The inclusion of Sartre here is apt. I had forgotten how beguiling the idea of revolution was back when he was in his heyday. Heidegger, for me, also had that irrational appeal of a gnostic, mystical truth available to the few. They were often in my bookbag, though Being and Time was comically impossible to read and existentialism was as…
The inclusion of Sartre here is apt. I had forgotten how beguiling the idea of revolution was back when he was in his heyday. Heidegger, for me, also had that irrational appeal of a gnostic, mystical truth available to the few. They were often in my bookbag, though Being and Time was comically impossible to read and existentialism was as much anti-humanist rot as smoking Gitanes was cool. But I do not recall the worship of violence as being so preeminent. So many of us are shocked that kids barely out of their teens can be so sucked in, when what we've missed is what has gone on in the humanities departments for decades. These are places that took the romanticism of revolution and oppression and structures of power to their logical conclusion, that they don't count if they remain mere theory; they have to be acted upon (of course, the "actions" will be done by the oppressed far, far away while the academics get to watch from their sanitized distance, probably masturbating at their desks). These are the bloodlust dreams of the AR-15 loner acting out his grotesque fantasies; the only difference being the instititutional constraints of academia, which though incredibly weak at least give the impression that all this talk and theory is never going to escape the lab. But when it does, you can see in the "exhiliration" of these over-credentialed, tenured miscreants a perverse joy, followed of course by the mandatory "statement" of "that is not who I am." But of course that is who they are.
The inclusion of Sartre here is apt. I had forgotten how beguiling the idea of revolution was back when he was in his heyday. Heidegger, for me, also had that irrational appeal of a gnostic, mystical truth available to the few. They were often in my bookbag, though Being and Time was comically impossible to read and existentialism was as much anti-humanist rot as smoking Gitanes was cool. But I do not recall the worship of violence as being so preeminent. So many of us are shocked that kids barely out of their teens can be so sucked in, when what we've missed is what has gone on in the humanities departments for decades. These are places that took the romanticism of revolution and oppression and structures of power to their logical conclusion, that they don't count if they remain mere theory; they have to be acted upon (of course, the "actions" will be done by the oppressed far, far away while the academics get to watch from their sanitized distance, probably masturbating at their desks). These are the bloodlust dreams of the AR-15 loner acting out his grotesque fantasies; the only difference being the instititutional constraints of academia, which though incredibly weak at least give the impression that all this talk and theory is never going to escape the lab. But when it does, you can see in the "exhiliration" of these over-credentialed, tenured miscreants a perverse joy, followed of course by the mandatory "statement" of "that is not who I am." But of course that is who they are.