/lit/ - Literature

>>12003514
>But again, it looks like you have a dualistic opposition here between nature and non-nature (you can say power as “will” and power as “necessity”) so I am distrustful of this idea.
i don't tho. obviously Nietzsche is a way cool guy, but the really key thinker here is *Heidegger* and not Nietzsche. in terms of the distinction between nature and non-nature, i don't ultimately believe there is one. Nietzsche didn't either, and that was what made him interesting: Nature is also Culture, and Culture is also Nature: wat do? and his is a soaring vision for all time like that.

Nietzsche is a great thinker of *biology,* but biology isn't what Land is all about, however much he enjoys grumbling about genes on Twitter. the question isn't about Nature and Culture anymore, it's about Culture and Technology - or, as Simondon would have said, Mechanology. Land has more than a little social Darwinism in him, to be sure, and he tends to see Capital as a kind of self-selecting artificial environment. that's hardly news, that business is a jungle is what everybody knows. his thesis - again, not really all that crazy, when you think about it - is that capital selects for its own in that way. where things get a little crazy is when this blows back towards culture, and we start realizing that we are being consensually or volitionally programmed in this form: that capital is a computer which processes desire. once again, there is a need to understand that this is not in fact a request for old-fashioned System-Smashing, b/c i happen to like washing machines, wi-fi et al. in a certain powerful sense, one of the things that i find most attractive about this philosophy is the *critique of desire itself,* that is to say, the Will as it might have been understood by 19C thinkers. i'm neither a Schopenhauerian pessimist nor a Nietzschean optimist-pessimist/pessimist of strength and so on. i find myself in a much more complicated place, being skeptical about a lot of pessimism (when it takes the form of irony) and optimism (when it takes the form of romantic politics). i'm also pessimistic about being skeptical about the whole thing (cynicism) and as such, i wind up with mysticism (which i like).

this kind of dualism takes me back towards a position of *reciprocity,* the dangers of which i am highly aware of. Girard is my boy, after all. but i also have a lot of love, as it is probably clear by now, for Chinese metaphysics (the yin-yang of things, and the Way), Hegel (dialectics) and even a little deep ecology also. but all of these things only become possible once the Will as understood in its 19C sense is *surrendered.* Nietzsche is a big deal and always will be a big deal, but he makes sense more as an ethical teacher of man inasmuch as he is a process, which is to my mind the right way to understand the Ubermensch and much else. a kind of becoming, but it is a human becoming.