/lit/ - Literature

>>13000387
i have a similar critique for Heidegger too, btw. Heidegger frequently distinguishes between the technological and the poetic, aletheia and veritas, the metaphysics of production and all of this. but there is a realm in between that i think is kind of germane: it is in that area of labor which we can call 'play' that doesn't quite allow itself to be reduced to one side or the other. i'm thinking here of things like *singing,* or playing basketball, playing with your dog, relatively small things like this but still ultimately important. what happens when you want to do things that aren't driven technologically or fall into his usual camp of that which we are producing - more accurately, *doing* - that is in some sense important to us existentially, involves our being in the world, but at the same time isn't *so* expressly existential that we can really call it poetry, or that belongs to Being in this way?

Land has his own theory of capital, of course, and in a way it is kind of Heideggerian by another means: Land kind of reverses the order of things and makes Being chimerical if it doesn't belong to capital or teleoplexy, and in so doing makes the Being of capital really the only game in town. his own spectacularly imaginative theory of anti-entropics follows from this, especially since we can do all kinds of things playfully and be paid for money, or not, and on she goes. but here again is this kind of space that i think Heidegger, like Hegel, might actually have struggled to formulate: a space in which one has no mind, or a kind of mind which is for lack of a better word 'playful' and yet in being playful doesn't immediately fall into worlds of being simulacral, inauthentic, or otherwise technological. of course this is at the same time the domain of the absolutely worst forms of boomer shitliberalism and micro-resistances that Zizek himself points out as being the death of relevant postmodernity also: i basically fucking gasped when he mentioned Foucault in that debate, and sighed when that line of conversation didn't go any further, because he was exactly right about that. with Foucault things do indeed take this massive turn into all things discursive, such that we can no longer tell what is meaningfully authentic and not, and aaaaaaaaaaaaaall the rest. all of it. and for this of course there is Land.

but things are changing once again, i think. everything is super-engaged, super-activist, and we can't tell what's power from what isn't, whether oppression by another name is oppression or not, state-sanctioned scapegoating and all of the rest. in a world of hyper-reaction it's very hard to tell what is *genuinely affirmative* from what is *compulsively affirmative* and that to me is an important distinction. because when you well and truly can't it means a kind of a key change is necessary. it can't just be affirmation against negation. it may be negation versus emptiness.

(cont'd)