“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)

“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.)

“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)

…”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.)

“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)

“The political potential of deconstructive analysis lies not in the simple recognition of the inevitability of exclusions, but in insisting upon accountability for the particular exclusions that are enacted and in taking up the responsibility to perpetually contest and rework the boundaries”

Karen Barad, 1998  (“Getting Real: technoscientific practices and the materialization of reality.”  Differences 10(2):87-128.  Pg. 103-4)

“The very notion of ‘dialogue’ is culturally specific and historically bound, and while one speaker may feel secure that a conversation is happening, another may be sure it is not.  The power relations that condition and limit dialogic possibilities need first to be interrogated.  Otherwise, the model of dialogue risks relapsing into a liberal model that assumes that speaking agents occupy equal positions of power and speak with the same presuppositions about what constitutes ‘agreement’ and ‘unity’ and indeed that those are the goals to be sought.”

-Judith Butler, 1990.  (Gender Trouble.  New York: Routledge.  Pg. 20)

“What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy – a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States at this very hour.”

-Frederick Douglass, 1852  - Independence Day Speech at Rochester, New York

via (notes on) politics, theory, and photography

“There are two ways to die, two ways to sleep, two ways to be stupid – a head first dive into chaos or stabilized installation in order and chitin. We are provided with enough senses and instinct to protect us against the danger of explosion, but we do not have enough when faced with death from order or with falling asleep from rules and harmony”

-Michel Serres, 1980 [2007] (The Parasite.  Minneapolis MN: University of Minnesota Press.  Pg 127)

“Philosophers who leave their studies are likely to be surprised”

-Annemarie Mol, 2008 (The Logic of Care.  New York: Routledge.  Pg. 9)