update at the top. It just gets worse.

Jäger: "Oh buddy"

Fukuyama: “the invasion of Ukraine was such a shock bc in our lifetimes we’ve never witnessed one country militarily invading another.” 

Chris Hayes: “Well, Iraq.”

Fukuyama: “Yeah but…well, ok” 

Jäger: "We should just cryogenically preserve the Fukuyama of 1991 and not listen to the other versions." 

Fukuyama hasn't changed. And they're not talking about the Iran Iraq war. The Israeli invasion of Lebanon doesn't' count. A lot of invasions don't count. Wikipedia has a list.

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Jäger rt's a pic of a text of Alexander Kluge, with images by Richter. The passage fits every argument I've ever made about the Gothic anti-humanist logic of modernism. It's almost too perfect.

A transcription of texts (just as if evolution had been tinkering with their DNA texts) doesn't only create lines to new, future texts. It can also be reconstructed in the direction of paradise. The way there leads through indeterminacies. (Nearer, my God, to Thee’ was the music played by the orchestra on board the Titanic as the ship went down. But  it is also the working instructions to copyists of all countries, who are driven from the omphalos of experience into the parallel world (heterotopia), the pre-world (history) and the future world (the world of our children, who are so attached to life). For copyists, all images are NOW—TIME.

The medieval world of monastic copyists, of the memorization as opposed to interpretation of the Koran, the Talmud, the Bible, or any religious text. Allegiance to dogma: the innocence of the eternal present.

And he rt's this

Schmitt: “... your point on page 215 would change all of present philosophy”

Kojève: “Yes, everything essential appears on my page 215”

*Allan Bloom cuts page 197-224 from the English edition*

— Julien (@grainofglass) May 16, 2023

In order to give to divine Spirit the fullness of being, it is necessary to situate divine Spirit within the World, to conceive of it as the “entelechy” of the World. Now, to conceive of it [215] in this way is to conceive of it as worldly, that is to say, human Spirit, and no longer as God. In short, Man who seeks to understand himself fully and completely as Spirit, can be satisfied only by an atheistic anthropology. And this is why the Schicksal, the Destiny of every Theology, of every Religion, is, in the final analysis, atheism.

And this documents how fascism and other forms of ideologically committed authoritarianism in the 20th century could be "a-theistic". It's all interesting as a matter for history and sociology, but with these idiots we're back to Fukuyama, and the moral imperatives of faith, in ideas, in the word, in a metaphysical reality.

Before that he rt'd Loren Balhorn's sad emoji for the last playlist of Ryuichi Sakamoto, avatar of ironic kitsch pop. Sakamoto was wishfully pretentious, but he had a light sad sense of irony and an awareness his own limitations. And he didn't pretend to be a leftist. Jäger can be good with facts; he says he prefers ideas, but his real preference is fantasy. All of them indulge the waking dreams of people who've watched too many movies 

There's an attitude in Godard, despite the assertions of wanting to converse, that says, Don't argue or cross me about such things. And this book does not alter the notion of his brilliant immaturity. The most fascinating point of all applies more broadly than to Godard; it reaches out to anyone who believes that film is more important than the world. Maybe film is not the great new language of engagement with the world that Bazin hoped it would be. Perhaps it is, instead, a vehicle more suited to dreaming, sensationalism and not wanting to grow up. Perhaps language--the construct of words--was always subtler, deeper and more humane.

All art relates to dreams; film is the nearest art to dreaming itself. It's the nearest thing to a drug: that's its weakness. No other art makes it so easy to deny the fact of artifice, but every great film, one way or another puts artifice out front. The corollary is that bad films try to replace reality. "Trash cinema" is credited with giving the lie to smooth commercialism but wouldn't exist without it. It's dependent. Negative dialectics is the sincerest form of flattery.