Great stuff, this series is what I love about your writing most of all: you can take a topic I would have told you I don't care about at all, and write something so clear, eloquent, and thought provoking it makes me unable to even remember how I could have found this uninteresting.
The only thing you do better is when you write about something I already know I care about (e.g. occultism in Silicon Valley).
Enjoy your holidays, hope 2024 is a great year for you (and all fellow Unpopular Frontists), and thanks for filling my 2023 with lots of interesting, thoughtful writing.
Exceptional work. The incel example in the context of comparing Girard and Marx is insightfully chosen and explained. I appreciate your charitable (it seems to me) emphasis on Girard's ambivalence between Enlightenment and counter-Enlightenment reaction and how the novelists he interprets may share that ambivalence. Your discussion of the commodity fetish evokes for me one more framework that might be useful in interpreting narratives of decadence: the value of purity.
In their 2014 paper "Against the Yuck Factor," Kelly and Morar conclude that the emotion of disgust is an especially unreliable moral indicator because it extends one's reaction to poisons and pathogens toward socially contingent "foreign elements," so to speak. Disgust is a fast-acting rejection response to literally or figuratively "spit something out" before pollution can occur. But when someone is culturally conditioned to find an target disgusting, they experience that disgust just the same way, just as immediately and overwhelmingly, as they would when smelling or tasting something toxic-seeming. In the grip of disgust and its sense of emergency, every disgusting object seems intrinsically dangerous and everything threatened by that object seems intrinsically valuable. In disgust's immediacy, there is no consciousness of mediation -- there's just you and the threat -- or much capacity to introduce it through, say, reflection on what constitutes danger and why.
As the moral emotion of anger is bound up with the value of fairness and contempt is bound up with authority or hierarchy, so the moral emotion of disgust is bound up with purity: there is a sacred that must be protected from the profane with an urgency that supersedes logical or empirical justification. For disgust, the body is a temple. It's not hard to imagine how an emotion like disgust might evolve to help us survive as a species, in its sheer practicality and even in its hostile and regulative social dimension. Sometimes disgust is right to make us spit. It is just not reliably right and, more importantly, arguably reliably wrong (maybe differing from anger or contempt here) as soon as we start talking about people and not, like, literal excrement.
I don't know how helpful armchair psychology of reactionaries is, especially compared to focusing on their ideologies or material interests, but: there is a throughline of purity here that connects a desire for direct unmediated access, reification of what is contextual into an intrinsic property, and an anxiety over decadent decay. There never was such a thing as artistic pursuit without material concerns, a noble aristocracy without brutish domination, a salon without pettiness, a mind without a body, the sacred without the profane. But disgust and its attendant value of purity can make it seem so. In theory, corruption could be understood in terms of harm done or injustice suffered, and we could discuss concretely in terms of harms and injustices what enables or inhibits intellectual and aesthetic authenticity and originality. But in practice, the value of purity forms an entirely separate interpretive framework that resists reduction and appears ineffable: some things are just sacred and others just profane.
There seem to me two crucial moves for the reasonably ambivalent individual to make here: first, to affirm that compassion and fairness are higher values than purity and authority, that the latter must serve and be understood in terms of their contribution to the former; and second, to acknowledge that even the value of the higher values must still be interpreted, that mediation (or Thirdness) remains between us and even what is most obviously true or good. We do not transcend mediation, but find and create kinder and fairer modes of mediation, what Dewey calls "amelioration." Dewey argues that there are no ends in themselves, just "ends in view": purposes or values that we take to be good enough for going on in the moment but which are always provisional and open to question. What is authentic or "pure" is, at best, just so in relation to its context and the other values it realizes, which will change. We should be sympathetic to the alienated and any yearning for intrinsic and irreducible value. But we must have the courage to move on, again and again, to the next, provisionally more valuable, end in view. Ultimately, I can only conclude that the politics of despair, whatever else it involves, represents the lack of this courage.
I've very much appreciated this whole thought-provoking and important series, and also Devin Fitzpatrick's comment as a kind of necessary coda--necessary because it raises again what for me was in many ways the most important moment in the series, the question in part 3: "But what of us who are not great novelists or mystics or heroes?" That question haunts me, in part because I imagined part 4 would go some way to answering that question, and I'm not sure it did. It seems to me that focusing on the novel in general, and Stendhal-as-read-by-Girard in particular, puts us once again in the realm of standards both impossibly high, and mediated (in this case, by artistry). I say Stendhal-as-read-by Girard, because it sounds from this like Girard ignored Stendhal's self-lampooning aspect. S. always seems to me to present himself as a slightly ridiculous admirer-from-afar of impossibly above him, beautiful aristocratic women (the Countess Dembowska in On Love) and impossibly high-performing heroic leaders (Napoleon). Indeed, can his own loves and artistic preoccupations be said to be free of mediation (by both social distance and his own imagination) or commodification (is he not appreciating those he admires as, in some sense, goods-of-the-imagination)? He certainly, as he presents it all, does not seem to know them as people. And again, all of this seems to come with a good deal of self-deprecating humor. He can imagine transcending the limits of ordinariness, but he doesn't think he has, or ever will.
In part, I'm posting because I want to ask about the key concepts, mediation and commodification (or commodity fetishism). I (somewhat wantonly) used them in the previous paragraph, but in fact I find both quite difficult to understand, and my efforts to learn about them have so far been fruitless. Alas, much of what I find on the internet, or when I try to look them up in Marx himself, comes across as a bit too in-universe for a novice untrained in Marxian discourse to really understand. I feel in need of a good intro to both. Can anyone point me to a good source to refine my education in these terms? (Is there perhaps a John Ganz post I missed, entitled "What is commodity fetishism?")
Thanks for your thoughtful reply. For introductions or refreshers on philosophical concepts, when the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is insufficient, I recommend looking for *.edu sites written by academics for their students. For example, this delightfully Web 1.0 excerpt from an introduction to critical theory looks substantive and succinct: https://www.cla.purdue.edu/academic/english/theory/marxism/modules/marxfetishism.html
On your general themes, if I've understood you right: it's difficult to cogently move from discussions of impersonal forces (historical, economic, psychoanalytic) to individual ethical recommendations. If one's position is that we are entrapped or enframed within the ideological iron cage of our era or whatever, which is suppressing and subverting autonomy or originality or spontaneity, one probably cannot then say "here is what individuals can do to induce incremental change in the system!" without being ridiculous. Each act would only be subverted, and some grand rupturing expression is required.
When I referred to the "reasonably ambivalent individual," I think I'm imagining someone who is inclined toward such a viewpoint while also wary of it: someone who feels as though they are drowning in mediocrity, that brilliance is ignored or punished and that the sludge of society is only further solidifying as time goes on, but reluctant to accept the all-or-nothing attitude toward social change that likely follows. I don't know how much individual ethical stances matter for the purposes of reform of revolution, whether political or aesthetic, compared to collective action and solidarity across individuals with different ethical outlooks but common interests. But I too feel like there ought to always be a takeaway, that there's always some meaning in that. And so I think it's important to affirm: even if you cannot always act, you can choose to interpret your own reactions differently, so that your thoughts are clear when the opportunity for action comes. When you feel anger, ask what would be fair and why. When you feel contempt, ask what would be the proper assignment of status or esteem any why. And when you feel disgust, reject it, in the name of never, no matter how monstrous your foes, becoming someone who views other persons as shit.
Following that advice probably won't make anyone into a world-historical artist, but maybe it will contribute to a world in which more and better world-historical artists can come into being -- among other benefits.
Thank you for the detailed reply and link, which is quite helpful (and indeed, as you say, delightfully Web 1.0), with useful links to supplementary definitions and textual references, etc.
As for the rest, I now see that your original post was strongly focused on the problem of disgust as it was evoked for you in Ganz's discussion of commodity fetishism. With some embarrassment, I admit I cannot now reconstruct how I saw that linked to the question raised in part 3 that I mentioned. But, it does seem that that Girard, judging from parts 3 and 4, has little to say in terms of individual ethical recommendations, beyond his admiration for artists, mystics, and heroes. And if we, his readers, were to take up his admiration, would that not itself mean we had been implanted with a desire powerfully mediated through Girard himself? If that's true, perhaps ultimately Girard himself leaves us in an impasse.
I think your observation on Girard is astute. I have two suggestions, for what they are worth: first, I think you correctly perceived that to discuss disgust is to discuss the individual. Although I was going off on my own tangent, I was working toward connecting general claims (like "given the structure of desire itself, we need a grand artistic breakthrough and here is what it would look like") with a more recognizable individual experience ("once we extract a kernel of truth from these ideas, here is what any given person, alleged genius or no, might learn from it"). At least, that was the spirit in which I interpreted your reply.
My second suggestion is, as a non-expert in Girard but someone who has seen this sort of pattern before: the impasse may be the point. If we are all doomed to imitate, what do we do? Well, we would need someone or something to transcend our fate: a God we can worship in a direct and pure dyadic relationship or a genius in whose works to bask. We would need a hierarchy, as egalitarianism would only reinforce our mediocrity. How convenient for those who already value hierarchy!
That said, I wouldn't view this as a conspiracy or bad faith or something, necessarily, and that's why I praised Ganz for focusing on Girard's seeming ambivalence. It seems that Girard strains against the straightforward well-trodden path in the previous paragraph enough to have some interesting ideas.
I like these posts and, as a subscriber, am glad to be getting more on Girard. They may induce me to read more than the few short selections of his I’ve looked at.
Thanks for this! I'd always been meaning to check out Girard. There are definitely funding opportunities to look into him, but more than that, I think--providing the German Studies perspective--he's benefitted also for the search for a heroic Theorist post-French Theory, a new system, a search that has benefited folks like Kittler and Luhmann.
Honestly though? Hearing you lay it all out here, the Stendhalian notion of a kind of democratic aristocracy of experience, a heroism of refinement and distinction (as the search for the new, the different, but also, the articulated, the worked through, the sharpened) as against the levelling of the time might really be my own personal aesthetic or life philosophy. The analagous pre-Nietzschean figure in the German context would be Goethe, who also advanced his own conception of aristocracy at the dawn of the bourgeois epoch. Intellectually, I'm with the left, intellectually, material and class analysis are central, but, I think I'm not the only one who finds the left's cultural production, especially in recent decades, just... really bad, totally standardized, kind of blah, in a way that keeps me from really putting my heart into it. And like Stendhal, or rather, Stendhal's protagonists, I think in so far as I find myself resenting both the very wealthy and the cultural bourgeoisie, it's really for their incredible cultural mediocrity, for their small-mindedness. I don't know! This stuff really resonated. Just pulled down the Charterhouse of Parma and can't wait to revisit it.
of Stendhal/Tocqueville/Flaubert/Balzac Tocqueville is the one I know the best / much at all, but he says roughly the same thing re: his internal struggles between admiring democracy and believing it to be superior but still preferring aristocracy on some aesthetic level: "the sight of such universal uniformity saddens and chills me, and I am tempted to regret that state of society which has ceased to be. When the world was full of men of great importance and extreme insignificance, of great wealth and extreme poverty, of great learning and extreme ignorance, I turned aside from the latter to fix my observation on the former alone, who gratified my sympathies. But I admit that this gratification arose from my own weakness ..." https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/de-tocqueville/democracy-america/ch44.htm
Thank you for these. I've been thinking a lot lately about subjection/interpellation w/e and the Buddhist concepts of samsara (wandering, grasping) and anatta, or non-self.
For no person is it literally true that their desires come from "within," as if such a place exists independently of all else. If we give up on thinking of ourselves as discrete subjects constituted by our desires, whose happiness depends on their fulfillment; if we think instead of ourselves as beings who are entirely socially, materially, and biologically contingent, we can put our better efforts toward less spurious ends, ones grounded in a more comprehensive, less delusional understanding of ourselves and our social-biological environments.
I appreciated how you highlighted the relationships between the Buddhist/Hindu tradition and some of Girard's ideas in part 3, and I'd be interested to hear any additional thoughts you have on the matter. Anyway, I know all of this is somewhat besides the point of the series, but it has intersected with my own thinking of late. Thanks again.
Loved this series, and particularly its ending, seeing yet another plucky underdog get blown out 63-0 by Marx in the Theory of Modernity Bowl.
I also find it interesting how often discussion of the commoditization of life turns to the incels. For better or worse (mostly for worse) that concept seems to be on the bleeding edge of the collapse of society into commodity value.
"They are liberal because they are aristocrats" -- this feels like the modern day "education polarization" argument -- that education cuts across class lines and leads to more progressive political attitudes even when they oppose individual status/class interests.
This is the quality of contextual analysis that spurred me to pay to subscribe and support, in spite of our differing political premises.
It should be no surprise that capitalists who have amassed power and profit hate capitalism. They know someone else will mimic their successful innovation and creativity at their expense. They seek the solution that is a fatal flaw in Marx's analysis: They can only have monopoly by purchasing it from a coercive government.
Marx, and his mongrel socialist/progressive cousins shill for increasing that source of monopoly instead of constraining it. Never works.
There is something missing here; the other meanings of “reaction” cry out to be defended. Some things should be done on autopilot.
This relates to the notion of paganism being a front for Satanic worship. History rhyming forces us peons to be mistaken for atheists simply to escape things like the war on Christmas and “I identify as an attack helicopter”.
Great stuff, this series is what I love about your writing most of all: you can take a topic I would have told you I don't care about at all, and write something so clear, eloquent, and thought provoking it makes me unable to even remember how I could have found this uninteresting.
The only thing you do better is when you write about something I already know I care about (e.g. occultism in Silicon Valley).
Enjoy your holidays, hope 2024 is a great year for you (and all fellow Unpopular Frontists), and thanks for filling my 2023 with lots of interesting, thoughtful writing.
Exceptional work. The incel example in the context of comparing Girard and Marx is insightfully chosen and explained. I appreciate your charitable (it seems to me) emphasis on Girard's ambivalence between Enlightenment and counter-Enlightenment reaction and how the novelists he interprets may share that ambivalence. Your discussion of the commodity fetish evokes for me one more framework that might be useful in interpreting narratives of decadence: the value of purity.
In their 2014 paper "Against the Yuck Factor," Kelly and Morar conclude that the emotion of disgust is an especially unreliable moral indicator because it extends one's reaction to poisons and pathogens toward socially contingent "foreign elements," so to speak. Disgust is a fast-acting rejection response to literally or figuratively "spit something out" before pollution can occur. But when someone is culturally conditioned to find an target disgusting, they experience that disgust just the same way, just as immediately and overwhelmingly, as they would when smelling or tasting something toxic-seeming. In the grip of disgust and its sense of emergency, every disgusting object seems intrinsically dangerous and everything threatened by that object seems intrinsically valuable. In disgust's immediacy, there is no consciousness of mediation -- there's just you and the threat -- or much capacity to introduce it through, say, reflection on what constitutes danger and why.
As the moral emotion of anger is bound up with the value of fairness and contempt is bound up with authority or hierarchy, so the moral emotion of disgust is bound up with purity: there is a sacred that must be protected from the profane with an urgency that supersedes logical or empirical justification. For disgust, the body is a temple. It's not hard to imagine how an emotion like disgust might evolve to help us survive as a species, in its sheer practicality and even in its hostile and regulative social dimension. Sometimes disgust is right to make us spit. It is just not reliably right and, more importantly, arguably reliably wrong (maybe differing from anger or contempt here) as soon as we start talking about people and not, like, literal excrement.
I don't know how helpful armchair psychology of reactionaries is, especially compared to focusing on their ideologies or material interests, but: there is a throughline of purity here that connects a desire for direct unmediated access, reification of what is contextual into an intrinsic property, and an anxiety over decadent decay. There never was such a thing as artistic pursuit without material concerns, a noble aristocracy without brutish domination, a salon without pettiness, a mind without a body, the sacred without the profane. But disgust and its attendant value of purity can make it seem so. In theory, corruption could be understood in terms of harm done or injustice suffered, and we could discuss concretely in terms of harms and injustices what enables or inhibits intellectual and aesthetic authenticity and originality. But in practice, the value of purity forms an entirely separate interpretive framework that resists reduction and appears ineffable: some things are just sacred and others just profane.
There seem to me two crucial moves for the reasonably ambivalent individual to make here: first, to affirm that compassion and fairness are higher values than purity and authority, that the latter must serve and be understood in terms of their contribution to the former; and second, to acknowledge that even the value of the higher values must still be interpreted, that mediation (or Thirdness) remains between us and even what is most obviously true or good. We do not transcend mediation, but find and create kinder and fairer modes of mediation, what Dewey calls "amelioration." Dewey argues that there are no ends in themselves, just "ends in view": purposes or values that we take to be good enough for going on in the moment but which are always provisional and open to question. What is authentic or "pure" is, at best, just so in relation to its context and the other values it realizes, which will change. We should be sympathetic to the alienated and any yearning for intrinsic and irreducible value. But we must have the courage to move on, again and again, to the next, provisionally more valuable, end in view. Ultimately, I can only conclude that the politics of despair, whatever else it involves, represents the lack of this courage.
I've very much appreciated this whole thought-provoking and important series, and also Devin Fitzpatrick's comment as a kind of necessary coda--necessary because it raises again what for me was in many ways the most important moment in the series, the question in part 3: "But what of us who are not great novelists or mystics or heroes?" That question haunts me, in part because I imagined part 4 would go some way to answering that question, and I'm not sure it did. It seems to me that focusing on the novel in general, and Stendhal-as-read-by-Girard in particular, puts us once again in the realm of standards both impossibly high, and mediated (in this case, by artistry). I say Stendhal-as-read-by Girard, because it sounds from this like Girard ignored Stendhal's self-lampooning aspect. S. always seems to me to present himself as a slightly ridiculous admirer-from-afar of impossibly above him, beautiful aristocratic women (the Countess Dembowska in On Love) and impossibly high-performing heroic leaders (Napoleon). Indeed, can his own loves and artistic preoccupations be said to be free of mediation (by both social distance and his own imagination) or commodification (is he not appreciating those he admires as, in some sense, goods-of-the-imagination)? He certainly, as he presents it all, does not seem to know them as people. And again, all of this seems to come with a good deal of self-deprecating humor. He can imagine transcending the limits of ordinariness, but he doesn't think he has, or ever will.
In part, I'm posting because I want to ask about the key concepts, mediation and commodification (or commodity fetishism). I (somewhat wantonly) used them in the previous paragraph, but in fact I find both quite difficult to understand, and my efforts to learn about them have so far been fruitless. Alas, much of what I find on the internet, or when I try to look them up in Marx himself, comes across as a bit too in-universe for a novice untrained in Marxian discourse to really understand. I feel in need of a good intro to both. Can anyone point me to a good source to refine my education in these terms? (Is there perhaps a John Ganz post I missed, entitled "What is commodity fetishism?")
He talks about novelists deployment of humor and irony but doesn't seem all that sensitive to it .
Thanks for your thoughtful reply. For introductions or refreshers on philosophical concepts, when the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is insufficient, I recommend looking for *.edu sites written by academics for their students. For example, this delightfully Web 1.0 excerpt from an introduction to critical theory looks substantive and succinct: https://www.cla.purdue.edu/academic/english/theory/marxism/modules/marxfetishism.html
On your general themes, if I've understood you right: it's difficult to cogently move from discussions of impersonal forces (historical, economic, psychoanalytic) to individual ethical recommendations. If one's position is that we are entrapped or enframed within the ideological iron cage of our era or whatever, which is suppressing and subverting autonomy or originality or spontaneity, one probably cannot then say "here is what individuals can do to induce incremental change in the system!" without being ridiculous. Each act would only be subverted, and some grand rupturing expression is required.
When I referred to the "reasonably ambivalent individual," I think I'm imagining someone who is inclined toward such a viewpoint while also wary of it: someone who feels as though they are drowning in mediocrity, that brilliance is ignored or punished and that the sludge of society is only further solidifying as time goes on, but reluctant to accept the all-or-nothing attitude toward social change that likely follows. I don't know how much individual ethical stances matter for the purposes of reform of revolution, whether political or aesthetic, compared to collective action and solidarity across individuals with different ethical outlooks but common interests. But I too feel like there ought to always be a takeaway, that there's always some meaning in that. And so I think it's important to affirm: even if you cannot always act, you can choose to interpret your own reactions differently, so that your thoughts are clear when the opportunity for action comes. When you feel anger, ask what would be fair and why. When you feel contempt, ask what would be the proper assignment of status or esteem any why. And when you feel disgust, reject it, in the name of never, no matter how monstrous your foes, becoming someone who views other persons as shit.
Following that advice probably won't make anyone into a world-historical artist, but maybe it will contribute to a world in which more and better world-historical artists can come into being -- among other benefits.
Thank you for the detailed reply and link, which is quite helpful (and indeed, as you say, delightfully Web 1.0), with useful links to supplementary definitions and textual references, etc.
As for the rest, I now see that your original post was strongly focused on the problem of disgust as it was evoked for you in Ganz's discussion of commodity fetishism. With some embarrassment, I admit I cannot now reconstruct how I saw that linked to the question raised in part 3 that I mentioned. But, it does seem that that Girard, judging from parts 3 and 4, has little to say in terms of individual ethical recommendations, beyond his admiration for artists, mystics, and heroes. And if we, his readers, were to take up his admiration, would that not itself mean we had been implanted with a desire powerfully mediated through Girard himself? If that's true, perhaps ultimately Girard himself leaves us in an impasse.
I think your observation on Girard is astute. I have two suggestions, for what they are worth: first, I think you correctly perceived that to discuss disgust is to discuss the individual. Although I was going off on my own tangent, I was working toward connecting general claims (like "given the structure of desire itself, we need a grand artistic breakthrough and here is what it would look like") with a more recognizable individual experience ("once we extract a kernel of truth from these ideas, here is what any given person, alleged genius or no, might learn from it"). At least, that was the spirit in which I interpreted your reply.
My second suggestion is, as a non-expert in Girard but someone who has seen this sort of pattern before: the impasse may be the point. If we are all doomed to imitate, what do we do? Well, we would need someone or something to transcend our fate: a God we can worship in a direct and pure dyadic relationship or a genius in whose works to bask. We would need a hierarchy, as egalitarianism would only reinforce our mediocrity. How convenient for those who already value hierarchy!
That said, I wouldn't view this as a conspiracy or bad faith or something, necessarily, and that's why I praised Ganz for focusing on Girard's seeming ambivalence. It seems that Girard strains against the straightforward well-trodden path in the previous paragraph enough to have some interesting ideas.
I like these posts and, as a subscriber, am glad to be getting more on Girard. They may induce me to read more than the few short selections of his I’ve looked at.
These have been a wonderful expedition thus far!
Thanks for this! I'd always been meaning to check out Girard. There are definitely funding opportunities to look into him, but more than that, I think--providing the German Studies perspective--he's benefitted also for the search for a heroic Theorist post-French Theory, a new system, a search that has benefited folks like Kittler and Luhmann.
Honestly though? Hearing you lay it all out here, the Stendhalian notion of a kind of democratic aristocracy of experience, a heroism of refinement and distinction (as the search for the new, the different, but also, the articulated, the worked through, the sharpened) as against the levelling of the time might really be my own personal aesthetic or life philosophy. The analagous pre-Nietzschean figure in the German context would be Goethe, who also advanced his own conception of aristocracy at the dawn of the bourgeois epoch. Intellectually, I'm with the left, intellectually, material and class analysis are central, but, I think I'm not the only one who finds the left's cultural production, especially in recent decades, just... really bad, totally standardized, kind of blah, in a way that keeps me from really putting my heart into it. And like Stendhal, or rather, Stendhal's protagonists, I think in so far as I find myself resenting both the very wealthy and the cultural bourgeoisie, it's really for their incredible cultural mediocrity, for their small-mindedness. I don't know! This stuff really resonated. Just pulled down the Charterhouse of Parma and can't wait to revisit it.
I have enjoyed the Girard posts and this last one in particular. The incel example seems to me spot on.
of Stendhal/Tocqueville/Flaubert/Balzac Tocqueville is the one I know the best / much at all, but he says roughly the same thing re: his internal struggles between admiring democracy and believing it to be superior but still preferring aristocracy on some aesthetic level: "the sight of such universal uniformity saddens and chills me, and I am tempted to regret that state of society which has ceased to be. When the world was full of men of great importance and extreme insignificance, of great wealth and extreme poverty, of great learning and extreme ignorance, I turned aside from the latter to fix my observation on the former alone, who gratified my sympathies. But I admit that this gratification arose from my own weakness ..." https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/de-tocqueville/democracy-america/ch44.htm
Indeed. I’ve never seen it spelled out this way, or possibly I merely forget, the fallacy of meritocracy seems inescapable.
Thank you for these. I've been thinking a lot lately about subjection/interpellation w/e and the Buddhist concepts of samsara (wandering, grasping) and anatta, or non-self.
For no person is it literally true that their desires come from "within," as if such a place exists independently of all else. If we give up on thinking of ourselves as discrete subjects constituted by our desires, whose happiness depends on their fulfillment; if we think instead of ourselves as beings who are entirely socially, materially, and biologically contingent, we can put our better efforts toward less spurious ends, ones grounded in a more comprehensive, less delusional understanding of ourselves and our social-biological environments.
I appreciated how you highlighted the relationships between the Buddhist/Hindu tradition and some of Girard's ideas in part 3, and I'd be interested to hear any additional thoughts you have on the matter. Anyway, I know all of this is somewhat besides the point of the series, but it has intersected with my own thinking of late. Thanks again.
Enough of Girard, thank you.
Loved this series, and particularly its ending, seeing yet another plucky underdog get blown out 63-0 by Marx in the Theory of Modernity Bowl.
I also find it interesting how often discussion of the commoditization of life turns to the incels. For better or worse (mostly for worse) that concept seems to be on the bleeding edge of the collapse of society into commodity value.
"They are liberal because they are aristocrats" -- this feels like the modern day "education polarization" argument -- that education cuts across class lines and leads to more progressive political attitudes even when they oppose individual status/class interests.
This is the quality of contextual analysis that spurred me to pay to subscribe and support, in spite of our differing political premises.
It should be no surprise that capitalists who have amassed power and profit hate capitalism. They know someone else will mimic their successful innovation and creativity at their expense. They seek the solution that is a fatal flaw in Marx's analysis: They can only have monopoly by purchasing it from a coercive government.
Marx, and his mongrel socialist/progressive cousins shill for increasing that source of monopoly instead of constraining it. Never works.
There is something missing here; the other meanings of “reaction” cry out to be defended. Some things should be done on autopilot.
This relates to the notion of paganism being a front for Satanic worship. History rhyming forces us peons to be mistaken for atheists simply to escape things like the war on Christmas and “I identify as an attack helicopter”.
When are you the NPC?
Hegel: religion, art, philosophy
Marx: revolution
Abstractions: Who is going to do the actual work? Who will organize the economy? How much will various strata of labor be paid?
fixed