/lit/ - Literature

>>12663722
>what you have in something like that essay is just a deliberate, 'satanic' inversion of the dialectic of enlightnment
that's interesting. it does seem warranted tho, in a way. the DoE finds a secret crack in the heroism of Ulysses, which is a colossal downer, but it's not hard to see why if you're Adorno. but there are those who take issue with him in return, and for them there's Bataille.

>call it the diabolism of liberal theocracy
i would call it this also. the world of sacrifice opens caverns dark and deep within the universe of petit-bourgeois narcissism. there is something profoundly illiberal at the heart of liberalism and it cannot stand being brought out into the light

>but it's all just a word game, replacing term for term. the logic is still there, but now it's correspondence with reality is just--gone. it's pure fantasy.
about eighteen post-structuralists would like to have a word with you. this is the world we are now in

i'm not on the side of maximal deconstruction, i am what i am because i was terribly worried about the prospect that nobody was actually steering the ship at all, or if they were, they were steering it more or less on blind impulse. this is what led me to Land and away from the post-structural guys. Bataille is good - very good - at torpedoing something Lacan also wants, which is the conflation of desire with the Good. apocalypse, eschatology and sacrifice are things i can into, i don't really know why. they kind of resonate with me on some deep level and suggest something fundamentally true about the nature of our fantasies and our desires

GB was also a major influence on Baudrillard, those systems of ritual consumption and destruction were interesting to him also, and i think it was Bataille/Mauss et al that finally forced him to break with Marx also. if Girard didn't exist at all i would probably namedrop Bataille much more than i do, but Girard wears a white hat that i like, and find pretty convincing. the logic of sacrifice and murder, these kinds of things...they get pretty dark, but i think they skew agreeably well with Marxist theorymongering also. for me at least they incline me to look at civilization a lot more charitably than i might if i was still in my unironic socialism phase. Confucian ritual also seems to me to deflect a lot of the dark stuff that drives the chains.

>>12663865
well he hasn't been fired, but he's been given some kind of message, and seems to be something of a nonperson at his uni these days, and he's blogged about it too, his disaffection with academia and its sacred cows. which is, imho, a total fucking disgrace, because he's a smart guy and is for me asking all the right questions. but he's rubbed up against the Common Sense of the day, much as Peterson did. i'm not sure if Land was ever actively turfed from his job or if he just knew it was time for a change for him as well. it was the same for Bret Weinstein at Evergreen (and considerably worse).