Today violence is the rhetoric of the period, the empty rhetorician has made it his own. When a reality of human existence has completed its historic course, has been shipwrecked and lies dead, the waves throw it up on the shores of rhetoric, where the corpse remains for a long time. Rhetoric is the…
In a right ordering of public affairs, the mass is that part which does not act of itself. Such is its mission. It has come into the world to be directed, influenced, represented, organized … It needs to submit its life to a higher court, formed of the superior minorities. …but without them, humanity…
This morning I was moved by the description in the New York Times of the hundreds of criminal prosecutions in the aftermath of the January 6 uprising at the Capitol in Washington. This from the Times: If someone is being criminally prosecuted, there’s often some dysfunction in their past. But I’ve been struck by…
Censor the body and you censor breath and speech at the same time. Write your self. Your body must be heard. Only then will the immense resources of the unconscious spring forth. p. 880 To write and thus to forge for herself the anti-logos weapon. To become at will the taker and initiator, for…
Saturday morning dawns, sunny and temperate — a perfect mid-summer day for the Midwest. There’s no possible summation of the state of things, — no matter the iphone news feed. The extremes attract our attention as the fight or flight trigger is deep, encoded, that instinct for survival yet necessary, even if I cannot…
…the individual finds himself already with a stock of ideas. He decides to content himself with them and to consider himself intellectually complete. As he feels the lack of nothing outside himself, he settles down definitely amid his mental furniture. Such is the mechanism of self-obliteration. The mass-man regards himself as perfect. …it never…
Sunshine! Much needed rain is followed by a morning of sunlight. Often I take Nature for granted. Somehow it doesn’t come to mind that the most basic needs and pleasures of my life directly depends on the soil, upon moisture and light in proper measure. No application of technology can possibly counter the inexorable…
Everyone has ideas, even more than they need. What matters is the poetic singularity of analysis. Only this spirituality of language can justify writing. Not a critical objectivity of ideas. There will never be a solution to the contradiction of ideas, except inside language itself, in the energy and fortune (happiness) of language. Radical…
Several days ago I offered a short quote from Baudrillard in an email to several friends. The objection was made that I had not given a context to ease understanding of the admittedly obscure lines. Once again here is an excerpt from Baudrillard’s essay Radical Thought. Added context would not make his words more…
I read an email this morning from a friend expressing anguish at the juxtaposition between the stunning accomplishments of mankind culturally and scientifically with the despoliation of Nature and the consequent global warming and climate catastrophe. It is hard to conceive of anyone now living who is not aware of the event of climate…
