/lit/ - Literature

>The staff doctor, von Grävenitz, told me that physical exams showed the great majority of the girls to be virgins. This is also apparent from their faces, but it is difficult to say [whether] this is more readable from their foreheads or their eyes. A silver glow of chastity suffuses the face. Its light does not have the glow of active virtue, but more a second-hand reflection, like moonlight. It lets us perceive the sun, the source of such serenity.
Is he right? Can you tell whether a girl is a virgin or not by her appearance?

The new normal will last 10+ years, "real life" as we have known it (if we even did) is over. Why haven't you withdrawn into your imagination yet? There's less reason to think about shit like society and relationships than ever before in history.
Me personally, I'm daydreaming about fairy and elf goddess waifus while building my own version of the Atlantis legend.
Consider the luminar in pic related's Eumeswil but instead of a time machine, it's a time-making machine - the imagination. Whether our fantasies are "real" or not is simply a question of how vivid it all becomes.

Also Ernst Jünger would have concurred with many of the insights in this book, the two having the same last name is a coincidence.

>The forest rebel is the concrete individual, and he acts in the concrete world. He has no need of theories or of laws concocted by some party jurist to know what is right. He descends to the very springs of morality, where the waters are not yet divided and directed into institutional channels. Matters become simple here - assuming something uncorrupted still lives in him. We already saw that the great experience of the forest is the encounter with one’s own Self, with one’s invulnerable core, with the being that sustains and feeds the individual phenomenon in time. This meeting, which aids so powerfully in both returning to health and banishing fear, is also of highest importance in a moral sense. It conducts us to that strata which underlies all social life and has been common to all since the origins. It leads to *the* person who forms the foundation beneath the individual level, from whom the individuations emanate. At this depth there is not merely community; there is identity. It is this that the symbol of the embrace alludes to. The I recognizes itself in the other, following the age-old wisdom, “Thou art that.” This other may be a lover, or it may be a brother, a fellow sufferer, or a defenceless neighbour. By helping in this manner, the I also benefits itself in the eternal. And with this the basic order of the universe is confirmed.

>These are facts of experience. Countless people alive today have passed the midpoint of the nihilistic process, the rock-bottom of the maelstrom. They have learned that the mechanism reveals its menacing nature all the more clearly there; man finds himself in the bowels of a great machine devised for his destruction. They have also learned firsthand that all rationalism leads to mechanism, and every mechanism to torture its logical consequence. In the nineteenth century this had not yet been realized.

>Only a miracle can save us from such whirlpools. This miracle has happened, even countless times, when a man stepped out of the lifeless prisons to extend a helping hand to others. This has happened even in prisons, indeed especially there. Whatever the situation, whoever the other, the individual can become this fellow human being - and thereby reveal his native nobility. The origins of aristocracy lay in giving protection, protection from the threat of monsters and demons. This is the hallmark of nobility, and it still shines today in the guard who secretly slips a piece of bread to a prisoner. This cannot be lost, and on this the world subsists. These are the sacrifices on which it rests.

-- Ernst Junger/The Forest Passage

this was a *man.*

>The forest rebel is the concrete individual, and he acts in the concrete world. He has no need of theories or of laws concocted by some party jurist to know what is right. He descends to the very springs of morality, where the waters are not yet divided and directed into institutional channels. Matters become simple here - assuming something uncorrupted still lives in him. We already saw that the great experience of the forest is the encounter with one’s own Self, with one’s invulnerable core, with the being that sustains and feeds the individual phenomenon in time. This meeting, which aids so powerfully in both returning to health and banishing fear, is also of highest importance in a moral sense. It conducts us to that strata which underlies all social life and has been common to all since the origins. It leads to the person who forms the foundation beneath the individual level, from whom the individuations emanate. At this depth there is not merely community; there is identity. It is this that the symbol of the embrace alludes to. The I recognizes itself in the other, following the age-old wisdom, “Thou art that.” This other may be a lover, or it may be a brother, a fellow sufferer, or a defenceless neighbour. By helping in this manner, the I also benefits itself in the eternal. And with this the basic order of the universe is confirmed.

>These are facts of experience. Countless people alive today have passed the midpoint of the nihilistic process, the rock-bottom of the maelstrom. They have learned that the mechanism reveals its menacing nature all the more clearly there; man finds himself in the bowels of a great machine devised for his destruction. They have also learned firsthand that all rationalism leads to mechanism, and every mechanism to torture its logical consequence. In the nineteenth century this had not yet been realized.

>Only a miracle can save us from such whirlpools. This miracle has happened, even countless times, when a man stepped out of the lifeless prisons to extend a helping hand to others. This has happened even in prisons, indeed especially there. Whatever the situation, whoever the other, the individual can become this fellow human being - and thereby reveal his native nobility. The origins of aristocracy lay in giving protection, protection from the threat of monsters and demons. This is the hallmark of nobility, and it still shines today in the guard who secretly slips a piece of bread to a prisoner. This cannot be lost, and on this the world subsists. These are the sacrifices on which it rests.

Ernst Junger, The Forest Passage

>>10982395
but again tho. here's a model that can be followed. junger, who was no fucking stooge, wound up fighting for the Bad Guys, twice. he did so with honor and distinction. no need for zeal or devotion here, if you know - as he did - that that to which the collective zeal was being devoted to was completely wrong-headed. he had to conduct himself as a *soldier* but even in doing so there was this double need to refrain from doing *more* than a soldier was supposed to do.

the nazis, it should be remembered, are the original prototype for social justice. and the stalinist types afterwards, and the maoists of the cultural revolution. it doesn't matter whether they were left totalitarians or right totalitarians. the end process was the same every time.

marcus aurelius is another not-terrible example of what i mean. here's a guy who does his job, which is defending rome from the german barbarians. there is no need to drive them to the edge of the earth, crucify them, whatever else. the job needs to get done and it *gets* done, but you don't read a lot of devotion or zeal in the meditations, unless its devotion to the stoic ideal.

nietzsche's commentary on the stoics is, as it is of everything he writes, of course devastatingly accurate. but we have to ask ourselves about the concept of zeal, and especially political zeal, today. mob sensibilities are very hard to argue with, but that is what a mob always is, in the end: is collective zeal looking for an object.

and it's why girard is That Dude. because he understands that the mob is *looking for a cure for its collective identity crisis.* it is 100% the same conclusion lacan reached when he was inquiring into the nature of hysteria and the sphinx: that the sphinx is looking for a master, and all of its questions are riddles poised to *evade this truth.* it's why i can argue that girard is not just a cheap ripoff of lacan, as >>10978712 suggests, he's looking at the *phenomenology of the crowd* rather than the individual being in psychoanalytic practice. it's a crucial distinction.

existential man is not really religious man, but the lines get very connected once we start talking about hegel, heidegger, sartre et al. in situations of religious holy war, as zizek says, everything is permitted. the gods are not too far away but much too close.

consider again the ending of the dark knight: the joker knows all of this and absolutely depends on it. and yet one boatful of people declines to pull the trigger. in the Hour of Decision, sometimes the right thing to do is absolutely nothing. you just wait. you have no idea what for. but not firing the first shot meant that the second and far more destructive shot was not fired.

i haven't been to church since middle school and i am not a practicing catholic. but girardian stuff just makes too much sense to me. maybe it won't always be so. this is to be hoped for.

>>8660406
>There's no problem today. This is what you must understand if you accept violence, because if you accept violence you accept everything; everything is as it "deserves" to be.

I have some serious doubts about 21C Nietzsche. Not that he himself was wrong. More that people accept him unquestionably.

There has to be a limit. This is what de Maistre is saying. In order for there to be a limit, people are going to have to at some point stop being mimetic and agree on something. Even *this* process, Girard will say, will involve yet another murder. And so on.

Peter Thiel got it right. The danger lies in everybody virally copying everyone else. So did Clausewitz. In a world where everyone is constrained by the logic of the duel, you don't get the Ubermensch or even tragedy. Maybe some people have powerful, even transcendent experiences. But everything else dies.

>>8603915
What an awesome question.

I'm reading Eumeswil right now, and I'm all in on the anarch. All fucking in. It's like if James Bond was Bruce Lee, Ernst Junger would be Ip Man. It's a stupid comparison in many ways (conflating literary and historic figures from across cultures, etc.) but...well, whatever.

But I think that his concept of the anarch one of these concepts that really makes sense coming from a conservative-revolutionary background - moreover, one that actually sees the war, as Junger does, the craziness and the transcendent dimensions of it that he describes.

How about you? Which is the best Junger?

>/lit/ is a classier version of /pol/