“Take the trouble to listen to a single word: in that word, nothingness is struggling and toiling away, it digs tirelessly, doing its utmost to find a way out, nullifying what encloses it—it is infinite disquiet, formless and nameless vigilance. Already the seal which held this nothingness within the limits of the word and within the guise of its meaning has been broken; now there is access to other names, names which are less fixed, still vague, more capable of adapting to the savage freedom of the negative essence—they are unstable groups, no longer terms but the movement of terms, an endless sliding of ‘turns of phrases’ which do not lead anywhere.”
Maurice Blanchot, “Literature and the Right to Death”
To all my readers (to what, all four or five of you?):
I’m sorry. I haven’t written shit about my experience abroad. That will change in the next few days, hopefully. I feel a sudden desire to write, partly to share my experiences with the people who care about me, but mostly to get out of this shitty writing funk. So please forgive me.
“Close up these barren leaves;
Come forth, and bring with you a heart
That watches and receives.”
- William Wordsworth, “The Tables Turned”
“Hitherto men have constantly made up for themselves false conceptions about themselves, about what they are and what they ought to be. They have arranged their relationships according to their ideas of God, of normal man, etc. The phantoms of their brains have got out of their hands. They, the creators, have bowed down before their creations. Let us liberate them from the chimeras, the ideas, dogmas, imaginary beings under the yoke of which they are pining away. Let us revolt against the rule of thoughts. Let us teach men, says one, to exchange these imaginations for thoughts which correspond to the essence of man; says the second, to take up a critical attitude to them; says the third, to knock them out of their heads; and—existing reality will collapse.”
Karl Marx, The German Ideology
I’m flying to London tomorrow. See ya!
“It’s in engagements like this, in competition and comparison with others, that one can hope to hit upon the elusive, magical mot juste. For me, to remember friendship is to recall those conversations that it seemed a sin to break off: the ones that made the sacrifice of the following day a trivial one.”
-Christopher Hitchens
“When a bachelor of philosophy from the Antilles refuses to apply for certification as a teacher on the round of his color, I say that philosophy has never saved anyone. When some one else strives and strains to prove to me that black men are as intelligent as white men, I say that intelligence has never saved anyone; and that is true, for, if philosophy and intelligence are invoked to proclaim the equality of man, they have also been employed to justify the extermination of men.”
-Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks
“The man described for us, whom we are invited to free, is already in himself the effect of a subjection much more profound than himself. A ‘soul’ inhabits him and brings him to existence, which is itself a factor in the mastery that power exercises over the body. The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body.”
-Michel Foucault
“Man is not merely a possibility of recapture or of negation. If it is true that consciousness is a process of transcendence, we have to see too that this transcendence is haunted by the problems of love and understanding. Man is a yes that vibrates to cosmic harmonies. Uprooted, pursued, baffled, doomed to watch the dissolution of the truths that he has worked out for himself one after another, he has to give up projecting onto the world an antimony that coexists with him.”
-Frantz Fanon
