A learned reply

“I am often asked the question, ‘Do you believe in the afterlife?’ After mumbling something stupid on a few occasions, I have now learned to reply, ‘Yes, of course I believe in the afterlife. I believe in the life of those that come after, those we love, who are few in number, and those we don’t even know, who are obviously many more, a great many in fact.’ People rarely seem impressed by this answer.

However, why should we assume that the question of the afterlife must always be answered with reference to me? Isn’t just a teensy bit selfish? What is so important about my afterlife? Why can’t I believe in others’ afterlife without believing in my own?”

-Simon Critchley, 2009 (via Flavorwire)

Colonial-Style

“Under the colonial regime, anything may be done for a loaf of bread or a miserable sheep.  The relations of man with matter, withing the world outside and with history are in the colonial period simply relations with food.  For a colonized man, in a contest of oppresion like that of Algeria, living does not mean embodying moral values or taking his place in the coherent and fruitful development of the world.  To live means to keep on existing.  Every date is a victory: not the result of work, but a victory felt as a triumph of life.”

-Frantz Fanon, 1963 (The Wretched of the Earth.  Middelsex, UK: Penguin.  Pg. 249)

A million-dollar-question

“How, then, does one live when the time to die has passed, when it is even forbidden to be alive, in what might be called the experience of living the ‘wrong way around’?  How, in such circumstances, does one experience not only the everyday but the hic et nunc when, every day, one has both to expect anything and to live in expectation of something that has not yet been realized, is delaying being realized, is constantly unaccomplished and elusive?”

-Achille Mbembe, 2001 (On the Postcolony.  Berkeley: University of California Press.  P 201)