“The sensitive conscience…refuses. One can always mediate, pass over into the antithesis, combine the synthesis, but the thesis does not follow: it subsists in its immediacy, in its difference which itself constitutes the true movement. Difference is the true content of the thesis, the persistence of the thesis. The negative and negativity do not even capture the phenomenon of difference, only the phantom or the epiphenomenon. The whole of Phenomenology is an epiphenomenology.”
—Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repitition, 52.
June 2013
6 posts
“The first thing I did after I heard about the highly classified NSA PRISM program two years ago was set up a proxy server in Peshawar to email me passages from Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. A literary flight of fancy. I started sending back excerpts from Gerard Manley Hopkins poems.”
—Incredible story at Warscapes by John Sifton, Asia advocacy director for Human Rights Watch (via bostonreview)
“I think it is unnatural to think that there is such a thing as a blue-sky, white-clouded happy childhood for anybody. Childhood is a very, very tricky business of surviving it. Because if one thing goes wrong or anything goes wrong, and usually something goes wrong, then you are compromised as a human being. You’re going to trip over that for a good part of your life.”
—Maurice Sendak, who would have turned 85 today. (via psychotherapy)
May 2013
7 posts
Urban affects: On assemblages and subjectivation →
kristinesamson.tumblr.com
“Assemblages capable of building up their own modes of subjectivation involve two kinds of attitude:
—the normalizing attitude, which follows two different but complementary ways: either it systematically ignores those assemblages, dismissing them as ancillary problems or archaisms, or else it…
“Precariousness as a generalized condition relies on a conception of the body as fundamentally dependent on, and conditioned by, a sustained and sustainable world; responsiveness—And ultimately responsibility—is located in the affective responses to a sustaining and impinging world. Because such affective responses are invariably mediated, they call upon and enact certain interpretive frames; they can also call into question the taken-for-granted character of those frames, and in that way provide the affective conditions for social critique.”
—Judith Butler, Frames of War (via rhizombie)
Word.
“Our best hope for the future is not to get people to think of all humanity as family—that’s impossible. It lies, instead, in an appreciation of the fact that, even if we don’t empathize with distant strangers, their lives have the same value as the lives of those we love.”
—Paul Bloom’s “The Case Against Empathy” in The New Yorker. (via bostonreview)
Once the family becomes the model of ethical life, life neither appears to us as, nor claims itself to be, ethical. It instead becomes a moralized division of labor writ large.
“There is not a world that contains time; there is a flow of time, which produces ‘worlds’ or durations. Time is a virtual whole of divergent durations: different rhythms or pulsations of life which we can think or intuit. The everyday illusion is that life flows from one moment to the next and that we exist ‘in’ some general line of time. We can be freed from this illusion of a homogeneous, linear and undifferentiated
time only by thinking of time as an intensive flow…
We tend to spatialise time. We map or represent time by the
movement of the sun across the sky, the hands moving around a clockface or some other moving body. In doing so we locate time within the world we perceive, within an actualised world of images.” —Claire Colebrook re. Deleuze (via inpraxis)
time only by thinking of time as an intensive flow…
We tend to spatialise time. We map or represent time by the
movement of the sun across the sky, the hands moving around a clockface or some other moving body. In doing so we locate time within the world we perceive, within an actualised world of images.” —Claire Colebrook re. Deleuze (via inpraxis)
Yup.
April 2013
8 posts
“
Gilles Deleuze: Crossing the desert is nothing much, working in, passing through a desert period is not bad. What is awful is being born in this desert and growing up in it…that’s frightful…I imagine, one must have an impression of solitude…
Claire Parnet: Like for young people who are 18 years old now, for example?
Deleuze: Right, especially when you understand that when things…this is what happens in impoverished periods. When things disappear, no one notices it for a simple reason: when something disappears, no one misses it. The period of Stalin caused Russian literature to disappear, and the Russians didn’t notice, I mean the majority of Russians, they just didn’t notice, a literature that had been a turbulent literature throughout the nineteenth century, it just disappeared. I know that now people say there are the dissidents, etc., but on the level of a people, the Russian people, their literature disappeared, their painting disappeared, and nobody noticed.
” —Gilles Deleuze, “C” for “Culture”, Abecedaire. Interview with Claire Parnet.
“…if there were impoverished periods, that’s quite normal, but it’s not the fact of poverty I find disturbing, but rather the insolence and or impudence of people who inhabit the impoverished periods. They are much more wicked than the inspired people who come to life during rich periods…”
—Gilles Deleuze, Abecedaire, “C” for “Culture”. Interview with Claire Parnet
“
Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious. They are default settings…
The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.
That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.
” —DAVID FOSTER WALLACE, IN HIS OWN WORDS | More Intelligent Life (via jomc)March 2013
2 posts
Play
February 2013
11 posts
“In the construction of Immortal Fame you need first of all a cosmic shamelessness.”
—Umberto Eco, “Travels in Hyperreality”
“An autopsy report has shed new light on the death of a Mexican teenager shot by the U.S. Border Patrol last October. Authorities claimed 16-year-old José Elena Rodríguez was throwing rocks at agents over the border fence. But medical examiners say José was shot as many as 11 times with all but one of the bullets striking from behind. They also found the bullets entered his body at a lower point than where they exited. A lawyer for José’s family said, “The only way I can fathom that report is that he was lying on his face when he was hit.” Further doubt has also been cast on the claim that José was throwing rocks, since he was standing on the Mexican side of the border fence, the top of which was more than 40 feet above him.”
—
Is this what immigration reform should look like? Or should practices such as these be the target of immigration reform?
Autopsy: Mexican Teenager Shot Multiple Times from Behind by Border Patrol (via kaliem)
He is the second teenager in the past two years directly murdered by a very racist US border patrol. Let’s not forget Ramses Barron who was killed in January of 2011.
(via tortillachronicles)
Let’s not also forget that the US border patrol also routinely destroys humanitarian food & water caches in the southwest to try to kill potential illegal immigrants.
(via widdershinsgirl)
“What is politics, in the end, if not both the interplay of these different arts of government with their different reference points and the debate to which these different arts of government give rise? It seems to me that it is here that politics is born. Good. Well that’s it. Thank you.”
—Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, Lecture 12.
“No one can speak up all the time on all the issues. But, I believe, there is a special duty to address the constituted and authorized powers of one’s own society, which are accountable to its citizenry, particularly when those powers are exercised in a manifestly disproportionate and immoral work or in a deliberate program of discrimination, repression, and collective cruelty.”
—Edward Said “Speaking Truth to Power” in Representations of the Intellectual [Vintage Books, 1994], p. 98
“Courage consists, however, in agreeing to flee rather than live tranquilly and hypocritically in false refuges. Values, morals, homelands, religions, and these private certitudes that our vanity and our complacency bestow generously on us, have many deceptive sojourns as the world arranges for those who think they are standing straight and at ease, among stable things.”
— Deleuze & Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
(via leavingmisternietzsche)
(via leavingmisternietzsche)
A.D.D.D.J. Jimi Hey Pause Tape 1996 (A.K.A. I Want To Get My Dick Sucked)
A.D.D.D.J. Jimi the Kidd Hey Pause Tape 1996 (A.K.A. I Want To Get My Dick Sucked)
Coming from the depths of L.A.’s mid-90s underground is this wonder from a mad genius/multiinstrumentalist who’s been a part of outfits as varied as Moog, Strictly Ballroom, GoGoGo Airheart, Beachwood Sparks, All Night Radio, Tristeza, Indian Jewelry, Holy Shit, Nite Jewel, and Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti. The dedication and tape deck splicing at work is, in the words of one Farmer Dave, epic. Sharing space with folks like Jimi, the Good Farmer Dave, and others during this time was an education—to say no less of a privilege—in itself.
Just listen and get ready to get knocked the fuck out by this mix. It will do nothing short of make your head explode, cleanse your sonic palate, and leave you wanting to hear more.
January 2013
6 posts
“Good people say that we must not flee, that to escape is not good, that it isn’t effective, and that one must work for reforms. But the revolutionary knows that escape is revolutionary-withdrawal, breaks-provided one sweeps away the social cover on leaving, or causes a piece of the system to get lost in the shuffle. What matters is to break through the wall, even if one has to become black like John Brown….the nature of the familial investments depends on the breaks and the flows of the social field as they are invested in one type or another, at one pole or the other. And the child does not wait until he is an adult before grasping-underneath father-mother-the economic, financial, social, and cultural problems that cross through a family: his belonging or his desire to belong to a superior or an inferior “race,” the reactionary or the revolutionary tenor of a familial group with which he is already preparing his ruptures and his conformities.”
—Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guatarri, Anti-Oedipus, 277-278.
December 2012
1 post
“Transcendence: a specifically European disease…
God is a Lobster, or a double pincer, a double bind.” —Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 18, 40.
God is a Lobster, or a double pincer, a double bind.” —Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 18, 40.
November 2012
6 posts
October 2012
1 post
“He who wishes to avenge injuries by hating in return does indeed live miserably. But he who, on the contrary, strives to drive out hatred by love, fights joyfully and confidently, with equal ease resisting one many or a number of men, and needing scarcely any assistance from fortune. Those whom he conquers yield gladly, not from defect of strength, but from an increase of it. These truths, however, all follow so plainly from the definitions of love and the intellect, that there is no need to demonstrate them singly.”
—
Benedictus de Spinoza, Ethics
(via kathleenjoy)
