The problem isn't capitalism. It's not Marxism either. It's a lack of refinement. We're acting like primitives and we have no sense of the aesthetic. We thirst for capital and accumulation because we don't know what we want and we don't know what to do with what we want once we have it. We just Want Shit. So we acquire capital in order to Someday have everything we want, to have it all heaped up around us in barbaric splendour and maybe take a nap on it like a cat. And be all cozy again.
Desiring the beautiful is painful and coziness leads to complacency and death. Heidegger is right. To think is to care. So is Nietzsche: life/aesthetically justified/ok. Want to improve civilization? Maybe learn about aesthetics. The fact is we're just fucking crude and unsophisticated.
but what if to live aesthetically we need to have money and pay for stuff?
Perhaps in your dia logos you should've taken in account the difference of enjoying aesthetics and owning aesthetically pleasing things.
Try again.
Ian Clark
Been meaning to read this for a while. I-Is this a new printing? If so, fuck yes.
Isaac Long
Of course we need money. The difference between enjoying aesthetics and owning aesthetically pleasing things isn't where the conversation is supposed to end, it's where it's supposed to begin. How beautiful consumer goods become disenchanted once we own them (or re-enchanted, perhaps, once we put them on display - in our homes, on social media, wherever).
I'm right there with envy and desire and mimesis. Psychologically I think that makes the consumer society run - and where consumption goes, much else follows.
But rather than respond in a mimetic way, how about this: talk about the difference between enjoying aesthetics and owning aesthetically pleasing objects, user.
Kevin Green
It's pretty interesting so far. PDF available here.
>And so, thanks to sadist intuition, there appeared in the realm of emotionality what was to become the principle of our modern economy in its industrial form: the principle of excessive production, requiring excessive consumption – produce destructible objects, and accustom consumers to not even knowing what a durable object is. Using a particular method to manufacture and produce objects in series, then, here corresponds to the quality of an act inflicted indifferently on a quantity of victims. Conversely, experimenting with various methods of manufacturing in order to impose a given quality on a product which is the same as the others so as to increase its character of rareness corresponds to a diversity of acts inflicted on the same victim, to take possession of whatever it is about them that is rare or makes them unique in their own way. The absurdity of an analogy like this shows the reversal that instinctive forces undergo in the realm of the economic expression of needs and of the manufactured objects corresponding to them. The relationship between emotion, provided either by the act or by the living object, and production proper, remains perfectly imperceptible owing to these being two spheres of human behavior that appear so incompatible in light of the conditions that determine said behavior. The reason for this is that in the economic order, labor capacity is precisely contrary to emotional life in general, and to the voluptuous emotion in particular. How can an act expressing an emotion be considered equivalent to effort exercised on living or inanimate material? Though said act is expressed through a group of gestures forming a deliberate activity, it is only ever just a staging of said emotion. What more likely comparison for the usage of manufactured objects besides the kind of horrible treatment people inflict on living beings?
People blame capitalism when the fact is that it is their own lack of imagination which is the real culprit. The crudity of the desire to own the same thing as everyone else. And the power of technology to grant this insatiable wish.
The McNugget itself McNuggetizes.
Daniel Ramirez
OP! I wait this thread one year or more, i had tried to make another Pierre Klossowski thread but nearly nobody respond and it drowned. It's would be great if we will have interesting discussion here, i will hope it be here now.
Mason Rivera
Me too user, me too. I've read a fair bit of continental philosophy, especially Baudrillard, and Klossowski was an influence on him and many others. But I hadn't actually read any of his work until now. I can see how much Klossowski's thought was a part of Baudrillard's work. I hope/think/desire that this will be of interest to Veeky Forums in many ways, but you can't force these things.
What was your previous thread about? What aspects of his thought did you want to bring up?
Jaxson Robinson
Can anyone give me a quick rundown on Klossowski, Nietzsche and conspiracy?
Jack White
Maybe this:
>For Klossowski, Nietzsche was a thinker of the near and distant future, a future he says which has now become our everyday reality. However, everything depends on knowing how we ought to read Nietzsche. Klossowski is ingenious in his response. He argues throughout the book that Nietzsche’s key thought-experiments are simulations and simulacra and that his thought unfolds in terms of the simulation of a ‘conspiracy’.
>The Nietzschean conspiracy is not, of course, that of a class but of an isolated individual ‘who uses the means of this class not only against his own class, but also against the existing forms of the human species as a whole’ (p. xv). The second key component of the reading is the claim that Nietzsche’s thought revolves around delirium as its axis and, furthermore, that it is incredibly lucid on this issue (Klossowski’s unfolding of the drama of Nietzsche’s last days in Turin in his final chapter makes for some truly chilling and remarkable reading since it demonstrates in a way that is both convincing and unnerving that there was something completely lucid about Nietzsche’s descent into muteness and madness).
>Klossowski insists that, conceived in terms of a project of delirium, Nietzsche’s thought cannot simply be labelled ‘pathological’. It is far too knowing about itself for this: ‘his thought was lucid to the extreme, it took on the appearance of a delirious interpretation – and also required the entire experimental initiative of the modern world’ (p. xvi).
>According to Klossowski, Nietzsche interrogates the nature and conditions of thinking and of philosophy – what is the act of thinking? what is philosophy? – like no thinker before or since. As a result he ended up producing a body of work that challenges both the principle of identity (the authority of language, of the code, of the institution) and the reality principle (consciousness, the subject, the ego, substance, etc.). His new demonstration – ‘required by institutional language for the teaching of reality’ – takes the form of the movements of a ‘declarative mood’. Ultimately this contagious mood, or what Klossowski calls the ‘tonality of the soul’ , supplants the demonstration and both thought and life become ‘mute’. The limits of the principles of identity and reality are inevitably and inexorably reached.
Nietzsche is never a bad look and Klossowski is fucking awesome.
>>The Nietzschean conspiracy is not, of course, that of a class but of an isolated individual ‘who uses the means of this class not only against his own class, but also against the existing forms of the human species as a whole’ (p. xv).
so this is just the ubermensch creating values?
Lucas Cooper
Yes, although there's a lot in that 'just.' Namely, that those values are required to be (or become) ultimately beautiful - no?
Hunter Phillips
Good essays on Klossowski and other subjects here.
Capitalism is still partially to blame, but it's a relationship between capitalism, historical coincidence, ideology and material circumstances. Bourgeois values stood in contradiction to the pre-enlightenment values because the basis of the bourgeois class was free ownership of property.
Cultures have had "imagination" for other things than the bourgeois materialism we see now, the reason it is so prominent is because they are the rational values of the capitalist ruling class that were hashed out centuries ago. They are the values that perpetuate their class, and their class is inextricable from capitalism, which is a system that also reproduces their class power.
Capitalism can still have people with other values, but it is an uphill battle. You are pulled in the direction of wanting to see legal changes to the system, because it will often struggle with you. Either that or behaving in a very unorthodox way, like being a homeless literary type, or something that would defeat capitalism as it is currently ordered if many other people behaved in the manner you do.
Aaron Thomas
I think this is what I like about Klossowski and maybe I'm starting to understand his thinking behind the Nietzschean 'conspiracy.' Art - aesthetics - allows you to be just *slightly* more 'creative' (or insane) than the reproductive forces of capital can keep up with. Just slightly.
Revolution and politics are one way, art is another. Maybe the best thing to do is to leave the class society and its consumerist fantasies alone. Create something beautiful and free rather than the truth or martyrdom. Postmodernism folds everything in together and makes it accessible, puts everything on display.
>money – the circulation of money – is the means for rendering the debt infinite. [...] The infinite creditor and infinite credit have replaced the blocks of mobile and finite debts. There is always a mon- otheism on the horizon of despotism: the debt becomes a debt of existence, a debt of the existence of the subjects themselves
Capital is an illusion but the debt, the presence of the debt-as-obligation is real. Fucking hell theory is dope sometimes.
Justin James
>we have no sense of the higher, refined aesthetics, so instead we fight over the raw material things.
Bruh, do u understand the topology of base/superstructure?
Luis Long
You're welcome to elaborate user. If it's going to contribute to the conversation then bring that shit out and talk about it.
Yours truly is feeling righteously and wickedly Klossowskified today, which means boilerplate Marxist theories of aesthetics are going to have a serious uphill battle against Joyous Difference unless they are really fucking interesting. So go on and interest us then you sexy mother.
Tyler Green
where do I even start to begin comprehending this stuff? I'm reading Kant right now but going through his entire corpus seems to inefficient to get to these guys
Jordan Sullivan
I'm going to take a peek at Klossowski, but that particular quote strikes me as giving too much credit to how much any one person can actually decide things for themselves, whereas nihil-capitalist philosophers are also in the wrong when they say the individual has nothing to say about his own consumerism. Things are not that simple, right? What has to be done is to build a model where the collective capital c "Capital" feeds input into people and in contrast receive a feedback from each of them, being in turn modified and returning that signal as more input to the masses. Nature vs nurture has since long ceased to be an exclusive "either/or" situation.
So, we do not engage in consumerism only because of lack of imagination or a hunger for primitive association by dissemination as per , but also as a matter of efficiency, not because it is efficient to us but because it's the most efficient way for the Capital to propagate itself.
We could feed it a different thing in principle, and we do actually, as most revolutionary/art movements of today, even and specially the ones supposed to go "against the flow" of the Capital, serve only to increase the spectrum of choice of markets which the Capital uses to feed its hunger for data/wealth. Try doing a single authentic thing today and watch it becoming a packageable product tomorrow, try writing a single fringe "will surely be prohibited" book and watch it become a cult hit tomorrow, etc.
The system might be caused by the people, but it has long surpassed the capacity of any one person and basically has its own motives and predispositions, much like conscience trumps its will and motivations (sometimes even self destructive) over the individual neurons and veins which constitute its totality.
Eli Lee
Putting on Wise Pseud Fuckface Guy Who Knows Hat: take your time. And remember that nobody on Veeky Forums really knows anything.
That said: besides Klossowski, Nietzsche, Baudrillard, Deleuze & Guattari, Lacan, Foucault, Heidegger, Derrida, Girard...they're all worth looking into. Nietzsche is the main guy.
Basically all those guys Jordan Peterson warns you to stay away from. This is coming from a guy who likes and admires Peterson, btw. But I'm basically interested in this stuff because I want to turn my internal Neomarxist ideologue into an artist rather than a guy with Great Ideas for social reform.
For what it's worth. Hopefully some other anons can give you better advice.
Hunter Gomez
I'm OP. Worth mentioning that that "quote" is from me and not Klossowski and I know nothing.
>The system might be caused by the people, but it has long surpassed the capacity of any one person and basically has its own motives and predispositions, much like conscience trumps its will and motivations (sometimes even self destructive) over the individual neurons and veins which constitute its totality. Yes. This. It makes me think that one of the things that happen to continental philosophers is this fork in the road where they start to realize that The People - as bourgeois or as proletariat - cannot be "saved" by macro-tinkering with the system. Heidegger has his "turn," Baudrillard switches into proto-reactionary mode, Land disappears into the wormhole. Capital does strange things to inquisitive minds. There are "dark" readings of Deleuze but I prefer the hopeful and affirmative interpretation.
Also I am beginning to acquire an intense dislike Nick Land's pessimism, although winding up in Land-land does seem to be the inevitable result of declining either the Klossowski road (art! difference!) or the Zizek road (communism!). Land/NRx thought is to me the construction of the castle of failed dreams disguised as emancipation, despair-as-liberation. But it's not like Land isn't vastly smarter than me and knows all of this very well himself. Anyways.
>So, we do not engage in consumerism only because of lack of imagination or a hunger for primitive association by dissemination as per , but also as a matter of efficiency, not because it is efficient to us but because it's the most efficient way for the Capital to propagate itself. Good shit user. We're unconsciously becoming the Borg via consumption, wired for pleasure and efficiency. To my mind this is because we are content to have our fantasies supplied by the commodity. And who wouldn't be? The ads are awesome and the chicken tastes great.
>The system might be caused by the people, but it has long surpassed the capacity of any one person and basically has its own motives and predispositions, much like conscience trumps its will and motivations (sometimes even self destructive) over the individual neurons and veins which constitute its totality. It becomes alive. But we feed it. I think it was Ernst Bloch who said that capital runs on *failed* dreams. It makes sense. Amazon has everything. We suffocate under abundance. The problem is that everything is so fucking great, so why change anything? Life in the Crystal Palace s wonderful...
>What has to be done is to build a model where the collective capital c "Capital" feeds input into people and in contrast receive a feedback from each of them, being in turn modified and returning that signal as more input to the masses. Not a crazy idea. If the masses weren't orgiastically consumptive consumer locusts crazed with simultaneously impossible and boring and repetitive desires...
>blogposts, getcha blogposts heah
Blake Wood
Everything is great, but it's not. Capital takes your time and fuels itself. It gives you material goods, but it's a very materialist system. It just suffocates so many other aesthetic, spiritual or intellectual ways of life. In some ways it accommodates everything, but it also perverts whatever it repurposes for its needs and leaves its mark.
There is a pretty natural desire to struggle with it if you aren't convinced by what it is trying to sell you as the good life. But individual struggle is totally impotent, and so many people are either quietly struggling, passively accepting or even fighting on behalf of bourgeois values, and whatever benefits capital.
It's also terrible that these kinds of observations feel so futile and masturbatory. We've been talking about this and criticizing it for over a century now from various angles. But still it persists.
Cooper Rogers
so this is the power of idealism...
Luke Taylor
>Everything is great, but it's not. Capital takes your time and fuels itself. It gives you material goods, but it's a very materialist system. It just suffocates so many other aesthetic, spiritual or intellectual ways of life. In some ways it accommodates everything, but it also perverts whatever it repurposes for its needs and leaves its mark. Yep.
>It's also terrible that these kinds of observations feel so futile and masturbatory. We've been talking about this and criticizing it for over a century now from various angles. But still it persists. True. If theory is masturbation, then art is produced by NoFap. Which is why I'm interested in talking about Klossowski and art and so on rather than polemic or revolution.
>But individual struggle is totally impotent Meh, I disagree. I actually think the problem is that we know that potency exists but we just don't know what to do with it. And it doesn't go away, desire/will/&c doesn't go away even if we want it to. We're stuck with it and it makes us feel sick.
>how do you kill that which has no life
Hence anxiety, guilt, grief and so on. If people really believed everything was pointless they wouldn't be miserable, have nervous tics, be awkward at social gathers, etc. It's because we know struggle is *not* futile or impotent that we wind up reading continental theory in the first place.
So I'm shitposting on Veeky Forums instead of, I don't know, painting a picture or riding a bicycle or falling in love, that's true. But I always find the conversation rich and frequently thought-provoking. I am a big fan of Veeky Forums.
