s.penkevich [mental health hiatus] > Books: philosophy‎ (28)

‘In defying the state, she repeats as well the defiant act of her brother, thus offering a repetition of defiance that, in affirming her loyalty to her brother, situates her as the one who may substitute for him and, hence, replaces and territorializes him’

‘[F]or Lacan, kinship is rarefied as enabling linguistic structure, a presupposition of symbolic intelligibility, and thus removed from the domain of the social; for Hegel, kinship is precisely a relation of “blood” rather than one of norms.That is, kinship is not yet entered into the social, where the social is inaugurated through a violent supersession of kinship.’

‘In Hegel, kinship is rigorously distinguished from the sphere of the state, though kinship is a precondition for the emergence and reproduction of the state apparatus. In Lacan, kinship, as a function of the symbolic, becomes rigorously dissociated from the sphere of the social, and yet it constitutes the structural field of intelligibility within which the social emerges. My reading of Antigone, in brief, will attempt to compel these distinctions into productive crisis.Antigone represents neither kinship nor its radical outside but becomes the occasion for a reading of a structurally constrained notion of kinship in terms of its social iterability, the aberrant temporality of the norm.’

‘I have projected myself into the other with such power that when I am without the other I cannot recover myself, regain myself: I am lost, forever.’

‘If I acknowledge my dependency, I do so because for me it is a means of signifying my demand: in the realm of love, futility is not a "weakness" or an "absurdity": it is a strong sign: the more futile, the more it signifies and the more it asserts itself as strength.’

‘Absence is the figure of privation; simultaneously, I desire and I need. Desire is squashed against need: that is the obsessive phenomenon of all amorous sentiment.’

‘Isn’t the most sensitive point of this mourning the fact that I must lose a language — the amorous language? No more ‘I love you’s.’

‘The story concerns the reason why we love to fall in love. Beauty spins and the mind moves. To catch beauty would be to understand how that impertinent stability in vertigo is possible. But no, delight need not reach so far. To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope. But no, delight need not reach so far. To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope.’

‘Most civilisation is based on cowardice. It's so easy to civilize by teaching cowardice. You water down the standards which would lead to bravery. You restrain the will. You regulate the appetites. You fence in the horizons. You make a law for every movement. You deny the existence of chaos. You teach even the children to breathe slowly. You tame.’

‘Honestly, if you were to ask ten feminists to define feminism you'd probably get eleven different answers. There are a few core things that we do agree about, though. First, feminists agree that women have been, and continue to be, disadvantaged relative to men...Second, feminists agree that these disadvantages are bad things that can and should be changed. And third, we agree that these disadvantages are interrelated, that they're the result of mutually supporting systems of privilege and deprivation that are structurally embedded in virtually every aspect of society and that systematically function to screw women over.’

‘spins women’s well-founded anger over legitimate grievances into the age-old spector of the irrational hag whose wailings needn’t be taken seriously.’

‘In contemporary patriarchal culture, a panoptical male connoisseur resides within the consciousness of most women: They stand perpetually before his gaze and under his judgement. Woman lives her body as seen by another, by an anonymous patriarchal Other.’

‘What we do need is men who are willing to fight patriarchy; men who are willing to consider giving up privileges they’ve received strictly because of their gender; men who don’t think that relinquishing this unearned privilege is an injustice.’

‘Atheistic existentialism, of which I am a representative, declares with greater consistency that if God does not exist there is at least one being whose existence comes before its essence, a being which exists before it can be defined by any conception of it. .... He will not be anything until later, and then he will be what he makes of himself…If God does not exist, are we provided with any values or commands that could legitimize our behavior.’

‘a man who commits himself, and who realizes that he is not only the individual that he chooses to be, but also a legislator choosing at the same time what humanity as a whole should be, cannot help but be aware of his own full and profound responsibility’

‘This is humanism because we remind man that there is no legislator other than himself and that he must, in his abandoned state, make his own choices, and also because we show that it is not by turning inward, but by constantly seeking a goal outside of himself in the form of liberation, or of some special achievement, that man will realize himself as truly human.

‘strives to hold both ends of the chain at the same time, surpassing the interior-exterior, subjective-objective opposition. It postulates the value of the individual as the source and reason for being [raison d’être]...yet it admits that the individual has reality only through his engagement in the world. It affirms that the will of free being is sufficient for the accomplishment of freedom, yet it also states that this will can posit itself only by struggling against the obstacles and the oppressions that limit the concrete possibilities of man.’

‘From the top of the hill I look at the path travelled, and the entire path is present in the joy of my success. The walk gives the rest its worth, and my thirst gives the glass of water its worth. A whole past comes together in the moment of enjoyment.’

‘Absurdity challenges every ethics; but also the finished rationalization of the real would leave no room for ethics; it is because man's condition is ambiguous that he seeks, through failure and outrageousness, to save his existence. Thus, to say that action has to be lived in its truth, that is, in the consciousness of the antinomies which it involves, does not mean that one has to renounce it.’

‘A freedom which is interested only in denying freedom must be denied. And it is not true that the recognition of the freedom of others limits my own freedom: to be free is not to have the power to do anything you like; it is to be able to surpass the given toward an open future; the existence of others as a freedom defines my situation and is even the condition of my own freedom. I am oppressed if I am thrown into prison, but not if I am kept from throwing my neighbor into prison.’

'The fundemental ambiguity of the human condition will always open up to men the possibility of opposing choices; there will always be within them the desire to be that being of whom they have made themsleves a lack, the flight from the anguish of freedom; the plane of hell, of struggle, will never be eliminated; freedom will never be given; it will always have to be won.'

‘In order for a liberating action to be a thoroughly moral action, it would have to be achieved through a conversion of the oppressors: there would then be a reconciliation of all freedoms. But no one any longer dares to abandon himself today to these utopian reveries.’

‘Hanging, swaying, pulsing, the most vulnerable and insubstantial creature, it has for its defense the violence and power of the whole ocean, to which it has entrusted its being, its going, and its will.’

‘you’re a median…Both, neither. Either, or. Where there’s an opposed pair, a polarity, you’re in the middle; where there’s a scale, you’re the balance point.’

‘Why do I have these thoughts if the reason I’m here is primarily to increase production? From what perspective are these thoughts productive? Was there an error in the update? If there was, I’d like to be rebooted.’

‘My own impression is that this idiosyncratic naming process is an indication that crew members feel a need to appropriate these objects in their own way, reducing the distance between crew member and object, and establishing a form of intimacy, so to speak...scaling down its strangeness and assimilating it into a reality the individual crew members can both relate to and accept, thereby facilitating a coexistence with the found objects.’

’The Lower Realm is where we learn. There’s only one purpose to both misfortune and happiness, and that’s to learn.’

‘You’re alive as long as I am.
That’s why I want to keep living. To make you like. To keep you, who I love most in all the world, alive….because I’m what’s left of you.’

’misogyny may be a purely structural phenomenon, perpetuated by social institutions, policies, and broader cultural mores.’

‘Boys will be boys, but women who get pregnant have behaved irresponsibly. We are so comfortable with regulating women’s sexual behavior, but we’re shocked by the idea of doing it to men.’

’[T]he anti-abortion movenent’s supposed pre-occupation with life belies the fact that it undermines the health and lives of cis girls and women, along with other people who may also become pregnant. Similarly, the anti-trans movement’s supposed preoccupation with sexual safety and lives of a particularly vulnerable class of people: namely, tans girls and women, who are disproportionately liable to be attacked, assaulted, and murdered, at rates that recently prompted the American Medical Association to declare this an epidemic.’

taking sexism to be the branch of patriarchal ideology that justifies and rationalizes a patriarchal social order, and misogyny as the system that polices and enforces its governing norms and expectations. So sexism is scientific; misogyny is moralistic. And a patriarchal order has a hegemonic quality.

Her humanity may hence be held to be owed to other human beings, and her value contingent on her giving moral goods to them: life, love, pleasure, nurture, sustenance, and comfort, being some

‘Screw the years—we don’t notice things change. We know that things change, we’ve been told since childhood that things change, we’ve witnessed things change ourselves many a time, and yet we’re still utterly incapable of noticing the moment that change comes—or we search for change in all the wrong places.’

‘Bureaucrats and politicians, who can’t afford to cultivate their imaginations, tend to assume it’s all ray-guns and nonsense, good for children. A writer may have to be as blatantly critical of utopia as Zamyatin in We to bring the censor down upon him. The Strugatsky brothers were not blatant, and never (to my limited knowledge) directly critical of their government’s policies. What they did, which I found most admirable then and still do now, was to write as if they were indifferent to ideology—something many of us writers in the Western democracies had a hard time doing. They wrote as free men write.’

’we discover not ideas given in advance but valuesemanating from the linguistic system…. [T]hese concepts are purely differential, not positively defined by their content but negatively defined by their relations with other terms of the system. Their most precise characteristic is that they are what the others are not’
-Saussure, 1974

’Paper echoes and resounds, subjectile of an inscription from which phonetic aspects are never absent, whatever the system of writing. Beneath the appearance of a surface, it holds in reserve a volume, folds, a labyrinth whose walls return the echoes of the voice or song that it carries itself; for paper alsop has the range or the ranges of a voice bearer. Paper is utilized in an experience involving the body, beginning with the hands, eyes, voice, ears; so it mobilizes both time and space. Despite or through the richness and multiplicity of these resources, this multimedia has always proclaimed its inadequacy and its finitude.