“A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession.”
—Albert Camus (via writersbloqinc)
June 2013
37 posts
"...the value placed on the color of skin is always and everywhere and forever a delusion." ~ James A. Baldwin
“In an industrial society which confuses work and productivity, the necessity of producing has always been an enemy of the desire to create. What spark of humanity, of a possible creativity, can remain alive in a being dragged out of sleep at six every morning, jolted about in suburban trains, deafened by the racket of machinery, bleached and steamed by meaningless sounds and gestures, spun dry by statistical controls, and tossed out at the end of the day into the entrance halls of railway stations, those cathedrals of departure for the hell of weekdays and the nugatory paradise of weekends, where the crowd communes in weariness and boredom? From adolescence to retirement each 24-hour cycle repeats the same shattering bombardment, like bullets hitting a window: mechanical repetition, time-which-is-money, submission to bosses, boredom, exhaustion. From the butchering of youth’s energy to the gaping wound of old age, life cracks in every direction under the blows of forced labour. Never before has a civilization reached such a degree of contempt for life; never before has a generation, drowned in mortification, felt such a rage to live.”
—Raoul Vaneigem (via marlkarx)
iwannatalktou
“I collect these essays in the name of a future pragmatism no longer parochially bound to its American provenance but unwilling to deny its genealogical engine, committed to the naturalism of the motto (and manifesto) just mentioned and, if I may now add, committed to the radical thesis that the self is a hybrid artifact of biological and cultural evolution that makes possible the entire run of the uniquely enlanguaged forms of human intelligence, thought, understanding, reason, feeling, experience, activity, conduct, creation, and knowledge that marks our race for what it is.” ~ Joseph Margolis, Pragmatism Ascendent: A Yard of Narrative, A Touch of Prophecy
For African and African-descended peoples were of little or no philosophical or anthropological significance to those who have been the designators, historians, practitioners, and mediators of the discipline's institutionalized canons of issues, figures, agendas, conceptual and methodological traditions, problem-sets, texts or text-analogs, organizations, and institutions. The pre-Modern histories of African and African-descended peoples; the centuries-long colonized, enslaved, and otherwise utterly dehumanizing unfreedom of Black peoples throughout the continents of Africa, Europe, the Americas, and the Caribbean; the rapacious unjust exploitation of their bodies, lands, resources, and life-opportunities—all of these went mostly without explicit comment in the discipline of Philosophy, not even as a focus of protest, notwithstanding all of the vaunted concern within the discipline for conceptions of freedom, justice, equality, human nature, and human well-being generally. Even as European and European-descended philosophes of the eighteen, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries fashion decidedly new philosophical anthropologies, socio-political philosophies, and philosophies of histories into complex Enlightenments to ground and guide quests to realize the global instantiation of Modernities in which reason-guided freedom and justice would be foundational to the spread of the racialized, capitalist civilizational projects of Eurocentrism (Amin 1989), there was almost total silence about the intended and unintended consequences for peoples African and of African descent—except for claims that colonization and enslavement would bring them much needed “civilizing.”
- Lucius T. Outlaw, Africana Philosophy (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
I just called her your name…
A Weltanschauung: “Nihilism is the breakdown of the order of meaning, where all that we... →
a-weltanschauung.tumblr.com
“Nihilism is the breakdown of the order of meaning, where all that we previously imagined as a divine, transcendent basis for moral valuation has become meaningless . Nihilism is this declaration of meaninglessness, a sense of indifference , directionlessness or, at its worst, despair that can…
palinode
so there’s this one girl…
she is something special, no—someone special
to me
we’ve got a past—some history, you could say
i do say
i really dropped the ball—back in our history that you could say and i do say
i think i’ve regained my dribble, my rhythm—it’s been more than a year almost
but she’s not here—around, to see it, per se
but i still miss this special girl—no, woman
beautifully bold, ravishingly calm—placid—frighteningly assured
i’m—absurdly—holding on to this hope, this chance, this maybe we’ll resume another history, a new one
as i sit at this airport, i’m thinking about her
i wonder
Beauty Resides Inside—and i want to meet her
it’s a special denial of humanity to suggest that if a black woman does something you dislike that she is aggressive and angry and irrational and “lost her shit.”
nothing but patriarchal white entitlement. that me asserting my humanity (my boundaries and ensuring that i’m respected) is me being angry and threatening
y’all do way too much. black women are human too.
Crunch Time x Cole
“Inside of me, lord I know, it’s a lie that we gon be fine, but momma I’m tired of cryin, just lie to me one more time.”
"...a becoming that knows no satiety..."
“And do you know what ‘the world’ is to me? Shall I show it to you in my mirror? This world: a monster of energy, without beginning, without end; a firm, iron magnitude of force that does not grow bigger or smaller, that does not expend itself but only transforms itself; as a whole, of unalterable size, a household without expenses or losses, but likewise without increase or income; enclosed by ‘nothingness’ as by a boundary; not something blurry or wasted, not something endlessly extended, but set in a definite space as a definite force, and not a shape that might be ‘empty’ here or there, but rather as a force throughout, as a play of forces and waves of forces, at the same time one and many, increasing here and at the same time decreasing there; a sea of forces flowing and rushing together, eternally changing, eternally flooding back, with tremendous years of recurrence, with an ebb and a flood of its forms; out of the stillest, most rigid, coldest forms toward the hottest, most turbulent, most self-contradictory, and then again returning home to the simple out of this abundance, out of the play of contradictions back to the joy of concord, still affirming itself in this uniformity of its courses and its years, blessing itself as that which must return eternally, as a becoming that knows no satiety, no disgust, no weariness: this, my Dionysian world of the eternally self-creating, the eternally self-destroying, this mystery world of the twofold voluptuous delight, my ‘beyond good and evil,’ without goal, unless the joy of the circle is itself a goal; without will, unless a ring feels good will toward itself—do you want a name for this world? A solution for all of its riddles? A light for you, too, you best-concealed, strongest, most intrepid, most midnightly men?—This world is the will to power—and nothing besides! And you yourselves are also this will to power—and nothing besides!”
—Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will To Power (via sunrec)
so I hit u up mad late
knowin I probably shouldn’t
but at any rate
I do it cuz you probably wouldn’t
and what I really hate
is time and distance tellin me every time I couldn’t
but then I do… why?
hope?less
“Terrorism is a heartless ideology, and like most ideologies that have their eye on the Big Picture, individuals don’t figure in their calculations except as collateral damage. It has always been a part of and often even the aim of terrorist strategy to exacerbate a bad situation in order to expose hidden faultlines. The blood of “martyrs” irrigates terrorism. Hindu terrorists need dead Hindus, Communist terrorists need dead proletarians, Islamist terrorists need dead Muslims. The dead become the demonstration, the proof of victimhood, which is central to the project. A single act of terrorism is not in itself meant to achieve military victory; at best, it is meant to be a catalyst that triggers something else, something much larger than itself, a tectonic shift, a realignment. The act itself is theatre, spectacle and symbolism, and today, the stage on which it pirouettes and performs its acts of bestiality is Live TV.”
—
Arundhati Roy, ‘The monster in the mirror’ (via indizombie)
in which case Arundhati Roy gets it right again.
(via asthepoemsgo)Thrasymachean presentiments
The more I hear about our government’s politico-juridical rationalization of Drone Strikes, the more I wonder if Thrasymachus was correct. In the end, maybe we don’t want Thrasymachus to be right (I’m fairly sure I don’t want him to be). However, I think we can agree that we find power, in whatever form it may take (state, capitalist-economic, cultural, political)—throughout human history—justifying, rationalizing, various abuses, self-serving exceptions to the rules and laws that obtain, and the expropriation of resources to which those sites of power have no real title or claim. Perhaps all politics is the Thrasymachean game, the Machiavellian contest, away from which, our idealistic fancies have—for so long, and with our permission—lured us. If so, what is left?
Play
“There isn’t just one Native American culture. There are hundreds. And there are millions of Native people. And we’re being ignored. We’re being told that we don’t have rights over how we are represented in mainstream America. We are being told that we should ‘get over it’ - but the people who are saying this don’t even know what the issues are. When people know of us only as a ‘costume,’ or something you dress up as for Halloween or for a music video, then you stop thinking of us as people, and this is incredibly dangerous because everyday we fight for the basic human right to live our own lives without outsiders determining our fate or defining our identities.”
—Jessica Metcalfe (via nitanahkohe)
“To be beautiful means to be yourself. You don’t need to be accepted by others. You need to accept yourself. When you are born a lotus flower, be a beautiful lotus flower, don’t try to be a magnolia flower. If you crave acceptance and recognition and try to change yourself to fit what other people want you to be, you will suffer all your life. True happiness and true power lie in understanding yourself, accepting yourself, having confidence in yourself.”
—
Thich Nhat Hanh (via stellablu)
I believe this is so true
(via eccentricsoul)
“Find meaning. Distinguish melancholy from sadness. Go out for a walk. It doesn’t have to be a romantic walk in the park, spring at its most spectacular moment, flowers and smells and outstanding poetical imagery smoothly transferring you into another world. It doesn’t have to be a walk during which you’ll have multiple life epiphanies and discover meanings no other brain ever managed to encounter. Do not be afraid of spending quality time by yourself. Find meaning or don’t find meaning but “steal” some time and give it freely and exclusively to your own self. Opt for privacy and solitude. That doesn’t make you antisocial or cause you to reject the rest of the world. But you need to breathe. And you need to be.”
—Albert Camus, from Notebooks, 1951-1959 (via solunars)
eternal recurrence of the same
“Write hard and clear about what hurts.”
—Ernest Hemingway (via larmoyante)
“At first glance, a society based on mass consumption appears to encourage self-indulgence in its most blatant forms. Strictly considered, however, modern advertising seeks to promote not so much self-indulgence as self-doubt. It seeks to create needs, not to fulfill them; to generate new anxieties instead of allaying old ones.”
—Christopher Lasch (via tinfoilhatlady)
permanence never lasts
May 2013
34 posts
PSA: Intersectionality is the default, not the exception.
It’s never just gender.
It’s never just race.
It’s never just sexuality.
It’s never just class.
It’s never just disability.
It’s never just one thing.
All that shit is always interacting at the same time.
AGAINST MONISM! ONWARD!!!
“[W]hat token could one give to demonstrate at the present moment whether we’re asleep or dreaming? That’s it, Socrates [Theaetetus answers], it is most perplexing … for all the same things follow in parallel and like the strophe and counter-strophe of a chorus. For just as there’s nothing to prevent what we’re now conversing about be also dreamt as a conversation with one another during sleep, so whenever in a dream what we dream we are recounting is itself a dream, the similarity of that to this conversation is strange.”
—Plato, the Theaetetus as quoted in Deconstruction and Philosophy, ed. John Sallis (via heteroglossia)
vivify
“Without music, life would be a mistake.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (via americanphilosopher)
“
The one historical constant in my field is that each time a claim of human uniqueness bites the dust, other claims quickly take its place. Meanwhile, science keeps chipping away at the wall that separates us from the other animals. We have moved from viewing animals as instinct-driven stimulus-response machines to seeing them as sophisticated decision makers.
Aristotle’s ladder of nature is not just being flattened; it is being transformed into a bush with many branches. This is no insult to human superiority. It is long-overdue recognition that intelligent life is not something for us to seek in the outer reaches of space but is abundant right here on earth, under our noses.
” —Frans de Waal, The Brains of the Animal Kingdom
Play
can't wait for the next time the muse ensues...
definitions, an attempt
Phallogocentrism: an androcentric ‘essence’, deeply (ontologically) implicit in the human linguistic-discursive-conceptual condition, in a historical-social world suffused with patriarchy. (?)
language, paradoxically, is constricting and liberating.
"One must imagine Sisyphus happy."
~ Albert Camus
Nascentes morimur.
“As soon as we are born, we begin to die.”
“How did I come to believe in a government called Tony Hoagland?
with an economy based on flattery and self-protection?
and a sewage system of selective forgetting?
and extensive history of broken promises?” —Tony Hoagland, What Narcissism Means to Me (via crematedadolescent)
with an economy based on flattery and self-protection?
and a sewage system of selective forgetting?
and extensive history of broken promises?” —Tony Hoagland, What Narcissism Means to Me (via crematedadolescent)
