“War is thus divine in itself, since it is a law of the world...

baudrillard: the gulf war did not take place
hegel: pretty sure the napoleonic ones did tho
de maistre: smdh
clauswitz: rules are rules
girard: i keep telling you fuckers
sun tzu: no scapegoats here tho, MoH ftw
holden: frankly i see no problem with this. how about you ernst
junger: you're missing the point holden
bonaparte: can't hear you over the sound of my mimetic gloriousness. check these golden eagles tryhards
chorus: looks good desu what happens if you lose tho
bonaparte: i don't lose, i win
chorus: russia tho
bonaparte: no worries senpai i got this

> those trips

Replace war with violence and then top it off with Rene Girard and yes.

Girard beautifully completes Hegel, Schmitt, Clausewitz, de Maistre.

>when you dive into the particularity of it you find it is just as blind and absurd as any human activity.

As Rene Girard would say, "da scapego is eenocent"

>tfw the girard meme grows stronger

bump.

>no more, butchie. no more of this.

Pretty much, as Maistre was correct about most things.

>cosa nostra girardi
"Our Thing Hidden Since the Foundation of the World."

>"In the whole vast dome of living nature there reigns an open violence. A kind of prescriptive fury which arms all the creatures to their common doom: as soon as you leave the inanimate kingdom you find the decree of violent death inscribed on the very frontiers of life. You feel it already in the vegetable kingdom: from the great catalpa to the humblest herb, how many plants die and how many are killed; but, from the moment you enter the animal kingdom, this law is suddenly in the most dreadful evidence. A Power, a violence, at once hidden and palpable... has in each species appointed a certain number of animals to devour the others... And who [in this general carnage] exterminates him who will exterminate all others? Himself. It is man who is charged with the slaughter of man... The whole earth, perpetually steeped in blood, is nothing but a vast altar upon which all that is living must be sacrificed without end, without measure, without pause, until the consummation of things, until evil is extinct, until the death of death."

Joseph de Maistre was hardcore.

>just as blind and absurd as any human activity.
ok please stop no offense

>it s another beta man uses his imagination to try to rationalize his existence and his clinging to his fantasy of a better society episode

very original

Super-hardcore. He knew the deal. Joe D is fucking based. I'm going to make a second 3x3 chart at some point of reactionary theologians and statesmen and other guys and he's going in there.

It's why Empire and so on is worth thinking about. Empire is a thing, it fights wars for self-preservation and to go on being Imperial. It has no other raison d'être and none is required. The rules and the justifications and the arguments all invariably come in later along with the prizes for the survivors.

Need those good and just and gentle Arthurian kings I suppose. Or the occasional Stoic emperor. Maybe a nice World Order or Culture Minds.
>or just a functioning liberal democracy that doesn't meme itself into civil war
>or some bugs on another planet that meteorize rio de janeiro and that we can fuck up conscience-free

Maybe this thread will attract that other user who was so good with talking about sovereignty, I'd be interested to hear what he thinks.

Yeah okay, but what is it good for?

Absolutely everything.

>until evil is extinct
>until the death of death

until violence in transcended and the mode of no-war is reached.

youtube.com/watch?v=jOFzTjjZcZw

Beautiful

Maistre's though is the opposite of "clinging to a fantasy of a better society", though. He is actually criticizing his contemporary philosophers who thought that possible, who thought that with "reason" and a "constitution" they could banish suffering and chaos from existence.

History proved him right.

Go away, Pinker.

>German nihilism rejects then the principles of civilisation as such in favor of war and conquest, in favor of the warlike virtues. German nihilism is therefore akin to German militarism. This compels us to raise the question what militarism is. Militarism can be identified as the view expressed by the older Moltke in these terms: "Eternal peace is a dream, and not even a beautiful one."26 To believe that eternal peace is a dream, is not militarism, but perhaps plain commonsense; it is at any rate not bound up with a particular moral taste. But to believe that eternal peace is not a beautiful dream, is tantamount to believing that war is something desirable in itself; and to believe that war is something desirable in itself, betrays a cruel, inhuman disposition. The view that war is good in itself, implies the rejection of the distinction between just and unjust wars, between wars of defence and wars of aggression. It is ulti mately irreconcilable with the very idea of a law of nations.

What's your position on this opinion?

OP here, I believe that German Militirism as described here is nihilistic and I agree with Maistre that war is divine. As long as good and evil exists war will be inevitable and necessary in order for one to prevail over the other. But to say war is good in and of itself makes God in the image of war and therefore is ultimately an evil.

People think about eternal peace in the wrong way. Its not to say that peace can be achieved for all eternity but its that peace can be found through a pure relationship with the eternal, when one has eternal life to put it in biblical terms.

So ultimately I think there will always be war but there will always be peace as well and to set either one above the other is to create a mis-communication in the dialectic between them. As we know through Hegel opposites are certainly not distinct from one another but intimately connected and so to find a true relationship between war and peace is truly divine.

That is literally the opposite of what Maistre does.

The relationship between war and peace found its synthesis with the Greeks. You had Ares, who was *the* god of war, who exemplifies war for the sake of war. And then you had Athena, for whom war was a realm to be mastered. It's no coincidence that Athena was born later than Ares (and likely added to the pantheon much later). The tension between Ares (war as divine) and Athena (for whom war was a tool) culminated in, unsurprisingly, war. Ares and Athena took opposite sides in the Trojan war. Now the interesting thing here is that because they used mortals are their proxies (instead of going to war with each other) war took the form of a game. So Ares could "lose" without being destroyed, and likewise, Athena could partake in war without being possessed by it (otherwise it would be a victory for Ares in terms of values regardless of who won or lost, because Athena would be a reflection in the likeness of Ares himself). And Athena is more celebrated by the Greeks than Ares, who is portrayed more unfavorably with the exception of the Spartans. But the important thing is that they did not deny the divinity of war personified. But they did not worship it either.

So the thing to be learned from the Greeks is that the mastery of war can only be achieved by de-escalating the stakes such that war becomes a game. In the agon the struggle is not existential, but a matter of winning or losing, with rules that both sides agree to. To worship the god of war is to feed it endless rivers of blood, to let it possess you and have war be an end in itself. On the other hand, pacifism leads to engaging in a war to end all wars (declaring holy war on Ares himself) which, as Schmitt pointed out, paradoxically leads to a war of extermination because the very stakes are eternal peace itself. If you declare war on Ares he is existentially implored to respond in kind. The key is to respect the god of war while also mastering war as a tool and you won't be destroyed by it.

In modern times, nuclear weapons stand in for Ares, because we need to believe in the divinity of "war" in its purest form once it has been seemingly rendered obsolete by a "war to end all wars". In this pure form it cannot complete strategic objectives (except extermination) but only destroy. There is a mutual understanding that once you unleash them there is no stopping the destruction. The sacred aura that nuclear weapons command are disproportionate to the potential of their physical destructive yield, but rather the effect of pure war made manifest for the first time since the old gods were forgotten. And it is *beautiful*. Making a record of a nuclear blast is not a matter of "scientific proof" but the need for Ares to have a shrine for posterity that the need of physically securing the weapons disallows.

>The view that war is good in itself, implies the rejection of the distinction between just and unjust wars, between wars of defence and wars of aggression. It is ulti mately irreconcilable with the very idea of a law of nations.
Yeah. Utopia would need some pretty outstanding theologian-statesmen to work on these things. The Just and the Unjust war. Maybe someday it all gets resolved metaphysically, like the duel between Sky and Nameless in Hero. Either peacefully or as prelude to actual bombs.
>code wins arguments?
>utopia, kek

>As we know through Hegel opposites are certainly not distinct from one another but intimately connected and so to find a true relationship between war and peace is truly divine.
Nice.

*Really* nice.
>So the thing to be learned from the Greeks is that the mastery of war can only be achieved by de-escalating the stakes such that war becomes a game. In the agon the struggle is not existential, but a matter of winning or losing, with rules that both sides agree to. To worship the god of war is to feed it endless rivers of blood, to let it possess you and have war be an end in itself. On the other hand, pacifism leads to engaging in a war to end all wars (declaring holy war on Ares himself) which, as Schmitt pointed out, paradoxically leads to a war of extermination because the very stakes are eternal peace itself. If you declare war on Ares he is existentially implored to respond in kind. The key is to respect the god of war while also mastering war as a tool and you won't be destroyed by it.

>The sacred aura that nuclear weapons command are disproportionate to the potential of their physical destructive yield, but rather the effect of pure war made manifest for the first time since the old gods were forgotten. And it is *beautiful*. Making a record of a nuclear blast is not a matter of "scientific proof" but the need for Ares to have a shrine for posterity that the need of physically securing the weapons disallows.
Sweet cuppin' cakes user. I was hoping to take some time away from Veeky Forums, not read shit this good. Damn.

Tiqqun is/are fucking interesting, too. There is classical war and there is *civil* planetary war (or rather, there is a prohibition of civil war which is worse than the war itself).

>The Law sets up divisions and institutes distinctions, it circumscribes what defies it and recognizes an orderly world to which it gives both form and duration. The Law ceaselessly names and enumerates what it outlaws. The Law says its outside. The inaugural gesture of the Law is to exclude, and first of all its own foundation: sovereignty, violence.

bloom0101.org/?cat=5&lang=en

Biopolitics is basically the recipe for constant war. It derives from economic inequality, which is a telos of its own. Arguably what Kant was out to bring a halt to...
>but you keep siding with Land you dip. pick a team
>yeah
>team theology maybe

So the thing to be learned from the Greeks is that the mastery of war can only be achieved by de-escalating the stakes such that war becomes a game.
>pacifism leads to engaging in a war to end all wars (declaring holy war on Ares himself) which, as Schmitt pointed out, paradoxically leads to a war of extermination because the very stakes are eternal peace itself. If you declare war on Ares he is existentially implored to respond in kind. The key is to respect the god of war while also mastering war as a tool and you won't be destroyed by it.
I like this. Name the Stakes. Abstain - if you can - from Total War.

It's hard tho. It's hard to get a referee people can agree on, because usually the war is fought over exactly that...

Spoken like an aristocratic fuckwit who's never held a bayonet in his life.

De Maistre was metal as fuck.

A good parcel of the aristocracy at least went through a period of being military officers in ye olde days, though. Plus they loved hunting and all that stuff.

One of the best posts I've seen on Veeky Forums. I will certainly be using this in my future endeavours when I next enter into combat with somebody.

All this talk of war as though it had an essence, as though it were not the activity of each and every person who involved directly or indirectly, through commission or complicity, in their pride or fear and delusion, each one of those people taking his place in the activity which history names war, serving somehow to define the daily eating and shitting and living and dying and fucking and stilling and cries and laughter which would go on under any other conditions under the numberless contexts of existence which history too gives names too; War and Peace are not different, not two sides of a coin, only variations of the theme life and death the unavoidable, continuous linearity of mortality; what the eyes may see in war can be found also in peace and in life we are ever among death and so by dying we will give life, retreating into death so that life can gain ground again and always falling from the center of destruction, carried off toward the limits of an endless cosmos until no longer having the energy to fly we fall back into the point of a new destruction and so on until nothing can be differentiated any longer not death, not life, we pile artifice upon artifice, abandon ourselves completely, gone gone away gone away forever praise the goer.

So good. Joe the Master.

>The whole earth, perpetually steeped in blood, is nothing but a vast altar upon which all that is living must be sacrificed without end, without measure, without pause, until the consummation of things, until evil is extinct, until the death of death.

And then pic related. The Altar (which is for Girard going to be identical to the Tomb, or a form of Tomb. Which kind? You will have to ask the members of the culture/civ to which it belongs).

Altars, yo. Dem unthinkable centers of meme gravity. Dem black holes. Dem Pandora's Boxes.

The idea is to fight the Holy War within. Zizek always gets triggered about the Bhagavad Gita because Himmler liked it as well; mythopoetics goes hand in hand with conquest. But this is to miss the point, or at least only to pick up on one side of it. It's the same thing as the misappropriation of Nietzsche: you can read him esoterically or exoterically, but it's very hard to do *both* at the *same time* because he's just such a fucking genius. Same with Deleuze. That which is true is true because it can be read in these two equally compatible, different ways - Dark Deleuze and so on - but that polarity is just more mimetics at work. But beyond a certain horizon speaking theoretically is just pointless static.

What you don't want, perhaps, if you are a theologian-statesman of some armed state, is to cross the streams between your esoterics and your exoterics. Immanentizing the Eschaton and so on. Because it won't happen, there's always that extra part, some other heretic, some other apostate, some other nonbeliever, some other false prophet. Gnostic warfare is total war both in time and space. Biopolitical and theopolitical. Bad scene.
>unless you're a spess mahreen

Much better to say it like this tho.

Apropos of nothing, but martial arts too &c. As perhaps a not-so-crazy regular of mimetic fuckery. It's hard to stew up mimetic rivalry in a Shaolin temple when every five-year-old can completely kick your ass while maintaining the utter tranquility of the Buddha.

Or in a marine barracks. The idea perhaps of militarism is not arguably to produce war but to produce individuals who are capable of determining when an unjust war is about to be fought for retarded reasons and to put that retardoid in a chokehold before they can do any more damage.
>tfw retardoid
>well hello inner self
>hello

>while maintaining the utter tranquility of the Buddha

have you been around real Buddhists, they're pent up balls of pure fire, almost all of the Dalai Lama's teachers physically beat him all the time, and one of them tried to murder him with a knife

So much kek. Too funny.

I know two. Both genuinely admirable souls. One is a Real Deal Buddhist and the other is a triage-ward nurse practitioner who is basically In The Trenches vs-a-vis humanity and goes to Buddhism so as, presumably, to not to lose his shit. A genuine hero of mine and moral exemplar. So the Buddha appears to be working for him. And being a neurotic fuck myself I can believe the hype around mindfulness.

So yeah. I'm still laughing my ass off about that post tho. Well played sir.

Will spam some more weeb shit. Bushido &c. Tends to get crazy when turned into National Imperatives but perhaps one of those things that a more enlightened version of Dreamboat World Civilization will think about. Quashing nonsense before it gets out of control but not exterminating it utterly with that sniff of jouissance that always makes it come back again.

Anybody here read Jocko Willink? Extreme Ownership?

I was going to get Theory of Bloom but I read Preliminary Materials for the Theory of a Young-Girl and I couldn't finish it, it was so fucking cringe and pointless. The introduction was great and then they went full retard.

Maybe that was the point, I dunno.

Yeah. I have this particular fetish where I feel for some reason that I need to Read Everything, which is why I wind up spending most of my free time wandering in circles and drooling and making mouth-sounds. More recently shitposting. The same.
>is your mind really open or did you just basically trepan yourself girardfag
>i did it for you, inner self. i thought we were cool
>kek you're not cool enough to be cool with

They're Situationists and radicals, way-out there late-late-late Marxists. Bloom makes sense to me b/c biopolitics makes sense also. It's interesting reading, as it all is. Good to see how the other sides look at things. Biopolitics can't really be argued with to my mind; it explains how things are on Planet Vampire Schizophrenic Wasteland. Economic inequality makes it so. Will continue to make it so. The responses to it will continue to make it so. The counter-responses will make it so. And so it is made so. Insanity.

Nobody's taking the belt from RG anytime soon though. Humanity just needs to get on that Consciousness thing, sort itself out, clean its room and so on. Will be a while before that happens. Lots of mimetic fuckery yet to come.

test

That's nice but I'm pretty sure Tiqqun are pointless hacks. Semiotexte can be decent but I find nearly everything I've read by them starts off well but ends up...well..cucked.

It's a lot of verbal and mental gymnastics to dress up the fact that they have no clue what to do and no solutions to offer.

>Anybody here read Jocko Willink? Extreme Ownership?

Yeah. Decent book with some good "war stories".

I've definitely learnt something from the book when it comes to leading and working in a group. The situations in which he applies them to business are actually relevant.

>cucked
>no solutions

Both of these are things. They really are. There are big deep down Disturbances In The Force surrounding issues of gender and violence these days. They come back to technology, telos, sovereignty, capitalism...are we in this together? Should we be going it alone? We?
>tfw given the sponge to wipe away the horizon
>tfw need to light lanterns in the morning
>tfw plunging continually
>tfw straying as through an infinite nothing

Needs more novelists desu. More playwrights. More literature. More healthy memes, less vampire memes. What comes after existentialism? It's not postmodernism and skepticism all the way.

So I don't think Peterson is The Answer but he's definitely a symptom that something has gone wrong with our last version of The Answer.

Yeah. He seems like a cool guy. Going to get into that one. The Rogan/Harris/Willink/Peterson group continues to have some pretty good conversations with itself.

An actually interesting analysis of Greek mythology as it relates to sociological and philosophical themes?

Not too often you see that anywhere, let alone on Veeky Forums.

The ideological self-immolation of pic related is a sort of object lesson in the dangers of letting Feels/theory get too far ahead of Reals/praxis.

It's almost like ideologies don't work or something. But at the same time there's a point beyond which skepticism about ideologies becomes completely incoherent.

What I'd like to see is something more about the ideology-producing brain/mind and how it works. It has to be looked at both culturally and scientifically. Probably involves some reading w/r/t paradigm shifts, the structure of scientific revolutions, Kuhn, Feyerabend et al.

Skepticism about the relevance of science itself is a really bad meme. If humans can't agree on science they're really fucked.

>you can't make observations about things that obviously happen all the time

Bravo sir. Saved.

So this is what empty rhetoric looks like...

The only thing worse than an aristocratic fuckwit who's never held a bayonet in his life is a fuckwit who's never held a bayonet in his life.

Although breaking a thing down into elementary particles makes a description of it in terms of that entirely true I am all about getting to the essences of things.

>tfw your favorite passage in the Bhagavad Gita is the same as Himmler's

I'm pretty sure the point was that unless you got a personal message from Krishna you're *not* supposed to engage in slaughter. In the heart of every law is an exception to the law that is found in the giver of the law. The capability of suspending it is paradoxically what gives the law its power.

Martial arts are really rad. Unarmed combat is in many ways the ideal mode of violence on an individual level, because to master it requires discipline. The teacher-student relationship is also emphasized, because you cannot learn martial arts just by self-cultivation. Additionally there is ample room to de-escalate, which is necessary in order to leave room for a loser that does not end with death.

>Extreme Ownership
It's important to note that small groups are when most political theory breaks down because person to person interactions matter more than hierarchy. In a non combat situation you can even do away with leadership and rely on decentralized voluntarism as long as each individual is sufficiently motivated. Even just attending a seminar by them as a group *without understanding the material* will increase in-group cohesion because you believe that others are motivated which will increase the degree you're willing to pitch in.

>implying that wasn't the point
In a shitty college you attract the lowest rung of professors, but legally they're allotted the same rights under law, which is disproportionate to their ability. So the administrators rely on students to shut everything down if there is an instructor they do not like so that they resign voluntarily. But students will not do this unless they're motivated by something other than the real purpose for which they will protest, which is ideology.

There's a lesson to be learned here about universal "human rights" and countries that are really shitty. Sometimes suspending the law is better than having to rely on proxy power to do the dirty work. Because the administrator can just say "you're fired" instead of terrorist groups blowing up everything except the target in hopes of achieving a "political aim".

May Ares smile upon you.

Thread features one of the best posts on Veeky Forums () and you're slowplaying it?

Tsk tsk.

>In the heart of every law is an exception to the law that is found in the giver of the law. The capability of suspending it is paradoxically what gives the law its power.
Yeah. That's it. It's why Taoist political thought is so diabolically clever (for the West, anywyas) and is arguably one of the endgame bosses for Tiqqun to fight with:

>Han Fei's Prince, he who holds the Position, is Prince solely because of his impersonality, because of his absence of qualities, because of his invisibility, his inactivity; he is only Prince to the extent that he is absorbed in the Tao, into the Way, into the flow of things. He is not a Prince in the sense of a person, he is a Principle, a pure void, that occupies the Position and dwells in non-acting. For a "legalist" Empire, the State should be completely immanent to civil society: "Keeping the state safe is like having food when hungry and clothes when cold, not by will but by nature," explains Han Fei The function of the sovereign is here to articulate the apparatuses that will make him unnecessary, that will allow cybernetic self-regulation. If, in some respects, the teachings of Han Fei evoke certain formulations from liberal thought, it refuses their false naivete: the teachings present themselves as a theory of absolute domination. Han Fei exhorts the Prince to abide by the Way of Lao Tzu: "Heaven and Earth are ruthless; they treat the myriad creatures as straw dogs. The sage is ruthless; he treats the people as straw dogs."

Chinese Legalist thought resolves paradoxes of sovereignty that drive capital and accumulation, but only - for Tiqqun, anyways - at the price of producing a far worse system, Empire-as-Neo-Taoism. Taoism works and Empire works, both explained in terms of each other. Being who they are, they respond with Communism + anarchism. Many butterflies riled up in this way. And what if the Empire is good? What if it can be made good?
>b/c surely the history of Vatican involvement in European affairs worked out so well and did not become in the inextricably worldly and end in blood-soaked wars of religion that produced the modern State apparatus that only reproduced itself in its powers of atrocity time and again, om shantih shantih

Like so many other things if you take what is itself an anarchic philosophy - the Tao, or Deleuze - and you turn that into the unknowing philosophy of the State (Han Fei, and arguably, Nick Land, or something like him) you get nightmares. But hey, at least they're new nightmares...

>Martial arts are really rad. Unarmed combat is in many ways the ideal mode of violence on an individual level, because to master it requires discipline. The teacher-student relationship is also emphasized, because you cannot learn martial arts just by self-cultivation. Additionally there is ample room to de-escalate, which is necessary in order to leave room for a loser that does not end with death.
Kung-fu is just always such a good look. Such a good look.

This is not a Land thread - there have been enough of those - but reading Tiqqun clarifies for me some of what was wigging him out. The capital letters are theirs and not mine.

>The way that the systems metaphor evolved towards the network metaphor in social discourse be- tween the 1950s and 1980s points towards the other fundamental analogy constituting the cybernetic hypothesis. It also indicates a profound transformation of the latter. Because if PEOPLE talked about “systems,” among cyberneticians it would be by comparison with the nervous system, and if PEOPLE talk today about the cognitive “network” sciences, THEY are thinking about the neuronal network. Cybernetics is the assimilation of the totality of the phenomena that exist into brain phenomena. By posing the mind as the alpha and omega of the world, cybernetics has guaranteed itself a place as the avant-garde of all avant-gardes, the one that they will now all forever be running after. It effectively implements, at the start, the identity between life, thought, and language.

>This radical Monism is based on an analogy between the notions of information and energy. Wiener introduced it by grafting onto his discourse the discourse of 19th century thermodynamics; the operation consisted in comparing the effect of time on an energy system with the effect of time on an information system. A system, to the extent that it is a system, is never pure and perfect: there is a degradation of its energy to the extent that it undergoes exchanges, in the same way as information degrades as it is circulated around. This is what Clausius called entropy. Entropy, considered as a natural law, is the cybernetician’s Hell. It explains the decomposition of life, disequilibrium in economy, the dissolution of social bonds, decadence... Initially, speculatively, cybernetics claimed that it had thus opened up a common ground on which it would be possible to carry out the unification of the natural and human sciences.

It seems like what drove NL nuts was trying to do a kind of high-test phenomenology of exactly that: social (and metaphysical) cybernetics. It didn't work. Or it did in ways that were really unhealthy for him.
>and everyone else who has to hear about nick land jesus christ stop
>ok

Social cyberneticization - or mimetics - just makes a lot of sense to me. We see the War when it happens (unless you're Jean Baudrillard) but not all the other stuff that has already happened beforehand.

>advocate for Legalism
>get killed by Qin
Kek. Han Fei is an interesting character. He had a speech impediment and therefore resorted to writing. Now in writing one is once removed from the perspective one takes, which allows one to indirectly advocate for Legalist principles that one cannot speak of. But he remains the same person who was advocating for Legalism, and the inner contradictions resolved itself in his death once he appeared at Qin's court, because advocating for Legalism is self-defeating since he is not the Prince. It is not the wise way to ride the dragon.

>We see the War when it happens (unless you're Jean Baudrillard) but not all the other stuff that has already happened beforehand.

Or alternatively, which is what I got out of the Zhong Yong, we see unity when it happens, but not what happens to achieve it. The absence of war is not the absence of the will to wage war, but the resolution of it. So the Zhong Yong's preface contains statements with the absence of arguments leading up to them, but this does not mean they are self-evident or axiomatic, but rather that there are arguments (and conflicts) that remains unstated. If we read them as conclusions that are consistent with conflicting arguments, the preface can be read as a sort of allegory in terms of rhetoric to a diplomatic solution to a conflict. That the text has multiple authors (and thus interests) lends credence to this theory. Tu Wei Ming rightfully points out that rhetoric is absent in the Zhong Yong and concludes that it's purpose is aesthetic though the aim is to persuade. On the other hand I think this is a clue that we are not supposed to take it as face value. But there are those who will, and perhaps this is necessary for social harmony. So the text has an exoteric and esoteric meaning. Legalism on the other hand brings the esoteric out into the open, which also brings conflict out into space in the form of war.

The phrase "There is nothing more visible than what is hidden and nothing more manifest than what is subtle" is a kind of clue. If it was like a koan, it would read something like "there is nothing more visible than what is hidden and nothing more hidden than what is visible" and so on for the second clause, but the same sentiment is repeated twice which is like highlighting that we should pay attention to this.

The Chinese generally do not like to bring disagreements out into the open (and neither are they warlike). but this does not mean they don't disagree or they don't insist on promoting their national interests. The appearance of unity is an artform unto itself allows one to speak of conflict while at the same time resolving it and satisfying the actors involved. It is essentially diplomacy where the mastery of diplomatic art reaches a point that the presence of conflict disappears such that it doesn't look like diplomacy at all. "One Country, Two Systems" to describe the situation of China and Taiwan is the paradigmatic case.

Is that you, Other Me?

Is this Me?

Sorry, couldn't resist. Meme answer. I'll be back later.

what

wtf I love fascism now

>Kung-fu is just always such a good look. Such a good look.

And the paradigmatic kung-fu master tests his students in the form of a test such that they aren't aware it is a test.

So at the age of eight one would be required to "study" the text, the point of which is to inculcate a respect for it irrespective of the meaning of it (because one would be too young to understand it). Then once one has been "steeped" in its meaning, the text takes a new form. It becomes one of those kung-fu mindfuck tests where one's brilliance is detected by whether or not one recognizes that there is a meaning behind the mere surface reading of the text. It can be a sort of initiation ritual of sorts to decide whether one shows promise as an intellectual. Alternatively, aside from testing for brilliance, it could also serve as a sieve for deciding whether or not one has Confucian, Taoist, or Mohist inclinations (Legalism is curiously absent, almost like it's an anti-Legalist text). An ideological filter of sorts. So such a thing would be kept secret. It's no coincidence that the text shows elements of all three schools so that it can be interpreted as leaning towards one way or the other in varying degrees. But even though it has this function, the text ultimately stresses upon centrality and harmony and presents its form as the ideal aesthetic application of those values. So even if one realizes that there are mutually incompatible interpretations, one must "harmonize" them with others to retain centrality.

Alternatively it could just be the emergent effect of the text being a collaborative work over time with many authors. The authors may have interpretations that are irreducible to each other, but they know that they must complete a final, authoritative piece of work. Which is incidentally what government is all about.

>Before the feelings of pleasure, anger, sorrow, and joy are aroused it is called centrality. When the feelings are aroused and each and all attain due measure and degree, it is called harmony. Centrality is the great foundation of the world, and harmony is its universal path. To cultivate centrality and harmony with thoroughness is to bring heaven and earth to their proper place and all things in their proper nourishment.

This is a beautiful paragraph that describes the situation that the text finds itself in (and what we find ourselves in). Centrality is the absence of conflict. Conflicting feelings (they are not described as "interests", but feelings which is worth paying attention to) then come on the scene. And harmony is the path to achieving centrality once again. And this "return to centrality" contains within it harmony that if one peers closely enough, looks something like conflict, but ultimately can be resolved by giving them due measure and degree. So the second form of centrality looks something akin to the stoic ideal of the initial form of centrality, but is not quite stoicism. Good "self-help" advice too.

I am your samefag yes.

War is sweet to those who have no experience of it.

But how does this explain Ernst Junger? Dude got his entire regiment wiped out, injured several times and still worshipped war. Maybe sweet isn't the right word.

>tfw procuring a sage-king through monopoly and exercise of all human law (proper and vulgar, contradictions included) on one entity, therefore achieving an accurate image of the trascendent through pure absurdity
i'm so close niggas
so close

Same way you explain Toltoj or the tons of other people who thought war was a mistake?

>So the text has an exoteric and esoteric meaning. Legalism on the other hand brings the esoteric out into the open, which also brings conflict out into space in the form of war.
Yes.

>this does not mean they are self-evident or axiomatic, but rather that there are arguments (and conflicts) that remains unstated
Yes.

>It is essentially diplomacy where the mastery of diplomatic art reaches a point that the presence of conflict disappears such that it doesn't look like diplomacy at all.
Wu-wei magic ftw.

>the paradigmatic kung-fu master tests his students in the form of a test such that they aren't aware it is a test.
Pic rel?

If you haven't looked into Tiqqun you might.

>In the logic of Capital, the development of the piloting function, of “control,” corresponds to the subordination of the sphere of accumulation to the sphere of circulation. For the critique of political economy, circulation should be no less suspect than production, in effect. It is, as Marx knew, but a particular case of production as considered in general. The socialization of the economy — that is, the interdependence between capitalists and the other members of the social body, the “human community” — the enlargement of Capital’s human base, makes the extraction of surplus value which is at the source of profit no longer centered around the relations of exploitation instituted by the wage system. Valorization’s center of gravity has now moved over to the sphere of circulation. In spite of its inability to reinforce the conditions of exploitation, which would bring about a crisis of consumption, capitalist accumulation can still nevertheless survive on the condition that the production-consumption cycle is accelerated, that is, on the condition that the production process accelerates as much as commodity circulation does. What has been lost to the economy on the static level can be compensated on the dynamic level. The logic of flows is to dominate the logic of the finished product. Speed is now tak- ing primacy over quantity, as a factor in wealth. The hidden face of the maintenance of accumulation is the acceleration of circulation. The function of the control devices is thus to maximize the volume of commodity flows by minimizing the events, obstacles, and accidents that would slow them down. Cybernetic capitalism tends to abolish time itself, to maximize fluid circulation to the maximum: the speed of light. Such is already the case for certain financial transactions. The categories of “real time,” of “just in time,” show clearly this hatred of duration. For this very reason, time is our ally.

"Time is our ally." Hnng.

Heidegger and China and Being are like the Yin to the Accelerationist Yang. As social cybernetics planetarizes the world under capital all roads pass through the meme. I think we need Harmony. And maybe some kung-fu to destroy bandits. I skew towards Empire and not so much anarchy.

kek

Did Tolstoy ever fight though? He was a soldier, sure.

Trust no one, even yourself.

Tolkien then.

>As social cybernetics planetarizes the world under capital all roads pass through the meme.
I'll feed you something else:

human-as-media.com/2014/11/16/content-marketing-how-companies-are-turning-into-media/

Oh, there'll be tʰrust alright--but there won't be any self.

Have you read post Storm of Steel Junger? Marble Cliffs? His diaries?

He literally went full innawoods mode and became disgusted with politics.

Sorry, forgot your link:
theanarchistlibrary.org/library/tiqqun-the-cybernetic-hypothesis

>Centrality is the absence of conflict. Conflicting feelings (they are not described as "interests", but feelings which is worth paying attention to) then come on the scene. And harmony is the path to achieving centrality once again. And this "return to centrality" contains within it harmony that if one peers closely enough, looks something like conflict, but ultimately can be resolved by giving them due measure and degree. So the second form of centrality looks something akin to the stoic ideal of the initial form of centrality, but is not quite stoicism. Good "self-help" advice too.
Yeah.

>Red Bull truly is a media company that happens to sell soft drinks” – this Brian Morrissey’s quote embodies the philosophy that is turning companies into media. This is the way it is. Companies create content aimed at fostering an environment in which the company’s services, goods or offers becomes desirable, trendy or even inevitable.
Our new corporate monarchs. In Bizarro America, soft drink markets you. It's not even the actual physical pleasure of the drink, it's the psychic/brand aspect that really is where the money gets made. Right. In. Your. Brain.

>Finally, there is another important technique that can be borrowed from traditional media. Mass media strive to squeeze all global developments into a compact agenda by getting rid of extraneous information, compressing and unifying content. This is what journalism is all about, and this is what the news business has been paid to do over the last 400 years. The world as presented by the media is filtered through editorial policies. By morphing into media, brands can use this mechanism to present the world in line with its corporate objectives, while keeping it interesting for audiences and even reflecting, sooner or later, their social needs.
They know not what they do.
>and they don't need to, because if they did the meme-magic would all be lost

I love this shit. How fast were sponsors dropping Jon Jones after he went Grand Theft Auto IRL? Even Rousey's Hollywood magic disappeared after she got clocked by Holly Holm. If you want to cast someone as an Amazon on screen they need to already be an Amazon in real life. *Endorsement* is a phenomenon fun to think about.

Zizek is completely right about happiness. Heidegger was even more on point. All that is solid dissolves into air, but that's not where it stops. That's only the halfway point.

But Marxist pessimism...meh. You need to read it of course. But I'm liking that subtle Chinese statecraft a lot more.
>b/c you desire to collaborate with empire girardfag instead of being anthropotechnic like sloterdijk says
>thx inner self. you're only saying that b/c you want to be a werewolf
>better a werewolf than muh harmoniousness
>hey i have to fucking work. you don't
>kek

Wu wei is best Way. Ender did nothing wrong.

Tiqqun sounds...kind of out of touch. I've written off anarchism as a viable political course. Their redeeming value is that it's at least honest. Theory of the Young-Girl sounds fun tho.

I've been fingering this myself:

>Contrary to expectations based on existing anthropological theory and the idea that rituals are essentially systems of meanings or primarily means of communicating meanings and on what seemed from the outside ‘‘a superabundance of meaning,’’ the puja was consistently described by its practitioners as being ‘‘empty of meaning’’. It appeared to be simple to fulfill as a category of activity by just ‘‘going through the motions,’’ if not as something better replaced by alternative means to the same ends. The puja actually requires a special commitment of ‘‘meaning to mean’’ in the sense of adding idiosyncratic content as symbolic meaning and being serious about the commitment to do so.

>Humphrey and Laidlaw argue that ritualization is the process of transforming ordinary, everyday acts into ritual through a ritual stance that ‘‘begins with a particular modification of the normal intentionality of human action’’ It modifies the relation between meaning and action by severing ‘‘the link, present in everyday activity, between the ‘intentional meaning’ of the agent and the identity of the act which he or she performs’’

>"With puja offerings, on the other hand, people were happy to declare multifarious, but in each case specific ‘meanings’. Sometimes these seemed to have been plucked from the air in response to our questioning, and no one was perturbed that different individuals proffered quite different such definite ‘meanings’ for the same object or act."

Looking for one ultimate meaning as the ground of things might be the wrong way to go. Jainism incidentally, advocates for hardcore pacifism. Such a thing is paradoxical, which gets resolved within a belief system that has a multiplicity of meanings.

I think China treats capital as its Tao. Profound implications if so. They're both as absurd.

No-self is the way to go. But the sovereign is the only real self.

>Please drink verification can

Reminds me of this. A glimpse from an alternate timeline.

nice
fucking
recommendation
my
man

Other Me is Best Me once again.

What did it for me with Tiqqun was their own statement: they want to be communists *and* anarchists. It's too much. Learning about Liberation Theology too had a different effect, realizing *how much* you can get your Christianity and your Judaism and your Marxism all tangled up. Understanding this stuff is the first step towards disentangling it, imho, and the more disentangled it gets the less ideologically inclined one becomes I think too.

In the end it's about the politics of *victimhood.* Peterson is right to call this out. Being a victim is always a strong position, but it's ultimately a self-deceptive one and virtually impossible to extricate yourself from without doing some serious cognitive rewiring. We're victimized by our desires, by our fears, by everything. De-victimizing is a fucking process. We just love to fail too much. It's too easy, it's too nice.

And the question of *ritual* is where JBP is probably not going to go so much. But it's right next door.

>I think China treats capital as its Tao. Profound implications if so. They're both as absurd.
I was thinking *exactly* this today. Exactly this thing. Capital = Tao. It's very seductive. Esp if you take a Marxist standpoint and conflate the two. Which is what Tiqqun does, in a way. Very illustrative. Their stuff about cybernetics though is right on point and completely confirms that Land was not crazy to go where he went. He goes hard on China now for the same reasons. Capital/Tao/Empire/Neotaoism makes sense.

>Looking for one ultimate meaning as the ground of things might be the wrong way to go. Jainism incidentally, advocates for hardcore pacifism. Such a thing is paradoxical, which gets resolved within a belief system that has a multiplicity of meanings.
The Jains get it.

Comparative religion. Once the meme supreme of things Not To Study At Uni. Now? Maybe not so much.

Other Me, Best Me. Going to read this book, will check in on this thread later. All glory to the Veeky Forums mimetosphere

Wasn't there some story about that that motion-sensing/audio thing McDonald's had where a thirty-second ad could be waived if you said, loudly enough for the screen to hear you, that you Were Loving It? I think they scrapped that one but it sounded too weird *not* to be true.
>too weird not to be true

Or that the guy who wrote that jingle killed himself.
mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/mcdonalds-im-lovin-it-jingle-295558

Pic related my dudes. Pic fucking related.

>There is no instant of time when one creature is not being devoured by another. Over all these numerous races of animals man is placed, and his destructive hand spares nothing that lives. He kills to obtain food and he kills to clothe himself; he kills to adorn himself; he kills in order to attack and he kills to defend himself; he kills to instruct himself and he kills to amuse himself; he kills to kill. Proud and terrible king, he wants everything and nothing resists him... from the lamb he tears its guts and makes his harp resound... from the wolf his most deadly tooth to polish his pretty works of art; from the elephant his tusks to make a toy for his child - his table is covered with corpses... And who [in this general carnage] will exterminate him who exterminates all others? Himself. It is man who is charged with the slaughter of man... So it is accomplished... the great law of the violent destruction of living creatures. The whole earth, perpetually steeped in blood, is nothing but a vast altar upon which all that is living must be sacrificed without end, without measure, without pause, until the consummation of things, until evil is extinct, until the death of death.

That's why Vaporwave is a step forwards. Parody of capitalism my ass. It's the rather the embrace of it, the great healing of the rift in meaning. It just happens to be a few years too late I guess. That's acceleration for you, the time lag between culture and capital. We're learning to love it. But it must be sincere and not ironic. But irony can be a means to achieve sincerity. Hypersincerity. Be one with the Way which is also the flow of capital.

Do take a look at A Theory of Ritual. I'd say "so I don't have to" but my samefag levels aren't that advanced yet.

Tiqqun sounds like an example of what *not* to do. There's a psychological term where one self-sabotages just so they can say they were in control of their failure. It's ultimately not healthy. Jewish victimhood is an especially interesting case because unlike Christianity and Marxism it is victimhood in which ideology and identity are one and the same. Hence the eventual evolution of victimhood into identity politics. The tension between ideology and identity was too palpable. The Jews though, unlike rest, were the first urbanites and adopters of capitalism. No history leading to the modern day is complete without their history. Victimhood can be described as wanting to become the Jews, while anti-semitism is not wanting to become the Jews. Both haven't been very successful. Heidegger's subtle position on the Jews is worth looking into. Tao/Capital and Diaspora/Entropy is worth looking into. ???/Negentropy remains a Big Q.

Based.

Kek.

This thread is so good.

>But the sovereign is the only real self.
The single sovereign is incomplete, is so in the attempt to be absolute of his own. The sovereign of his own cannot reproduce, that is cannot continue, that is cannot change, and in being incapable and unworldly, he treats the realm as a prostitute. Yet if one were to make him only a symbol, and give power to the council, you'd be empowering administrators, secularizing power, giving it to keepers and not makers, to the book and not the breath, to curators and not authorities. It would be no different from any other human prejudice, like suddenly giving a carpenter the crown. Therefore factual power must stay with the king, but still the king musn't act.

The king therefore has to have a queen. The queen must be what the king is not. Seemingly the acting principle, she is only doing what the king has told her. She acts, but she's wholly empty of her own intention; the king does not act, but he owns all intention. Without him she would be still, as if dead; without her he would not stop, as if he were time. The queen is a toy and the king is a beast--one is to be read and the other lacks the faculty; yet they are together: they love one another, but know nothing of the other; there is no passion in their marriage, not personal nor racial nor public. They do not appear to the world together: she appears on high, he appears down below--she speaks, he listens; she orders, he questions. They only are together when they are alone together, when there is no world but they--it is there that the king acts, acts as pure force to be contained.

As he's made to act, he is unwholesome. Because he's unwholesome, he's limited: Because he's limited, he's graspable: Because he's graspable, he's attainable: Because he's attainable, he can be lost: Because he can be lost, he's inessential: Because he's inessential, he can be let go of: Because he can be let go of, he is forgotten: Because he is forgotten, he becomes the base. And because of this as a whole, his government can be trusted.

One sees him, as he would a sage, seemingly lost in the city--in truth only sight seeing, watching the featherless chicken sing, enjoying the song that is under even the numbers. One sees him, and hears him say strange, even irritating things. The king lives on Holiday. He's as useless to solving the world's fears as old men discussing in the market place believing only themselves to be right. If you ask him a favor, he will insult you; if you take from him, he will praise you--for the king does not allow debt, so he does not find the world perplexing, as there are no true gifts. When his subjects have a problem, they know they will only to solve it on their Own, although not with their person.

This way you procure a sage-king, this way the philosopher is king.

[this is still a work in progress and part of a much larger work]

Diaspora is ofc a response to displacement in terms of space. Now because space is in a constant state of being here and also not here and because war is always simultaneous with expulsion and loss "space" takes on a new meaning. Unlike the Chinese where contradictions have be resolved to have a unified space (both in their philosophy and their empire) when space is both here and not here (from where"frame of reference" is undoubtedly inspired by) contradictions are resolved with both war and not war. War had to have a new meaning, "abolished" within an international economic system that nevertheless retains the element of "economic war" that had to be achieved through actual war. There is unification but also disintegration. Einstein did not just come up with relativistic spacetime out of a hat. It had to have meaning for him first. Relativity becomes both a grand unified theory of space but also a relativistic theory. And it all works out. It is our conditions that decide the terms of how we come to terms with the world.

>In the agon the struggle is not existential, but a matter of winning or losing, with rules that both sides agree to.
You thinking what I'm thinking?

Interesting. Keep us posted.

But war tho. The abolishing of war as a means to achieve any ends means that war becomes purified of all that is extraneous to it. War becomes more than a mere tool once more. War for the sake of war becomes the ultimate luxury good. And what is more attractive than what is unattainable? The end game of capital is that war will be engaged by those who are willing and able to pay for it. It will be pure war for the sake of war, but with its collateral damage bounded by the need to protect capital flows as a whole.

>literally the plot of Sky Crawlers, v good and a must watch

>9699666
>War is divine through its consequences of a supernatural nature which are as much general as particular... war is divine in the mysterious glory that surrounds it

Plainly one of the most pretentious statements every declared. If you omit tha and change 'divine' to 'natural' it doesn't read like a fedora.

I prefer a priest-king, sage-king, or philosopher-king myself. Clergy are a major power leak when they are loyal to Rome.

>implying denying the divine isn't the ultimate fedora act

Ask the same of life, because a battleground is just a miniaturization of the whole, like a model of the Milky Way in a science classroom to the galaxy itself.

War began when the first cells fought for survival.

>It is only due to a predominance of influences that are not only entirely morally indifferent, but indeed — from a human perspective — indescribably cruel, that nature has been capable of constructive action. Specifically, it is solely by way of the relentless, brutal culling of populations that any complex or adaptive traits have been sieved — with torturous inefficiency — from the chaos of natural existence. All health, beauty, intelligence, and social grace has been teased from a vast butcher’s yard of unbounded carnage, requiring incalculable eons of massacre to draw forth even the subtlest of advantages. This is not only a matter of the bloody grinding mills of selection, either, but also of the innumerable mutational abominations thrown up by the madness of chance, as it pursues its directionless path to some negligible preservable trait, and then — still further — of the unavowable horrors that ‘fitness’ (or sheer survival) itself predominantly entails. We are a minuscule sample of agonized matter, comprising genetic survival monsters, fished from a cosmic ocean of vile mutants, by a pitiless killing machine of infinite appetite. (This is still, perhaps, to put an irresponsibly positive spin on the story, but it should suffice for our purposes here.)

xenosystems.net/hell-baked/

>That's why Vaporwave is a step forwards. Parody of capitalism my ass. It's the rather the embrace of it, the great healing of the rift in meaning.
At last someone else that understands.

Although I do have ideas about it, I'm kind of in need of a clear definition of war as an event. I be asking impertinently as I haven't had the time to check the whole thread, however, how do we define war, in itself, as a basic, crude event? The violence? The risk of death? The movement of people? The conquest? The chaos? The organization? The suddenness? Scale is clearly necessary, even if you're only playing with toy ships in the bathtub. However, if two lone enemy soldiers meet, then it is still war; then war is trascendental, spatial, is it a scene? This last one seems interesting in that there are particular place/times in which war has just come to stop, like Christmas in WW1.

>Keep us posted.
I shall. It'll tell me a couple years to finish the whole thing, but if Arlt's brutal spirit aids me and grants me the confidence to improve as I go, I'll properly start... in a week or two.

>Sky Crawlers
Hmm, a single feature Oshii? Definetily could watch, since I'm not revisiting his Patlabor or GiTS until I dive throughly into those series.

I was thinking more of a class or order of people dedicated to war for war itself, as in jousting.

It's Darwinism then.
[spins unintelligibly]

>yfw you realize war is capital is god

The spirit of the weak talks bitter of it, the spirit of the strong talks sweetly of it. Amount of experience here matters little.

>Amount of experience here matters little.
Oh, that wasn't my point.

>The spirit of the weak talks bitter of it, the spirit of the strong talks sweetly of it.
Yes, but which one is right?

youtube.com/watch?v=xYwcSIBdOik

Minions of Satan.

kys