/lit/ - Literature

>>16430296
>>16430403
"I am a terrorist and nihilist in theory as the others are with their weapons,"
The problem with critique itself is this carving out of new worlds. Baudrillard's method is itself the creation of a 'hyperreality', and ironically this is where critique becomes in its symbolic form the very same method employed in carpet bombing. Send in the first wave of bombers, then when the ambulances and firetrucks arrive the second wave of bombers will drop its payload. Whatever survives is true in its verification of the symbols.

Any possibility of truth is lost to the ugliness of the method, rationalist pantheism becomes a war of attrition from the skies, and the subject hit by proximity, an overwhelming payload that can just as easily hit everything surrounding the target yet leave what is essential to the structure in place. Man can survive in impossible places, which was the great lesson of military perfection in the World Wars, something beyond morale, strength, or even the relaxed instincts of the warrior. If man can survive in such places one cannot even imagine the landscapes in which truth may survive, nor how it overwhelms the senses without respect for laws of war and borders, the laws of time and space. Truth is both unknowable and overwhelming in its devastation.

Baudrillard's confusion over the Iraq War and 9/11 clarifies how he had lost sight of the symbolic, of the world being carved out by critique. War becomes an event precisely to the extent that it tears into the world of symbols, forcing a collision with the real, and with Baudrillard this results in an elimination of the terrorists, and the event itself, as anything but symbols. He engages in a counterattack within the realm of symbols, although it is unclear whether he is aiming this attack at the terrorists, Western nations, or just other symbols. One can certainly make the argument that terrorists engage at a level of symbolic warfare, (although in the case of Al-Qaeda/ISIS one has to question the extent to which carefully orchestrated spectacles of violence aimed at the Western psyche) but this was in no way the intent of the 9/11 attacks. Our experience is not in any way the reality nor even symbol of the event, such misconceptions are themselves the problem of the theorist becoming lost in his own theories, of rewriting the world in accordance with thinking.

Why do tankies deny the heroism of modern warfare? What could be more heroic than a few men holding out against an entire army in collapsing and burning buildings? It's apocalyptic, something even beyond heroism.
https://youtu.be/Il3FJMf4mSE

>>13560889
>Here we may sense that the smouldering of ruins is our own connection with earthly law, our whiskers and the pads on our feet. All of the perversion of a reconnection with nature begins to reflect itself in the totalism of natural law; both the accelerated destruction and hypergaudy identification with its symbols, as if Anglos turning nature's beauty into a freak show. We were never meant to bury ourselves within the earth, but rise from it - or at least bury ourselves in it without any hubris against the natural form and our own being. A quietism of awaiting decay in a lone forest grave would be the only appropriate suicide, as opposed to the willless denatured being of the curse of eternal struggle against a boulder and sunset. The suicide of our collective spirit is the ontology of our time, one which forms without dialectic - and this is worse than any mechanized genocide. Thus one can imagine the Great Extinction as a sacrifice to embarrassment: the low animals choose to commit sexual suicide before the statues of Praxitiles rather than being domesticated by giant stone figures with the genetics of hairless rats. Our own law disgorged to that which was supposed as our divine and legal dominion.

>The paradox of the human realm is that it will never come close to the complex lines existing within nature: the pluming clouds over the sunset, the monstrous rock-face peering into our being from prehuman geological warfare, the rolling fog over the forest canopy which only increases the height of the sovereign ash tree. The single appearance of a fata morgana is forever superior to any megacity. Beauty is not even a worthy discussion, and one cannot help but notice that abandonment of simple tools only increases the ugliness of escape into rational, lined abstraction.

>War is a recognition that the greatest works of human beauty must fall to ruin; divine sprawl, the architecture of nature's demons. Their lingering begins to scar the natural remains of our spirit. And so the dogs take flight across the Volga because our age needs no Melanchoetes, Theridamas, Oresitrophos... And we cry out for our lost masters as they devour themselves. We, the hybrid-feral coydogs, wait alongside suburban dumpsters to scavenge on whatever wanders out of the forest. And even this is now being overrun.

>>13182132
In Germany, on the contrary, the element of nationalism was not yet exhausted. Therein lies the reason why the struggle was renewed and now seemed to be assuming its final form; the reason being that Germany had to lose the war of conquest which she waged as a national state - and correspondingly one saw the forces of resistance grow in proportion as her efforts increased. Now it is important that along with the others she should win the war in so far as it is a war of unity."

What does this mean? Firstly, and the significance of this should not be understated, the birthplace of Nationalism has been exhausted, both in nation and spirit. Where nationalism remained it was as an element, and in an occupied state completely at odds with the Western order, this was a temporary stoppage in the move to "its final form." What then occurs in the war is that with every effort to exert itself as a nationalist state Germany is met by a much greater force, and is then exhausted. It assumes the same fate as France, sacrifices itself in the war of unity.

In essence, nationalism after the First World War could only exist as a minor oppositional force to the world order, a negation of itself, and any appearance only increased the need to finalise this order. WWII was the death march of the last nationalist state against the European/world order.

How badly do you want to lose this, Thrasymachus? You are arguing bare symbols against forms, and a minor period of a writer against his work as a whole. You want to scratch the surface and claim this is the whole story, disregarding any real engagement with the entire image. Yet you would be the first to argue against Walter Benjamin making a greater claim of understanding war than Junger. Is not the whole understanding of an individual's work greater than the partial, just as a complete consideration of warfare is required to understand war?

Need I remind you that Junger saw the individual as a single essence? His younger period is not at all opposed to the later period, this is a rising of his spirit, which must be reconciled with and then finalised as the entire character of his being. One could certainly view his younger period as a moment of perfection of this whole character, but then we might see something else entirely. Rather than a nationalist, we see the rising of a noble and ancient spirit, and the quick turn against the fascists proves this reading.

You are a terrible reader and wannabe academic. And completely disrespectful to me, anyone wanting a real discussion of these difficult works, and Junger's ideas. As if academia wasn't trash enough to begin with, and in complete opposition to Junger's thought, you come into this with swagger, passive-aggression, and two fistfuls of bullshit. You may be too pompous to realise this now, but perhaps in time you will be rightfully embarrassed. What a pathetic way to argue.

Now fuck off, Creightonfag, your agenda is clear.

>>12683641
I would even go so far as to say that war is the closest humanity comes to the essence of beauty. The figure emerging out of the rubble approaches perfect inhumanity, divine peace, a memory of the moment of creation - of Aphrodite, or Mary who offered her half-devoured child back to the rebels. To think that a man should be free of emotion and spirit in such circumstances is inhuman in an altogether different way. There is a deep humility amongst men who survived within ruins, and for others to live they had to lift the veil of death from the earth and sleep along the banks of the underworld. War is simply the form of devastation entering the world, and men having to survive within the rift. To accept this is not inhuman, it is humility before Fate - and so perfectly human. Those on the homefront who live in a mobilised form of peace while lamenting their own ruin drape veils over life wherever it appears; they are the citizens who offer to eat the half-devoured child, just as the rebels flee. Against Fate they offer their own homes to an unknown and unseen enemy, devouring even the memory of creation - something far worse than war.

"Stalingrad is no longer a town. By day it is an enormous cloud of burning, blinding smoke; it is a vast furnace lit by the reflection of the flames. And when night arrives, one of those scorching, howling, bleeding nights, the dogs plunge into the Volga and swim desperately to gain the other bank. The nights of Stalingrad are a terror for them. Animals flee this hell; the hardest stones can not bear it for long; only men endure."