>why bring up Girard?Mimetic desire is taking over. But the concept at bottom is empty. It is becoming a sign for 'knowing something about desire and human motivation' but in fact it tells us nothing. People are just throwing it around in order to try to give Xtianity some relevance in today's world. Xtianity is supposed to be the last bulwark against a sort of seething violence that, if unleashed today, would overwhelm the world in escalating rivalry. Xtianity is supposed to have, under its care, a single truth that protects us from the escalation: knowledge of the scapegoat mechanism. This knowledge is supposed to be deadly to culture itself and to every institution. It prevents escalating violence by reminding us that the victim (the scapegoat) is arbitrary. But this hypothesis is incoherent. Does anyone believe that 'scapegoats' have any power to quell violence? If anything the scapegoat theory is as much fuel to escalation as anything. Believing that you or someone is a 'victim' gives you the right, in today's world, to say, "I am only defending myself. The aggressor must stop the fighting if they want this war to end." In fact, Xtianity is the thing that has unleashed this very violence. By destroying the possibility for unanimity, resolution to violence is made impossible. What is the Xtian alternative? Lay down your claims, renounce your desires. Fantastic. But is this actually possible? Is this alternative actually open to anyone? Girard has no real insight. Case in point, he identifies ressentiment with will to power. To him they are basically the same. >Whenever the will to power is not recognized as the center of the world, it will place the one who does not recognize it at that same center and render him a secret cult.Can we really believe this? Is will to power really nothing but ressentiment? Is Nietzsche's work nothing but an embarrassing confusion in which he tries desperately to differentiate what is in fact identical?
The great irony of it all is that Peter Thiel, a self-proclaimed admirer of Girard, who included essays on mimetic theory and the scapegoat mechanism in his own writing, is the founder of Palantir, an organization devoted to the methodical extermination of enemies of Israel and the United States. For this Girardian, the current violence which 'we' face is nothing short of 'apocalyptic'. Such a threat merits an equally radical solution: the methodical extermination of the terrorist threat. Without this all-seeing safeguard of Palantir, we face the prospect of a violence the likes of which the world has never seen. Not satisfied to let the angels rescue the chosen ones in the midst of the end of days, these modern protectors have taken it upon themselves to play the part of the angels.
Just listen to this cultish proselytizing from Thiel:>Indeed, one may wonder whether any sort of politics will remain possible for the exceptional generation that has learned the truth of human history for the first time. It is in this context that one must remember that the word apocalypse originally meant unveiling. For Girard, the unveiling of this terrible knowledge opens a catastrophic fault line below the city of man: “[I]t is truly the end of the world, the Christian apocalypse, the bottomless abyss of the unforgettable victim.Does this sound like a sane person? >learned the truth of human history for the first time>it is truly the end of the worldHaven't we heard all this before? But now the end of days is proclaimed under the sign of a new concept: mimetic theory. The scapegoat mechanism. The problem here is the threat itself. It could come at any time, any place. No one is safe. In this way total surveillance, total control suddenly appears as the only solution to the threat.
A few lines of Nietzsche is enough to refute Girard entire body of work:>If, however, we place ourselves at the end of this colossal process, at the point where the tree finally matures in its fruits, when society and its morality of custom finally bring to light that to which it was only the means, then do we find as the ripest fruit on its tree the sovereign individual, that resembles only himself, that has got loose from the morality of custom, the autonomous "super-moral" individual (for "autonomous" and "moral" are mutually-exclusive terms),—in short, the man of the personal, long, and independent will, competent to promise, and we find in him a proud consciousness (vibrating in every fibre), of what has been at last achieved and become vivified in him, a genuine consciousness of power and freedom, a feeling of human perfection in general. And this man who has grown to freedom, who is really competent to promise, this lord of the free will, this sovereign—how is it possible for him not to know how great is his superiority over everything incapable of binding itself by promises, or of being its own security, how great is the trust, the awe, the reverence that he awakes—he "deserves" all three—not to know that with this mastery over himself he is necessarily also given the mastery of circumstances, over nature, over all creatures with shorter wills, less reliable characters?Here is air that we can breathe again. Not the constricting, 'hidden truths' of Girard. Nietzsche is clear and lucid. Everything Girard wrote is stumbling over itself, awkward, vague, tied up in generalities. If style counts for anything Nietzsche has to be read a hundred times for every reading of Girard.
>>24698735Throwing away the ladder after you've reached a conclusion is ((Wittgensteinian science)) at its best.P*ter Th*el , the antichrist is like a snake biting its own tail, contradicting himself on every step. BC the thruth is a like female whore. It bows down to the strong. The weak don't deserve it. The weak deserve to be fucked like a bitch and disposed of at the end. (You) are not strong like P*term Th*el. (You) are rather the opposite.
>>24698639>XtianityForced Jewish meme speak
>>24698750>>sounds insane, right?>we learned the truth of history>now the world is endingThat's literally just Nietzsche's ideas tho?>>24698984>neetch is clearer writerNietzsche is not lucid and sane. He is hyperlucid w madness. Big difference.>>24698735The issue here is that Girard and Thiel are all too modern. Lipservice is paid to Christ. But on an esoteric level, as per Strauss, they are both Nietzscheans at heart. They accept his picture fully.>>24698639I see the scapegoat mechanism on level of individuals and societies. Truly Christian grace and charity is the only way to escape this vicious circle and break history open into a ever perfecting spiral as is its destiny. Dionysius has already lost to the Crucified. War is over if you want it to be. Perhaps we are at the end. Perhaps we are at a new beginning. Perhaps man must always dance upon precipe of chaos and cosmos without ever fully resolving the picture for anyone but himself at best in this life and world.>will to power is ressentimentThat should be obvious. But it seems you yourself have fallen for bitter poisons of modernity. So I expect you to complain about "jewish fairytales" or smthn. But I would advise you to penetrate mysteries of theology if truly seek answers.
>>24700024>The issue here is that Girard and Thiel are all too modern. Lipservice is paid to Christ. But on an esoteric level, as per Strauss, they are both Nietzscheans at heart. They accept his picture fully.They aren't Nietzscheans at all, Nietzsche was obsessed with aesthetics, as Mann said he was "the most complete and unredeemable aesthete known to the history of the human mind". His antimoralism is completely downstream from this, and aestheticism is in some way a higher morality. Christian disgusted him on a purely aesthetic level. Thiel is totally remote from Nietzsche's way of thinking, he is just an insecure nerd.
>>24700043>Christian disgusted him on a purely aesthetic levelI mean Christians disgusted him on a purely aesthetic level. He respected Christ and the idealistic life Christianity offered him. He was deeply moved by Wagner's Parsifal
>>24700043>>24700045>missing the point
>>24700043>aestheticism is in some way a higher moralityNietzsche was like many other thinkers concerned with the purification of 'morality' (or as Kant called it, pure practical reason). One could argue that he only wanted to free the moral, self-directing impulse (which he described as the capacity to make and keep promises) from its entanglements in self-defeating reactivity (ressentiment). You could say he was in this way a precursor to Girard, if Girard did not outright deny any alternative to ressentiment. Nietzsche held the (English) utilitarian morals in contempt on the same grounds as 'old Kant'—that such systems of morals had not distilled the will into its 'unalloyed purity'. He was therefore an 'aesthete' in the same sense as Kant—that he was concerned with the 'architectonic' aspect of morals, with their purity, with their form. Schopenhauer of course accused Kant of pointlessly burdening himself with these aesthetic concerns. We could therefore say that Girard, like Schopenhauer, denied the possibility of pure practical reason. Practical reason never finds its own unique content, it is never 'autonomous'. The point here is not to lump Nietzsche together with Kant (whom he criticized for various reasons), but to remind ourselves of what is at stake here. Girard, like Schopenhauer, has to fall back on some idea of 'renunciation' as an escape from the travails of 'desire'. But does this not lead him right into the trap of ressentiment? Does he not drop right into John's apocalypse? Without the possibility of a 'good' (free) will, without the achievement of the freedom to bind oneself to principle or to action against all the 'teeth of fate', do we not have to resign into the passivity of 'renunciation'—and what is there to free us from the whirlwind of ressentiment, of 'reactivity'?
