Monday 25 April 2016

Capitalism's Crisis & Plato's Lysis


In Plato's Lysis, Socrates points out that praising a boy's ancestors in order to seduce him isn't a proof of love, not because the project of seducing a boy is unlovely in itself, but because the poet is only magnifying the object of his lust in order to eventually boast of having fucked in the ass the scion of a family distinguished enough to have had no need of his flattering apostrophes to a gorgeous familial Pheme his own phallus remains engorged to extinguish.

Similarly, for a Professor to constantly harp on Capitalism's world historical hegemonic power is not a proof of love of any ism whatsoever, because the Pundit in question is magnifying the imaginary object of a lust only able to sate itself upon the supposedly historically inevitable spectacle of every last Top Hatted Stockbroker howling incontinently at being hammered on 'Change and hobbling away with his trousers around his ankles and cum dripping from his anus.

This last, which we may brutely eroticize by terming it the coction that resolves a Hippocratean Crisis- itself antonymic to that gradual loosening of ontic bondage, as in agape's Lysis- is the but logical consequence of the concoction of a binary under scarcity- that is diminishing returns. As Aristotle points out, if both elements of the binary grow together- as lovers desire to do, in Aristophanes' view of Eros- then the one with inferior assimilative power will  disappear, swallowed up by the other. We might add, that if this is not the case, and they grow equally through sumphusis, then, at the margin, by the identity of indiscernibles, no binary exists.

Of course, if no scarcity obtains, then diminishing returns can't arise. However, this is an outcome ontologically dysphoric to 'second order' discourses like Philosophy or, that oxymoron, Political Science, because, if love can burgeon simply by its own actions, if theory is its own praxis, then there is no material curb or chorismos such that the one swells up only because the other is swaddled and constrained and so, at the end of the story, the boy Lysis skips away, unfucked to the Pundits' dismay, hand in hand with a friend his own age to engage in some healthier type of play.

Notes-
1) see here

2) vide


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