/lit/ - Literature

>>13000329
Zizek indicates also the distinction between Christianity and Buddhism, and again, he makes some important distinctions. there undoubtely are, but not all of these are explicable in entirely metaphysical forms: first of all, the Buddha is not *crucified,* and moreover the conversion of Constantine, the role played by Augustine, the whole meaning of Graeco-Roman antiquity and other things produce different forms of thinking for different reasons. i often wonder if Nietzsche had taken his cues from India (as Schopenhauer did) rather than decocting his own version of the ER from Dionysus and Greece if things might have taken a different turn there. Zizek can do metaphysical acrobatics for days wielding Hegel in one hand and Lacan in the other, but i think he does this to play the role of a kind of gadfly w/r/t democracy and capitalism today that is often a plate-juggling act i find tiresome after a while. and in spite of the fact that most of /lit/ seems to think he absolutely shelved JBP in their debate i thought it was much more even on the whole, especially with Zizek basically punting towards the end and saying he understands communism has absolutely failed. he just doesn't like Peterson's attitude about what to do next, which i also understand, and pointing out the terminal uncleanliness of Peterson's own room was a point well-made also.

he really doesn't want to give it up for Eastern thought and i understand this, obviously. authoritarian state capitalism bothers him as much as Woke Capital bothers Land and Woke Everything bothers JBP. they're all right in some senses and wrong in some others, they all have in each other - or would, if they spoke, which they will not, except perhaps in the rat-infested corridors of my own collapsing head - nemeses and rock-scissors-paper relationships of a type. but here again is why i would say there has to be some compromise in these things, or at least a kind of realization of those places where you just have to accept the limits of your own master thinkers in this regard. Lacanian analysis is very powerful stuff and it has helped me out of a few foxholes, but psychoanalytic dialectics really can become voluntary wormholes, as much as Landian theory can. *you have a choice whether or not to think about this stuff.* desire for psychoanalysts is an enormously powerful concept, there's no question about it. and Buddhism is a kind of self-refuting philosophy of desire in this way. and that is the point i would want to bring up: what if i *don't* want to suffer? what if i recognize my desires as *empty?* what then? Lacan is brilliant in his own way, but there's more to Buddhism - i think, i'm no expert - than the kind of meme treatment Zizek gives it. but that's just me. i just think that recognizing that desires themselves can be understood in ways other than Hegel or Lacan understood them is at least necessary, and that the crucial distinction lies between the negative and the *empty.*

(cont'd)