/lit/ - Literature

>>9633616
Good post! I can barely see you through all of this experimental fiction going on but maybe it's schizoanalysis. Anyways:

I'd like to veer more towards appreciating Kant in the long run, it's a real black hole of its own in my reading. Right now for me it's still aesthetics>ethics but I figure once I shake my sillies out I'll eventually be a happier person. My inner Confucian always has a look of stern disapproval when I get carried away by all things desire too much. Moral life/ethical life/virtuous life/everything follows the will of Heaven. I'm just too lazy and sentimental to do this yet and still having too much agonizing "fun" with the dark places. And Land does make me want to read more Kant.

>Now of course Derrida isn't a naive moralist here either. In a few choice places he leaves the back door open for the Freudian or Lacanian unconscious, and for historical "weight" if you like that makes some contexts more statistically credible (observed and "read within" by more readers) than other contexts. Derrida doesn try to factor ideology out or anything like that. But what he does do, I think, establish in what I again think is a very Kantian way the limits of context, within which limits ethical choice and political critique can be made. His is a critical project in the old, German sense: he's determining the limits of reading, not cracking it open to any use you like.
Yep. I agree. Derrida's hardly a villain and Peterson's interpretation of him is uncharitable. But again tho: social justice as neoliberal communism really is a problem for academia. Witness Evergreen or Middlebury. It's not Derrida's fault any more than the Nazis were Nietzsche's fault. I'm with you that Derrida matters. There's just an intellectual sea change going on.

>All this is to say Petersen is a disingenuous fascist who is slinging mud at French intellectuals with whom the right already has old bones to pick; he's letting a 40 year old prank (Sokal) make his argument for him to ingratiate himself with an audience that already is looking for what he has to say.
This tho. Disingenuous? I get the same vibe from Peterson I get from Zizek: Peterson is to [fascist X] what Zizek is to the Grand Inquisitor. They know themselves too well to believe in the ideologies that actually serve as the necessary lubricant for a happy and otherwise unintellectualized existence. So the gears are always chafing and so they have to go on talking and explicating themselves down to the electrons.

I think Great Books are the way. More in fact so that people *don't* get it in their heads to go and reform society - for NRx reasons, for traditionalist reasons, or out of the sense of a moribund humanism that seems to me wildly out of touch with reality. English departments actually can have an interesting job in gathering up the remains of our tattered civilizational Logos after the hellacious beating it took in the 20C (and the beatings it dished out in the name of the same).

>>9539282