/lit/ - Literature

>>11204527
apparently he's gotten in some dust-ups with habermas over his political views but he's basically making the conservative argument against neoliberal bloat.

>What is required of the Platonic zoo and its newer instantiations above all is to determine whether there is a difference between the populace and its leadership, and whether that difference is a graduated one or a specific one. According to the first assumption, the difference, the distance, between the herders and their charges is only accidental and pragmatic. One could accord to such a herd the capacity to choose its own shepherds. But, if there is a sharp difference between the people who run the zoo and the people who live in it, then they are so basically different that it would not be advisable for them to elect leaders. They should, rather, have governance by insight. Only a deceptive zoo director, a pseudo-statesmen or political sophist, would promote himself as one of the people. The true shepherd acknowledges difference and discretely allows it to be known that he, because he leads through insight, stands closer to the gods than the confused populace he governs.

>Two thousand years after Plato wrote it seems as if not only the gods but the wise have abandoned us, and left us alone with our partial knowledge and our ignorance. What is left to us in the place of the wise is their writings, in their glinting brilliance and their increasing obscurity. They still lay in more or less accessible editions; they can still be read, if only one knew why one should bother. It is their fate to stand in silent bookshelves, like posted letters no longer collected, sent to us by authors, of whom we no longer know whether or not they could be our friends.

https://rekveld.home.xs4all.nl/tech/Sloterdijk_RulesForTheHumanZoo.pdf

he's also got some interesting ideas about restoring patronage as a political principle. he's no cyberpunk, but he's also not in a kind of far-right monarchist way or anything that you could call neoreactionary. he seems to prefer surrealism in art. one of those guys that when you read him you go, holy fuck, this guy really makes sense. why aren't we all just doing this? but he realizes of course that the requirements of a state necessarily mean that it has to do business with the Outside. hence the immunological stuff. and shows basically how fundamentally *sensible* nietzsche was. we don't have to hand our destinies all the way over to accelerating capital in the way land imagines it. but the polis as presently understood is due for a corrective turn to the right that he is really good at articulating without lapsing into full-blown Deus Vult stupidity. a super-smart guy. got a shout-out in one of baudrillard's later books and the ziz admires him too.

there's good short interview here on some of this, there's sadly little on YouTube translated into english. but it kind of touches on these things.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_fsFwf0juk