Epigraff

mano-a-mano

yacob — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 03:50:40 +0000

“The fear is that in failing to affirm human uniqueness such views authorize the treatment of people as mere things; in other words, that a strong distinction between subjects and objects is needed to prevent the instrumentalization of humans [...] the ontological divide between persons and things must remain lest one have no moral grounds for privileging man over germ or for condemning pernicious forms of human-on-human instrumentalization”

Jane Bennett, 2010 (Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke. Pg 11-12)

trivial pursuits

yacob — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 17:16:28 +0000

“But are you not making a confusion in your criticism [that psychoanalysis deals only with trivialities] between the vastness of the problems and the conspicuousness of what points to them? Are there not very important things which can only reveal themselves under certain conditions and at certain times, by quite feeble indications? If you are a young man, for instance, will it not be from small pointers that you will conclude that you have won a girl’s favour? Would you wait for an express declaration of love or a passionate embrace? Or would not a glance, scarcely noticed by other people, be enough? A slight movement, the lengething by a second of the pressure of a hand? And if you were a detective engaged in tracing a murder, would you expect to find the murderer had left his photograph behind at the place of the crime, with his address attached? Or would you not necessarily have to be satisfied with comparatively slight and obscure traces of the person you were in search of? So do not let us under-estimate small indications; by their help we may succeed in getting on the track of something bigger”

-Sigmund Freud, 1916 (Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. London: Hogarth)

LOL

yacob — Sat, 09 Apr 2011 22:09:05 +0000

“Philosophy feels small and lonely confronting such forces, but the only way it’s going to die is by choking with laughter.”

Giles Deleuze, 1988 (“On Philosophy” Negotiations. New York: Columbia. P. 136).

Ideology

yacob — Tue, 18 May 2010 18:16:26 +0000

“I use the term ideology broadly to refer to what many anthropologists might prefer to call culture. I do not mean the term in the Marxist sense of mystification. Rather, ideology is the stuff of definitions of the world, that which allows people to understand and act. Its relationship to social and political systems must be determined in each historical and ethnographic instance”

Lila Abu-Lughod, 1986 (Veiled Sentiments. Berkeley CA: UC Press. P. 276)

A voice preceding me

yacob — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 17:46:05 +0000

“I would really like to have slipped imperceptibly into this lecture, as into all the others I shall be delivering, perhaps over the years ahead. I would have preferred to be enveloped in words, borne away beyond all possible beginnings. At the moment of speaking, I would like to have perceived a nameless voice, long preceding me, leaving me merely to enmesh myself in it, taking up its cadence, and to lodge myself, when no one was looking, in its interstices as if it had paused an instant, in suspense, to beckon to me. There would have been no beginnings: instead, speech would proceed from me, which I stood in its path – a slender gap – the point of its possible disappearance”

-Michel Foucault, 1972 (“The Discourse on Language” In The Archaeology of Knowledge. New York: Pantheon. Pg 215)

Slow Death vs a Crisis

yacob — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 17:32:24 +0000

“Often when scholars and activists apprehend the phenomenon of slow death in long-term conditions of privation they choose to misrepresent the duration and scale of the situation by calling a crisis that which is a fact of life and has been a defining fact of life for a given population that lives it as a fact in ordinary time. [...] Of course this deployment of crisis is often explicitly and intentionally a redefinitional tactic, a distorting or misdirecting gesture that aspires to make an environmental phenomenon appear suddenly as an event because as a structural or predictable condition it has not engendered the kinds of historic action we associate with the heroic agency a crisis seems already to have called for.”

-Lauren Berlant, 2007 (“Slow Death (Sovereignty, Obesity, Lateral Agency.” Critical Inquiry 33. P. 760)

Reading with care

yacob — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 22:58:08 +0000

“At some level we have not demanded even of ourselves that we ascertain whether we believe this hypothesis to be true; we have felt that there was so much to learn first by observing the automatic nervous system of a routinized dismissal of it in terms of today’s Theory. The moralistic hygiene by which any reader of today is unchallengeably entitled to condescend to the thought of any moment in the past (maybe especially the recent past) is globally available to anyone who masters the application of two or three discrediting questions. How provisional, by contrast, how difficult to reconstruct and how exorbitantly specialized of use, are the tools that in any given case would allow one to ask: What was it possible to think or do at a certain moment of the past that it no longer is? And how are those possibilities to be found, unfolded, allowed to move and draw air and seek new voices and uses, in the very different disciplinary ecology of even a few decades difference?”

-Eve Sedgwick, on reading Silavan Tomkins, 2003 (Touching Feeling. Durham NC: Duke. Pgs 117-8.)

A world destroyed

yacob — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 19:41:54 +0000

“the current obsession with the fetus represents, a la 2001, a displaced identification with future generations and a denial about the present. Modern Western culture seems to fantasize that a world destroyed for future generations can be redeemed by reproducing”

-Michael Warner, 1991 (“Introduction: Fear of a Queer Planet.” Social Text 29. Pg. 10)

Reparations

yacob — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 00:04:52 +0000

…”it’s often the ludicrous anachronisms within a given object or practice that operate as portals to other uses [...] like what Sedgwick means by reparative criticism: that because we can’t know in advance – we can know only retrospectively, if even then – what is queer and what is not, we gather and combine eclectically and idiosyncratically, dragging a bunch of cultural debris around with us and stacking it in eclectic piles [... A]esthetic objects – especially outdated ones – ‘make time appear’ in ways that contest dominant modes of writing and feeling properly historical: they demand that we read, and they themselves write, historiographically aslant. The apprehension of thus requires a certain stillness.”

-Elizabeth Freeman, 2007 (“Still After.” South Atlantic Quarterly 106(3). Pg. 497-9.)

Talking in walls

yacob — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 21:13:57 +0000

“The walls we have to erect about ourselves are immaterial walls, the walls of an idiolect whose terms and turns of phrase are not in the dictionary and the manuals of rhetoric. Not only the talk of lovers, but every conversation that is resumed again and again becomes, over time, incomprehensible to outsiders. There is secrecy in every conversation. In the measure that this wall of secrecy gets thinner, we more and more utter but current opinions, conventional formulas, and inconsequential judgements”

-Alphonso Lingis, 1994 (The Community of Those Who Have Nothing In Common. Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press. Pg. 77)