What if, however, humans exceed animals in their capacity for violence precisely because they speak? Language dismembers a thing, destroying its organic unity, treating its parts and properties as autonomous. -*- The fact that reason and race have the same root (ratio) in Latin tells us something: language, not primitive egotistic interest, is the…
“Si vous êtes pris dans le rêve de l’autre, vous êtes foutu” (If you’re trapped in the dream of the other, you’re fucked) —Gilles Deleuze Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn’t it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone…
I recently exchanged emails with a friend on the topic of gerrymandering. Gerrymandering is the practice of shaping the voting districts to align with the population density that has supported the party in power, according to past election data. The majority party, the one in power gets to manipulate the boundaries of electoral districts,…
I am only an experimenter. Do not set the least value upon what I do, or the least discredit upon what I do not, as if I pretended to settle any thing as true or false. I unsettle all things. No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment, an endless…
If we are going to be personally free and productive human beings we need to recover some kind of interest in the possibility of attaining a relatively human and civilized condition, in which we ourselves can find ourselves and help others do the same. And that we might even be able to communicate something…
“We acknowledge the receipt of your order for five triple furnaces including two electric elevators for raising the corpses and one emergency elevator..” –excerpt of letter from I A Topf and Sons, manufacturers of heating equipment to the commandant of Auschwitz concerning the new “heating system.” “…for putting the bodies into the furnace we…
Propaganda is an ostensible appeal to reason and to action which is in fact essentially irrational. We are all the more susceptible to its irrational appeal since we are subject to the same systematic irrationality in advertising. There is such a thing as a labyrinth of information; the information is truly abundant and complex,…
A man of massive meditation
Is like a man looking at death,
Looking at death as at a bull’s –eye.
He watches before he crosses the tracks.
–Richard Eberhart
Life comes at us without warning. I cannot imagine what this day will bring. Yet I must “cross the tracks,” get on with the business of my life. I have my to-do list. There is the potential customer that I hope to see in Gurnee, and the meeting preparation to attend to later at my desk. This is what is meant by “the future.” Opportunity and risk are one and the same.
Though we have the power to destroy the whole world, life is stronger than the death instinct and love is stronger than hate. It does not make logical sense to be too hopeful, but once again this is not a matter of logic. One does not look for signs of hope in the newspapers…
A mixture of satiety, boredom, violence, and despair which characterizes our mass society— the impotence of well-fed bodies with empty and lost minds. The obsession with lust and with violent erratic forms of sex. Abstraction, confusion, pseudo passion— fabricated in the imagination and centered on fantasies Collect us together, give us a leader that…
