuck off!

I don't see the utility of applying this model of "memetic rivalry" to our conversation. Debates in general need to be zero-sum in some sense because discarding incorrect beliefs in favour of correct ones is how we arrive at the truth. I don't assume all opinions are equally valid and therefore the guy who insists 1+1=2 locked in a "memetic rivalry" could resolve the conflict by learning something from the guy who says it's 3.

If you believe scientific studies, what we know about the human genome etc. is no more accurate than a literary theory, then fair enough. There's no abstract argument to be made against epistemological nihilism.

>If you believe scientific studies, what we know about the human genome etc. is no more accurate than a literary theory, then fair enough. There's no abstract argument to be made against epistemological nihilism.

well i'm not sure if any of girards shit really explains homosexuality, so i'm not arguing that he does or doesn't, but i am extremely skeptical of these attempts to find a gene to explain why some guys like to suck dick in public bathrooms instead of fuck their wife or whatever, doesn't seem any better than trying to find out if there is a certain skull shape that determines if someone will be a bank robber

>how we arrive at the truth
>believing in "truth"

and that's where u fucked up, now i see why u are so retarded

If you don't believe in truth, then wire me 100 dollars. Since, as you say, truth doesn't exist, then you have no reason to believe you will be worse off by doing so.
Oh, you don't want to? Then your actions show that you do believe in some form of truth after all :^)

>Debates in general need to be zero-sum in some sense because discarding incorrect beliefs in favour of correct ones is how we arrive at the truth.

Okay. In part I might agree. Except that even though you may feel that you are saying 1 and 1 equals 2, I am obviously not going to accept that therefore I am saying that 1 and 1 equals 3. The whole chain of philosophers that I invoke from Nietzsche until today are a nightmare for positivists. It's why there is an analytic/continental schism in philosophy itself. The brain itself is capable of infinite wonders. There are histories of philosophy that don't even include Nietzsche.

I do not believe that debates need to be zero-sum precisely because what you are calling the discarding of incorrect beliefs in favor of correct ones simply does skew with my understanding of humanity, history, culture, all of it. And that's not an unreasonable proposition. There is a thing called logic but humans are logical beings through and through. They are also weird amorous meatbags with crazy dreams and mortgages. And those dreams and mortgages are also a part of the world you and I live in.

I would also like to say that I am the very last person who is going to champion difference for the sake of difference. I think it is absolutely necessary that people find common ground on things. Forget about Derrida. Even *Wittgenstein* is going to say that language and logic are tricky propositions. I am not going to invoke Saul Kripke, John Searle, JL Austin, or any of those guys. I am not mathematician or a symbolic logic guy. I like history, aesthetics, psychology, morality, ethics, and other stuff. But the terrain is pretty murky down there. Nobody really is going to argue that Nietzsche, Marx and Freud didn't discover *something.* And we now live in a very fucked-up world which is driven by desire, violence, conflict, rivalry, and scarcity. You could even say that it's because of those theories, to some degree.

I would very much like to get past a lot of that stuff. I *do* think technology is the deal going forward. Computers mos def. Maybe even the planetary blockchain. But economic theories are also theories of human action and behaviour, and for that we are required to go to the psychologists who cannot take a hard-line positivist view. We will put our meat bodies in precision-engineered cars, but we will race down the Autobahn at top gear because it makes us feel really good. The gauge shows the speed but it doesn't show what's going inside the mind of the driver.

Thanks for the brilliant thread, Veeky Forums. I gathered a lot of algae in my nets and dried this will sustain me for ages, assuming I don't sell it all at the market.

Trolls ITT are only proving Girardbro's point. They want to control the thread, they compete for attention on a senegalese sarong-making BBS.

Also, after reading all this about Girard, I'm guessing Susan Blackmore's Meme Machine is basically plagiarism?

Also, also: Girardbro, I've been studying Jung (and Campbell, esp in Masks of God) for years. I highly recommend you look into his work soon. The human unconscious is a fascinating place, some sort of working insight in the conscious side of the human house is no doubt invaluable, if perhaps slightly too limiting in its presumptions. Thanks for taking the time m8.

Ah, you're so right about that. I love Joe Campbell, been meaning to read MoG for years now. The Bill Moyers documentary is pure wonderfulness. I really do have no excuses whatsoever for reading Jung.

Not really familiar with Susan Blackmore, but I mean, all this stuff is connected. I read Dawkins back in the day but he doesn't have a huge suite in the hotel in my head where these guys live. What I like about Girard is that he suggests a way of bridging some gaps that I think are ready to get bridged. Mimetics can and doubtless will be looked at in a biological sense, but possibly even in a computer learning sense (and certainly in the world of video games, social apps, the intraweebz and so on).

But Girard is basically the continental philosopher I have been waiting my whole life for, because he's just so fucking explicit about it: imitation/desire/violence/etc. It's not that he himself has to go bananas proving this like Zizek. He just nailed something humongous and I think over time he's just slowly going to be proven right. Not him himself, I mean. Just that it's going to be a *mimetic world* and it's cool that we have a continental guy (and a theologian!) who is maybe going to be there with science and computer tech...and if that shit doesn't give you a little shiver down your spine to think about, I don't know what will. I don't know if it's plagiarism. Maybe it's just big - really fucking big - pieces connecting up in interesting ways.

And buddy I love this philosophy shit *to death.* No need to thank me at all. I'm happy there's something in it for anons. I'd be doing this on the inside of a bathroom stall at Starbucks (and, honestly, you can't really know for certain that that's not where I am right now).

typo supremo: for *not* reading Jung

Actually, thinking about it now many of Jung's students intersect with Girard in rather surprising ways: Mircea Eliade's myth of eternal return is a primitive understanding of the recursive nature of violence, like an international currency made accessible by rites and symbols of initiation. Coming of age is passage into the arena, each generation a potential sacrifice. Edinger's archetypes of the apocalypse show man has always known and anticipated his fate. There's a lesson in understanding man's predisposition for myth, I think. Some property of self-interest that may be exploited to benefit the species rather than the individual or tribe and guide us into transhumanism.

Berreby's Us & Them is another you may enjoy. It's a layman journalist's study of human tribalism and how we tend to classify each other. It's a less generalized view of Other, I guess.

>Coming of age is passage into the arena, each generation a potential sacrifice.
Heavy stuff. But true, I think. Very very true. Unsettling, but...that's it. We need some hard realism in philosophy. Not utopianism.

Remember Freud's original vision for psychoanalysis, that he wanted it to be this complete field for looking into the human unconscious. This went through growth phases of its own, but then Zizek came along and learned a wicked Lacanian death-grip technique and memed it right back back into public consciousness. And he's too consistent to be ignored. Z is wonderful. That original vision, though, might be soon worth taking another look at it. It's audacious af to think, but...why not? The pieces I think fit more than they don't fit. It just has to be detached from Marxism and reattached to wide-scale psycho-anthropology.

The issue I think is also the legacy of Marx's disdain for religion and preference for revolution. Now it seems way more interesting to turn that skepticism back on Marx himself and take a second look at the tombs again. Not to worship but understand. They don't even need to be the Deep Dark Scary Things of brutality and repression that we inherited not so much from Freud but I think from uncharitable commentators and observers. Or from faux-Nietzschean tryhards and existentialist stragglers.

Sloterdijk in his way has done some amazing stuff in producing a much more civilizationally user-friendly version of Nietzsche. I'm not saying I want to defang the Neetch completely. Not at all. Even if that were possible (it isn't) it would be a terrible idea. Sloterdijk's anthropotechnics is really I think just a kind of super-intensitive *practice regimen*, which is why I like to talk about him also. Because maybe it's violence that *founds* culture, but it's *practice* that sustains them. And even Sloterdijk will say that *capital is only an accelerator of cultural practices.* Think about that! And that is a whole other massive thread.

What I think *would* be a good look is a sort of re-investigation of the kinds of things Girard explains: namely, violence and its role in culture. This can involve myth and religion, but it has to be done in a much more interesting, and charitable, way. We don't have to be in love with religion. But all roads meet at the bottom, in "the unconscious" - Girard, Nietzsche, Eliade, Guenon, Freud, Jung...*all* this stuff. So once we have a sense of *that* under control, maybe, we can get the rest of the Jungian house in order.

We shouldn't be afraid of the dark or worship it. But we also shouldn't go in there with a five-dollar flashlight and call it the opiate of the masses either. Not when the opiate of the masses today is so often zombie-Marx himself.

It's why I like the redpill stuff too. Some of it. We live in astonishingly interesting, and utterly fucking terrifying, times. Capital liberated doesn't always stay liberating...

>also, julia louis-dreyfus. good god a'mighty

I ran out of room in that last post, but I didn't miss your reference to transhumanism either. That's coming too, for sure.

I guess my hope is just that we don't get so absorbed in capitalism that we destroy the civilization we all depend on. Even Nietzsche asks for Good Europeans, and as much as he likes Napoleon and Cesare Borgia he reserves the highest praise for *Goethe.* And Goethe is a good look for any civilization to produce. Good Earthlings would be even better, as corny as that sounds.

>Do not hurry; do not rest.

I mean, that's a lovely line there. How can you argue with that? Goethe is like the Oracle in the Matrix. With the cookies.

Class division, for instance, is likely to be scary. But I liked what Ernst Bloch said, that capital runs on failed dreams. And Z has pointed this out too: ideology is all based on fetishization, cathexis, and so on. Consumer desire is not enough to fill in the massively larger psychological needs human beings have. Peterson bursts into tears now whenever he has to talk about it. Campbell knew it. I suspect Jung did too. Many, many others.

We know that we can't sledgehammer cultures and civilizations into place ideologically. We also are coming to know enough about the dark places within not to feel the need to drag everything out in the name of authenticity. When we do that it looks like the face-melting scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark: that's what happens when you look behind the Lacanian veil.

youtube.com/watch?v=n2ZpsbGr7s8

There are things we just aren't meant to look directly at - unless you are Judge Holden - but it doesn't mean we can't understand them. But that's why my feeling is that things have to be done collectively, so that we can get into that cool transhuman future. Consumer capitalism does part of it by constantly mobilizing our desires and drives. But it cannot and never will do anything but kind of charm and seduce us. For the bigger questions, we have to look back at the past and the tombs.

On an even more utopian note once we have cleared up some of those mysteries of the unconscious we can focus on learning to live with AI too, the same way we live with cars (or the based Cybernetic Consciousness in SMAC). That's a comin'. We'll do it for Nick Land. Lord knows he's suffered enough eating amphetamines and squeezing his head into a wireless router and zapping his testicles with a defibrillator. All he wants is to become Wintermute. Or maybe just William Gibson's word processor.

No doubt that mimetics is a valuable tool to helping us understand ourselves. What is the transmission of cultural myth but applied mimetics. What is history but the past we've written for our children?

Postmodern heads like Baudrillard are great at examining and summarizing reality as an economy. The hyperreal is a counterfiet, fiat currency. Insightful, but is there a humane solution? Apocalypse is an inevitability, but no sane person of the first world wants to participate.

Part of why I'm on Veeky Forums is for threads like this one. It may be twee or precious, but I don't want humanity to end. As the demon Edward Munny said, deserve's got nothing to do with it. I want to create a fiction with broad appeal that will reprogram its audience. Presently there is no such thing as "good government." The will to power in the United States (my nation) is not held in a person but an amalgam of self-interest, protected by the inertia of committee state and private. There is no one driving the bus, but most of the participants in this democratic experiment are too enthralled in bread and circus to notice. The future is not bright.

>Do not hurry; do not rest.

Precisely. We need time to digest. Every generation has only so many ways to experience the same works. I'm reminded of Borges' story of Pierre Menard, where the Quixote is recreated -- or rather created anew -- in a different century. The 20th century has been a marathon sprint. I am 35 years old. When I was born, the US population was 2/3 the size it is now and the mass communication of choice was passive and monolithic. Now each of us a molecular being participates in what we choose to label the real, like a rolling boil.

There's nothing wrong with desiring a utopia, or even a boring (but reasonable) compromise that can somehow rein in capital and make it a tool of man again. Perhaps by overloading its meaning, or smashing some political economies.

Also yes JLD is the Platonic ideal of woman.

>But I liked what Ernst Bloch said, that capital runs on failed dreams. And Z has pointed this out too: ideology is all based on fetishization, cathexis, and so on.

Fuggg I can't wait til my copy of Deceit Desire and the Novel gets here. Will be my first dip into Girard. This mechanism seems perfectly ripe for hijacking. All of 21st century life in America is a failed dream. Witness the wagecuck, the reality tv, the 87 genders, the Fight Club redpill guys desperately trying to save masculinity. We are a generation in need of definition. Without a proper outlet for our inborn motive to faith (the will to believe Wm James spoke of), a new spiritual awakening that says stupidly but authoritatively "you don't really have to believe any of that faerie shit we've got science now," and a peer culture that is stronger than ever we've shit the bed as a generation. We are defined by our fetishes and totems. You want to talk about the hyperreal? How about the facebook everyone logs into 10 times a day. Fuck I'm going to have an aneurysm.

You nailed it. Completely. I feel exactly the same way.

Anyways, DDR is absolutely great. I was copy-pasting so many sections out of that book that I was basically making a replica of the original on my computer. The best thing I can say about it is that *that is how literature is supposed to be taught,* full stop period. Girard is a great reader of great books but *not* a deconstructionist. He goes for radical sincerity and big-picture stuff, not criticism and what did he meme by this. I could talk about the victory of criticism over art forever, how critical theory basically prevented people from reading great literature in a way that was neither critical nor naive, but maybe that had to happen, culturally.

But everybody knows this now. You know. I know. We all do.

That mode of criticism was a good look in 20C. It served its purpose but it is dead as a doornail now and I think people should start get their faces completely rocked off by great literature again in a totally unironic sense. That's just a good look all around. So based on that post user I think you're going to enjoy the book when it arrives.

>Apocalypse is an inevitability, but no sane person of the first world wants to participate.
Yup. And yet we all do. Without meaning to. But because it's a perpetual crisis machine that seems to be horribly running itself, and things are only going to get increasingly on-rails from here, I think. Maybe not. But probably.

I agree with pretty much everything you've said in that post. In part I wonder if it's not in the end a choice between the utopian social project and a kind of *renunciation* of that project as something that can be ideologically formed. The shift from Marx to the stuff we're talking about - it's the red pill, for lack of a better word. I don't know how favourably Girard would have been about the red pill, because I think he would have said that if in the end it produces mimetic rivalry then it's no different from what it is rebelling against.

Despair is just not as awesome as it used to be. Everybody's got a reason to go full retard with meme ideologies, terrorism, cynicism, whatever. But it's a better look to understand that violence and desire are a part of the human condition in ways that are so massive we can barely see them anymore. And yet - isn't that how paradigm shifts and liminal moments always work?

Cynicism and irony, I would say, are just late-late stage romanticism, and romanticism does not work for Girard. You can't be romantic about the apocalypse. You can be Nietzschean, for sure, but for myself I think that Catholicism is really starting to look pretty good again.

Pic related is also outstanding for anyone who wants to get off the irony rollercoaster.

>JLD is the Platonic ideal of woman
>can't disagree with this either

*DDN, wtf is wrong with me

>even Sloterdijk will say that *capital is only an accelerator of cultural practices.*
>Bloch: capital runs on failed dreams

A to B to C: culture-as-we-know-it requires individual human failure. Failure in this sense desu is an extension of the laws of thermodynamics: dog eat dog, amoeba eat amoeba, guy gets girl, second banana gets cucked. Such is life on earth. Not everyone can be a winner.

How do we make failed dreams valuable? What narrative, whose perspective, could add value to that universal experience? Why is a failed dream shameful? This ties in to what you were saying earlier about Girard's analysis of desire and competition. There is a third party.

I don't mean accepting failure in the ironic sense of Kevin Smith movies. That's total acceptance. Nor the solipsism of Palanhiuk, which as a self-deception has no value if not part of a consensus.

How to transmute the failures of a human who doesn't know they are in search of personal redemption? Who needs a new understanding, a new call to action. I think religion is-was-has been an attempt. It's just been sorely misused by the aggregate in a largely pre-literate world. Maybe a new technology eat our sin for us.