Interesting book. bombs thrown at Bataille/Foucault/Hardt & Negri by a guy who knows his stuff...

Apparently it's only one small section where it is mentioned, I'll see if I can find it again, but a group of neoreactionaries have been running with it and showing a lot more examples. It seems like a real thing.

I think it is on page 344 of the one uploaded on archive.org

Also page 160.

But at first the common people can but applaud: the more capable among them are, in a continuous stream, enrolled in Power's army— the administration— there to become the masters of their former social superiors.

It is the most natural thing, therefore, that the common people should be Power's ally, should do its work in the expansion of the state— a process which they facilitate by their passivity and stir up by their appeals.

To represent Power as being of its nature dedicated to casting down social authorities and robbing them, as being inevitably thrown into alliance with the common people, is to run counter to accepted ideas.

cut and paste section from 343-344

But this coalescence of political Power with the social authorities
does not endure for ever. The reasons for its disappearance are vari-
ous, but chief among them is the coming of a "head chief" whose
policy it is to reduce his peers to a subordinate position— in other
words, a king. As we have seen, his next step is to court an alliance
with the inferior classes; but what is emphasized here is that it is
to the more vigorous elements of those classes that he goes for sup-
port, to those whose station in life is out of relation to their energies.
The more difficult the process of transition from one class to an-

other is made, the greater is the commotion among these elements
to find an outlet; the king provides them with the outlet which they
need by enrolling them in his service, and the body of the state
draws fresh life from their young strength. This is the first phe-
nomenon to mark: the encroachment of political Power on the aris-
tocratic authorities. A second, already described by us, accompanies
it: with a view to breaking down the resistance of the aristocracy,
Power strives to loosen the hold of the notables on their dependants.
This results in a change of status for the dependants. To be at the
mercy of a single master is a wretched condition. But when there are
two masters, squire and state, battling for their allegiance, the in-
tervention of Power creates for them a sort of liberty. Not, it is
true, the liberty which comes from a man's own assertion of his
own rights, but a poorer quality of liberty, liberty by another's in-
tervention, than which the securitarian temper can know no other.

The third phenomenon to mark is the progressive invasion of the
high social strata by elements from below; they ascend by the offi-
cial ladder and then, grown rich in the service, break away from it.

It is far from being the case that these new aristocrats show all
the characteristics of the old, or even of those who have climbed
the rungs of society's ladder by their own unaided efforts. It is one
thing to rise at the riser's own risks, another to owe promotion to a
master's favour. A pirate like Drake, enriched by his voyages, the
importance of which his ennoblement, if nothing else, attests, owes
everything to himself and makes a very different sort of aristocrat
from a public administrator grown great in public offices often by
qualities of flexibility rather than of energy.

It looks interesting, though calling Bataille "an obscure French pornographer" on the cover is a red flag for me. Is Bataille treated appropriately and with knowledge?

>Also reading about the book. It seems similar to De Jouvenal's High-Low alliance Versus the Middle. The powerful use these divide and conquer strategies way more than I expected.
>Apparently it's only one small section where it is mentioned, I'll see if I can find it again, but a group of neoreactionaries have been running with it and showing a lot more examples. It seems like a real thing.
I haven't read the OP's book yet but it's interesting in light of the interest taken in French philosophers of the '60s by American intelligence agencies. To be fair, I think the US was mainly interested in promoting Maoists (as opposed to sympathizers of the Soviet Union) in academia, though maybe they took more interest in Bataille, Foucault, etc. than is commonly let on.

The early CIA definitely backed critical theorists.

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Also, I've always found it hilarious that there is a """conspiracy theory""" among legitimate Soviet military and intelligence officers that is very similar to what took place in America during the Cold War and maps onto the function of many of these intellectuals' roles: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dulles'_Plan

The cold war was like mutually assured cultural destruction.

Apparently there is all these untranslated memoirs that outline how the west used these ideological weapons in Russia. I can't read Russian, but they sound fascinating.

True, I'm not sure what the end goal was, though. The CIA tended to back anything that opposed the USSR from anywhere on the political spectrum, from Birchers to moderate liberals to Maoists.

There's an analogous conspiracy about the USSR in the US. Both sides are probably right, honestly. If you started looking in 1958, how often over the next 60 years would you end up saying "The John Birch Society was right, again. Sigh..."?

Why is it good? Does it actually refute anything those authors wrote? Or is it just an intellectual history?

Reading the Introduction now:

>Chapter 8 is devoted to the “postmodernism of the Right”: it opens with an exploration of Ernst Jünger, one of the most talented and controversial writers of the twentieth century. Jünger is here introduced as conservatism’s counterimage of Bataille. The deep likeness between the two, especially Jünger’s forerunning analysis of “disciplinarian power,” is evidence of this fascinating communion between Left and Right, a communion sealed by the shared belief that sacrifice, war, and violence (i.e., the necessity of the holocaust) are the ways of nature and,
therefore, of man. Though poorly known to the American public, Jünger is a conspicuous figure that has exercised a strong influence upon Martin Heidegger.
Heidegger’s mythology of the
Dasein the being-there) is but the German, paral-
lel formulation of Bataille’s “core” (
le noyau). This philosopher, who, like Jünger, had been associated with Nazism, is, in fact, a guiding light of postmodernism. He is revered on the Left, by Foucault and the French antihumanists, as well as on the Right. Among the conservative admirers of Heidegger, we find Alexandre Kojève, who taught Bataille, and whose “End of History” is a tenet of Right- and Left-wing postmodernism, and Leo Strauss, a late icon of Neoconservatism. Following a discussion of Jünger, Heidegger, and Kojève, this chapter goes to appraise in succession the writings of Strauss and his followers (in particular, Allan Bloom, Irving Kristol, and Francis Fukuyama), who have come to embody the rhetorical panoply of so-called Neoconservatism.

>This portion of the study
aims to conjoin the two sides of this alarming ideology; we reiterate in this case the known thesis whereby this verbal confrontation opposing these Siamese halves of postmodernism is but a pretense—a pretense revealing the utter powerlessness and subservience of the Left, which, in fact, testifies by its stances and by preventing alliances across divides that it has taken a back seat in the great vehicle of power, driven by the Right.

He doesn't quite get it yet, or is trapped in Marxist-inspired thinking and hasn't grasped the HLvM at work, thus doesn't recognize the thing he's attacking as yet another manifestation of it, as opposed to a deviation from True Leftism, real Civic Dissent (tm), etc.

ty sir

>It looks interesting, though calling Bataille "an obscure French pornographer" on the cover is a red flag for me. Is Bataille treated appropriately and with knowledge?
yeah that is pretty provocative. again, the book is kind of a polemic, it just happens to be a pretty well-researched one by a guy who has read the stuff with enough engagement to spot the contradictions and connections relevant to where we are today. i have absolutely no doubt about the power of Bataille myself, there are parts of his work that i find absolutely fascinating and go way beyond his characterization as 'obscure French pornographer.' Bataille is an endboss-tier writer in the 20C, he's the guy who tips Land over the edge, much else. but i think you could read this book as a guy who is already pretty well aware of the power and influence that Bataille's thought has. so i would say the answer to your question is yes. the author isn't exactly sympathetic to a lot of Bataille's ideas, but what i find interesting about this book is that he has that rare gift of being able to present the ideas of the other side clearly and with understanding, even when he disagrees with them. this is the kind of thing that guys like Alan Sokal &c are completely incapable of. it's one thing to shit on an idea you hate, another to examine how that idea actually works, even if it leads to things you disagree with.

it's not so much a refutation, but if you like intellectual history or something like a genealogy of how we got to the monkey clownshow we have today this is a story well-told. it engages with thinkers the author doesn't necessarily like but it does so by way of clarifying a pretty significant chapter in intellectual history. Mark Lilla and Richard Wolin have written similar books on these themes, Stephen Hicks also. your interest in these things will vary depending on how much time you want to devote to thinking about cultural politics, philosophy, /acc stuff, whatever.

personally i find the awesome acrobatic contortions that lead from Bataille to 2019 and the state of total hysteria fascinating, if frequently soul-crushing, because of how insane things can yet potentially be. but as i've said in earlier posts, i'm trying to turn over a new leaf these days and not be perma-trigged about politics and stuff anymore. reading about how we got here helps with that. even if 2020 is shaping up to be another very exciting year for that stuff...

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Sounds like more academic horseshit.

i would liken it more to the shoveling of said horseshit.

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You would.
youtu.be/7WYVkhI53Yc

the whole reason i made this thread was because the book actually provides a fairy insightful diagnosis of the extent of the academic horseshit that pervades the world today. which is an exceedingly powerful strain.

i'm actually not pro-postmodernist, but i've read them deeply enough and so has the author of this text. that's the point.

What I'm seeing is a lot of words which say nothing. What was his insight? How does he differentiate from post-modernism (which he seems to misunderstand)? What are his conclusions and solutions?

>Foucault, again, had set the precedent in 1979, when he embarked on his controversial sojourn to Teheran to acclaim the advent of the “Imam” Khomeini. Generally appraised by postmodern admirers as a troublesome gaucherie on the part of Foucault, this was an episode of fundamental significance. It denuded the mercenary nature of the unwritten contract tying the “radical intellectual” to the establishment. As it always is between courtiers and the crown, the essential do ut des (a gift with forced reciprocation, so to speak) transacted between power and the scribes of the Left is one of fame and favor in exchange for “oppositional” propaganda consonant with deep geopolitical strategies.
This author is pretty good.

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Retard-tier analysis.

Why do you think so? This has been how the Western Left has worked since forever.

>What I'm seeing is a lot of words which say nothing.
in my opinion the Jedi are evil

>What was his insight?
postmodernism is riddled with internal contradictions that in no way render it efficacious in swaying the hearts and minds of many for hilarious and disastrous political outcomes

>How does he differentiate from post-modernism (which he seems to misunderstand)?
he recognizes that something is deeply rotten in the state of Denmark. this is obviously the case

>What are his conclusions and solutions?
i don't know, i haven't finished the book yet. personally i'm not sure if there *are* any conclusions except not to get sucked into impossible arguments with ideologues who weaponize and exploit your psychology, which is a thing as old as time. i don't personally see a problem with seeing a connection between Foucault and a horribly shitty version of Augustine, and something called the Cathedral where the Church once was.

read the book and you can get the author's opinions, ITT we talk about our own opinions. mine are pretty predictable at this point, i've been shitposting the same things on this board for years. in this book i find a kindred spirit, that's pretty much it. for whatever reason the Catholics always have the perspective on postmodernity that i like, because postmodernity - whose archetypal figure is Foucault - is a fucking death-sentence for philosophy, and makes an almost irresistable argument in favor of tyranny, and i'm not really a big fan of tyranny, i am discovering.

the Left sucks, Catholic commentators on the Left are cool, Land is fucking nightmarish, all of this stuff. we are driving off a cliff and being directed there by forces not in our control, and being told to Remain Calm and stay in our seats by well-intentioned and cynical inquisitors of a faith largely predicated on the weaponization of irony and a great many other rhetorical tactics. the long-term diagnosis is not good, but we got here through a long procession of ideas and other things which do not need to be mystifingly arcane. like fattened turkeys we are.

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>The Ideology of Tranny

This place is getting to me

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as for why tyranny is bad, in my own case it is because i can absolutely see the appeal of it, and obviously i would like nothing more than to wear a Hat of Truth and be a professional moral expert, washing brains across the Empire for the Greater Good of All. i would love if this were my job. it certainly has benefits.

if only it weren't, you know, *wrong.*

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That's simply not the relationship between the Left and the establishment. Not even close.

What do you think it is, then? To me, the radical left-wing intellectual effectively serves as a propagandist for decisions already made by liberal billionaires/intel agencies who direct the State and academia through patronage, usually with an end goal of some combination of power centralization and geopolitical necessity. Another example would be the US civil rights movement - Civil Rights laws conveniently allowed for further government centralization and served as marketing material for prospective allies in Africa against Soviet expansion in the region. We actually sent Louis Armstrong down there to shill (as in, play concerts) and promote Civil Rights.

>This was the first system that gave the rabble-not the working proletariat-theoretical dignity, and was therefore ideal for institutionalizing, speech-wise, a state of tribal warfare, which ultimately spared the elites by portraying them as faceless and decentered, and by contemplating no resolution
to the dynamics of opposition (between the gutter and the State).

>So Bataille and Junger have not made it into the Anglo-American academic mainstream, because their religiosity would have denuded the nature of the game, revealing what is at stake: namely, the kind of creed that underlies it all-a worship of the Void complemented by a mock-matriarchal celebration of generation and devastation (especially a proclivity for the latter). And, above all, a manifest contempt for compassion, which the benevolent facade of our Liberal democracies will allow in deed but certainly not in discourse. As a result, the system has opted for manipulations of seminal texts, manipulations such as those of Bataille by Foucault and Baudrillard, of Foucault himself by Baudrillard and Hardt and Negri, or of Gnosis and Junger by Heidegger, and to a very limited degree, of Heidegger and Kojeve by Strauss.

>In sum, Foucault, Heidegger, Strauss, and their imitators are, properly speaking, impostors, who have tampered with one original or another, creating as they went academic paradigms susceptible to ideological use, such as these stories of "minority power" squirting like a geyser, tales of "being-there" on the abyss of Nothingness, or a sham philology passing Plato for a Machiavellian. These paradigms are in essence instruments of power, as well as Trojan horses that have contrabanded antitraditional Gnostic myth into the walled perimeter of an area hitherto guarded ever more dubiously by monotheistic orthodoxy.

>The present situation is not encouraging. While the process of "homogenization" (i.e., globalization) proceeds apace, and so does the centralization of policy making, the Churches have given way to this Gnostic onslaught, and dissent has disappeared. The state of war is chronic. Academia in the West is for the most part indentured to Big Business, and the only way out would appear to be an appeal to civil engagement at the grass roots-in the cities, towns, and villages of our nations. As mentioned previously, a number of important regional initiatives have been active in several parts of the world.

>It is then our hope that, relying on our innate desire to "help the world," we shall succeed in recreating a wholesome movement of dissent across all divides, which will enable us to oppose war more decisively, to resist the flattening force of these corporate interests of globalization, and to defeat in our society the ideology of tyranny.

tldr shots fired. even at Junger. the absolute madman

There are no 'radical intellectuals'. If the state allows you to speak, if it gives you fucking positions in academia, you are not radical. If you're radical you are silenced, your views are made illegal to pronounce

A lot of people recognise something wrong, that isn't a reason for them to be an authority.
Perhaps the reasoning should be arcane. Those filled with nothing get the fattest. But if your conclusion is that history is simply a mechanical processing line you will never accept such a thing, you will simply be squawking the loudest while mesmerised by an endless assortment of instruments - fattened up even more on the final conveyor, never seeing the final blade.
It's interesting that you use the same tactics as the author, chastising the very qualities you take up yourself.
Just how fat are you?youtu.be/fqV9ogeJE3w

you seriously need to leave your bunker and go talk to some real people. your perspective on so much is beyond warped. i don't even know if you ever had a proper frame of reference to begin with, but you've gone beyond the advent horizon of theory. all light bends now in the direction of the hyperdense void, and there seems no escape, only paranoia and the ultimate exsolution of your psyche. dangerous shit.
if you refuse to seek the company of others, to reground yourself in the *real*, the concrete reality of sensuous experience (this is why you need whitehead), at least borrow, like, a chesterton novel from the library. or twain. anything but an academic critique of fucking bataille jfc.

>Just how fat are you?
i'm super fat, which is why my ideal job is to be a kind of Grand Overseer for a tyrant who will indulge my real desire, which is to float along a barge and inspecting the moral hygiene of the citizenry. mostly i do this by having one of my small corps of servants summon people from the beach to my ship, where i share my hot takes with them while passing judgment on their ideological fitness. also i am very lonely. sort of like J Edgar Hoover and Oscar Wilde, plus the Mouth of Sauron

>It's interesting that you use the same tactics as the author, chastising the very qualities you take up yourself.
yes but when i do it it's different tho

guards
seize this man
he dares to question me
for this he shall receive twenty lashes, if by lashes we mean a stream of ill-founded opinions

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So how does this fit in with Leftist criticisms of Israel while NATO supports 'moderates' in Syria?
The Left isn't for centralisation of the government, if it were then anarchists would have to appear elsewhere within the political geography. Instead, the Left promotes a particular form of political organisation which effectively seeks completion of the humanist project, a complete severing from the original crisis (which in turn completely distinguishes them from the Right, without reconciliation, giving an organic and mobilised flux between the two sides, and also explaining why the Left is effectively advantaged within any established dispute).

And on this point, what precisely is this guy's position? He seems like a deep centrist or liberal of some sort.

You are a really annoying cunt. Are you the space taoism guy?

>So how does this fit in with Leftist criticisms of Israel while NATO supports 'moderates' in Syria?
Marginalized/controlled opposition meant to reinforce domestic narratives about racism. You'll note that most of these critics are still taking money from the Ford Foundation (to name one) at the end of the day. Much of the radical Left nowadays that isn't Tankie (and thus irrelevant outside of fringe internet circles) has hitched its wagon to Kurds who are de-facto clients of Israel. Furthermore most of these leftists don't take their ideas to their logical conclusion and say that Israel has no right to exist, while at the same time denouncing the United States for its vile history of racism or whatever.

>The Left isn't for centralisation of the government
that's what's happened in most radical left experiments though.

>nstead, the Left promotes a particular form of political organisation which effectively seeks completion of the humanist project
Yeah but you just ended up expanding the power of liberal billionaires instead. Oops. Here is what actually happens: Said liberal billionaires wish to dissolve some social structure that obstrucs their profits. Anarchists/Communists (you) are provided with institutional/financial support to stage a chimpout. When the desired outcome has been achieved, funding is shut off and the radical left is left to self-critique over What Went Wrong This Time.

>And on this point, what precisely is this guy's position? He seems like a deep centrist or liberal of some sort.
I think he fancies himself an Old Leftist and is a fan of Thorstein Veblen. I'm quite interested in seeing how Progressive-era (1910s-30s) era radical intellectuals functioned in a similar way to now to promote centralization.

i'm girardfag. and yes i am an annoying cunt

fwiw, i'm also being facetious here.

>all light bends now in the direction of the hyperdense void, and there seems no escape, only paranoia and the ultimate exsolution of your psyche. dangerous shit.
the irony is that of course i don't want this, nor do i want others to feel sucked into hyperdense voids from which there is no escape. in my own misadventures i do often feel as though this has become the case, and in studying it i have found it to be a situation harder to escape from than once i thought. being wilfully facetious and stupid no doubt offends people, and i apologize if i'm come across as a crass idiot.

sometimes it's hard to gauge tone on the yak-milking boards. but warrants mentioning. so apologies.

i'm not offended, man, i'm worried for you.
try walking meditation. or just walking. root yourself in your environment somehow. i like to keep track of the birds that migrate through my area.

So a critique of Israel reinforces the racism debate which in turn means support for Israel in Syria? Pure nonsense based on vague coincidences.
Again, centralisation isn't the point because the right also wants centralisation (at least the political right). And an argument can be made that the deep centre also wants a form of centralisation, or the anarcho-capitalists to a pure form of centralisation in the abstract, the capitalist ideal which finally abolishes all others.
Also, I am talking about forms rather than effects. The single protest group which ends up supporting billionaires is not the Form of the Left, its ideal or essence, it very well could be a corruption that is closer to its opposite.
I'm not an anarchist or communist, don't make assumptions. And you seem to be making the assumption that a temporary contract is the truth of the matter. What about the conservative billionaires? What about all the times when they don't need oppositional alliance? Again, it's pure nonsense which conflates the object of critique into the conclusion.
Notice how his critique uses the same thesis as that of repressive desublimation? How does that fit into his theory of post-modernism and subsumption of the Left? And if Bataille created the origin for all of this mess why does he seem so enamored of these ideas? Should he not also be developing a critique of Bataille?

the last thing i want to do is offend people. and tbqh i know that i have at least one utterly loathsome streak in me, which is to be a kind of quietly controlling asshole. i really hate this, and i know that it proceeds out of the worst parts of my psyche. this is why i am so often attracted to thinking about tyranny, dystopia, CTRL and the rest. perhaps in some sense it gives me some competitive advantage in reading about philosophy stuff, i don't know. and honestly, one of the things i like about these boards is that you get called a fucking asshole sometimes, which is often exactly the truth. it's really welcome! i know the only reason i am so trigged by tyranny elsewhere is because i am sure i have a streak of it in myself...and the things most intimate to us in our personality are frequently the hardest to notice.

generally speaking intense philosophy-brooding does tend to do things to people. Taleb had a good line about this, he said: it's not always money that corrupts people, it's *writing* about money that does. i think he's right about that.

i appreciate the concern user. probably the best indication of health tho will be maintaining a hiatus from the boards tho, and if i return it will be to discuss the finer points of Stoic physics, ethics and logic rather than, say, the influence of Bataille or the alien attack from the future.

i do try to walk a lot these days. balance is good. beautiful day today.

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>So a critique of Israel reinforces the racism debate which in turn means support for Israel in Syria?
No, radicals go on about racism in Israel, while the establishment takes money from Israeli patrons to bomb Syria, and radicals end up advocating for a kindler, gentler Zionism in most cases, thus effectively running interference for Israel, Chomsky is a good example of this.

>The single protest group which ends up supporting billionaires is not the Form of the Left, its ideal or essence, it very well could be a corruption that is closer to its opposite.
It is, the left is quintessentially entropy. Liberal billionaires favor entropy because it presents more opportunities for profit for them and expands their power over an identity-less consumer base. If an ordered society is one with more intermediary structure between the state and the individual, liberal billionaires are firmly on the side of entropy.

>I'm not an anarchist or communist, don't make assumptions. And you seem to be making the assumption that a temporary contract is the truth of the matter. What about the conservative billionaires? What about all the times when they don't need oppositional alliance? Again, it's pure nonsense which conflates the object of critique into the conclusion.
"Conservative" billionaires are just liberals from a few decades ago. They, too, reinforce the HLvM mechanic as liberal billionaires pearl-clutch at the horror of anyone being so morally depraved as to oppose their latest scheme, which obviously justifies further power expansion to smash racism/sexism/the patriarchy/whatever in the name of The People. None of them believe their own rhetoric anyway.

The only points the ruling class care about are:
>1. Enriching themselves and expanding their power
>2. Israel
That's it.

>Notice how his critique uses the same thesis as that of repressive desublimation? How does that fit into his theory of post-modernism and subsumption of the Left? And if Bataille created the origin for all of this mess why does he seem so enamored of these ideas? Should he not also be developing a critique of Bataille?

I have not read the whole book yet. Batallie, of course, does not create the origin of the mess on his own, rather, the kind of thinking derived from Foucault, Bataille, and the like is sustained by Power for its own interests. Foucault conceived of society in a way that liberal billionaires found appealing insofar as it serves their interests, and thus promoted Foucauldians in academia, which shapes the thinking of the next generation of the ruling class. They are financing Foucaldian society into existence.

So it's not that Foucault is WRONG, per se, but that we aren't really asking the right question, namely, what is it about the structure of our society and of the categories we think in that leads Anglo-American intelligence to take an interest in Foucault, and how can this be remedied?

>what is it about the structure of our society and of the categories we think in that leads Anglo-American intelligence to take an interest in Foucault, and how can this be remedied?
a big part of it is the fact that in his analyses of neoliberal society Foucault is actually prescient. in many ways, he does reveal mechanisms of soft power and influence that are crucial to its working. this is why i think there has to be a charitable reading of him in one sense, because he plainly was not the Antichrist. at the same time, the mobilization of his thought as a valorization of the worst aspects of capital is really a disaster, because the fruits of capital include the ability for the first world to cover its grossest defects in the name of building a tolerant or democratic society.

Foucault can be read and digested without becoming a Foucaultian, but this is imho what doesn't happen: you get, rather, the division into camps:

a) people who read him and take everything he says unironically as gospel
b) people who haven't read him.

why we should be so hopelessly shortsighted and foolish is a part of the charm of the meatbag, but this is also all massively complicated too by the rise of the internet, computer technology, social media, lots of other stuff that we are totally unprepared for and trying to work through on the fly. we need things like high time-preference, charity, empathy as much as toughness and the rest.

>2019
>still fighting with foucault
wew lad

Can you give me some more insight into Bataille? What works and theories are you talking about in particular?

i'm not fighting with Foucault, i've read quite a lot of his work and i think he presents a paradox. the irony is that he presents as devastating a critique of neoliberalism as anyone else - it really is all soft power, coercion and disciplinics, and fascism by comparison is positively outdated. i'm not bitching about Foucault and your wew lad would be warranted if that were the case. but Foucault also gives you everything else which follows from him: as Moldbug would say, it's the Cathedral. Byung-Chul Han knows that there's something wrong with this, as does Land, Sloterdijk, and lots of others.

if people were marching around holding up copies of Being and Time and clobbering each other on social media for not being authentic enough it would be just as noxious. perhaps there is some alternate reality in which that is the case, but we live in this one, for better or for worse. and generally it is a better one, i think, although i'm not optimistic about the future precisely because i don't see any way to prevent the escalation of the dumbest and most cynical interpretations possible of his work. again, i'm not interested in just teeing off on social justice or whatever, but the rules of the game have changed. and if i'm going to take my cues from any continental theorist today (which is not as good as taking them from Greeks) it's going to be Land, no less thorny a writer and arguably even harder to defend.

basically i'm fucked no matter what. i think we all are, and that a world of escalating craziness ends in disaster for everyone. i would like to think there remains a way of extricating ourselves from a finger-trap of epic proportions but in order to do so there has to be some kind of move past Foucault stuff, in a sense. it doesn't necessarily imply going full-bore /acc either, a better plan would be something in the middle. obviously.

read The Accursed Share. it's quite brilliant. GB is also a major influence on both Baudrillard and Land, two guys who matter today.

or you can read these:
socialmatter.net/2018/03/22/principle-loss-reactionarys-introduction-georges-bataille/
socialmatter.net/2019/02/08/the-psychological-structure-of-antifascism/
socialmatter.net/2018/11/09/trump-and-the-sacred/

look carefully and you'll spot the Girard references in there too. Bataille was brilliant, as was Foucault. brilliant ideas have a power to shape reality to almost unimaginable degrees. the best we can do sometimes is just fucking survive amidst the waves guys like these can produce.

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Thanks, greatly appreciate it!

based Junger, one of the actual ubermensch that lived among us

also, that shit sounds like radical centrism

np senpai

>i don't even know if you ever had a proper frame of reference to begin with, but you've gone beyond the advent horizon of theory. all light bends now in the direction of the hyperdense void, and there seems no escape, only paranoia and the ultimate exsolution of your psyche
just to follow-up on this: this dubious creation tells me that i have perhaps accomplished some kind of Steam Achievement in philosophy and that it is probably time to stop proceeding further in this direction. i genuinely appreciate this user, as weird as that sounds to say, because in a certain sense i would agree with you. i think you're right about this. it's not really something i'm proud of, and it's largely a defense mechanism: rather like the CoF, or perhaps whatever kind of protocol is created by the machine gods of the Matrix. or insert allegory here.

you can learn a lot by meditating on the worst that is in people and society, but there does indeed come a point where one has to do the about-face and choose another direction. to have produced a kind of thought that is as you say is some kind of achievement, but Nietzsche has a line about this, about fighting with monsters. that it's not a good look, or something.

i appreciated you writing this user. just wanted to say that.

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>The Left isn't for centralisation of the government
>the Left promotes a particular form of political organisation which effectively seeks completion of the humanist project

>gulags people
>sets up massive surveillance states
>topples countries for democracy
>bans anyone that disagrees with them
>massive governmental programs
>calls anyone that mildly disagrees "fascists"
>turns a blind eye to ethnic crime against native europeans

amazing non-centralization and humanism there

>it's another "please ignore what leftists are doing" post

Amazing logic.

Is it pro-gnostic or anti-gnostic?

>Stephen Hicks
Ah, so turbopseudism

anti. but it's a misleading title. you don't need to know a whole lot about Gnosticism to engage with this book, it's not particularly dense and is quite polemical. but the author has at least done his homework.

Hicks' book is the worst of those three and not as good as this one either. but Wolin's is not without its flaws. no book is, especially those that wright about deconstruction and postmodernity, there is no perfect intellectual biographer of it. the best condemnations of postmodernity come from really sharp writers in that tradition themselves, which presents us with the paradox we have.

well, and Fredric Jameson. but in general it's because a lot of very perceptive writers find themselves in that camp and meddling with The Primal Forces of Nature. Foucault is the paradigmatic case of this, because the irony is that he was a pretty sharp critic of the neoliberalism apparently hates, he describes it well. but what do you do with the consequences of this critique, which leaves everybody floating in space?

Hicks' condemnation is too strong, and Peterson's take isn't great either. but nobody knows what the fuck is happening anymore, really.

You're pretty stupid.