affirmation, negation

[kurtwalker]

“Game developers just like black, […] the number zero, infinity, spheres, perfection—all that kind of stuff.”

— martin hollis, director of perfect dark (2000 n64, rare)

[thirdity]

“The more he identifies with the dominant images of need, the less he understands his own life and his own desires. The spectacle’s estrangement from the acting subject is expressed by the fact that the individual’s gestures are no longer his own; they are the gestures of someone else who represents them to him.”

— Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle

[julienbakerfavormp3-deactivated]

I know that you think you already know but— Wait Longer than that.

even longer than that.

Marie Howe, “What the Silence Says”

[theoptia]

Fernando Pessoa, from The Book of Disquiet

[quotespile]

“How marvelous books are, crossing worlds and centuries, defeating ignorance and, finally, cruel time itself.”

— Gore Vidal, Julian

[rozieramati]

“don’t you understand that the people who do this thing, who practice racism, are bereft? that is something distorted about the psyche. it’s a huge waste and it’s a corruption and a distortion. it’s like a profound neurosis that nobody examines for what it is. it feels crazy. it is crazy. it has just as much of a deleterious effect on white people as it does black people. if the racist white person doesn’t understand that he or she is also a race it’s also constructed, it’s also made, and also has some kind of serviceability but when you take it away, i take your race away, and there you are all strung out and all you got is your little self, and what is that? what are you without racism? are you any good? and you still strong? still smart?” -toni morrison

[absenceisaformofwinter]

And in the end, I believe that we don't need to do anything to be loved. We spend our lives trying to seem prettier, smarter. But I realized two things. Those who love us see us with their hearts and attribute qualities to us beyond those we really have. And those who don't want to love us will never be satisfied with all our efforts. Yes, I really believe that it is important to leave our imperfections alone. They are precious to understand those who see us with the heart.

Frida kahlo

[edwordsmyth]

Yahya Sinwar

[funeral]

Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays

[tonreihe]

“Is it my fault, people of New York and Paris, if you don’t have my agile mind, if you treat me like an acrobat, because for forty years I’ve trained myself so that my soul is as fit and agile as the bodies of acrobats? And I congratulate myself that you are more familiar with my name than with my works, because knowledge of my works would lead you down the path of sleepwalkers, giving you vertigo, for which you’d never forgive me.”

—Jean Cocteau, Letter to the Americans

[thirdity]

“If you have patience enough to search, maybe you’ll catch a glimpse of what you’re looking for. And when you find it, you’ll probably be disappointed. It isn’t the devil. It isn’t the State. It isn’t a magical child. It’s the void.”

— Roberto Bolaño, Between Parentheses

[liberatingreality]

An environment that is not safe to disagree in is not an environment focused on growth - it's an environment focused on control.

Wendi Jade

[mashatupitsyn]

Lyotard on the myth of development, which is to become inhuman: “Development imposes the saving of time. To go fast is to forget fast, to retain only the information that is useful afterwards, as in ‘rapid reading’. But writing and reading which advance backwards in the direction of the unknown thing ‘within’ are slow. One loses one’s time seeking time lost.” Adulthood advances backwards too. Into childhood. Constant dips back into childhood is what Lyotard means when he writes that childhood is a debt we can never pay off. So when we say we miss that time (of childhood, of adolescence), that time when we had all the time in the world, we are saying that we miss the time we had not yet lost, did not yet need to save in order to become inhuman.

Teaching this tomorrow. This one will be hard.

[improvisedliturgy]

[P]hilosophy is faced with a paradox: to say clearly something that is unclear, that has no firm outline, that does not accommodate to reification; to say it in such a way, that is, that the moments that elude the eye's fixating gaze, or that are not accessible at all, are indicated with the utmost distinctness. This, however, is not a merely formal demand but rather a part of the very substance philosophy is after. This demand is paradoxical because language and the process of reification are interlocked. The very form of the copula, the "is," pursues the aim of pinpointing its object, an aim to which philosophy ought to provide a corrective; in this sense all philosophical language is a language in opposition to language, marked with the stigma of its own impossibility.

Theodor W. Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies

[affirmation--negation]

The weakness of philosophy is that it hasn’t produced practical philosophy, but only bookish philosophy.

Mao

[philosophybits]

“Nothing determines me from outside, not because nothing acts upon me, but, on the contrary, because I am from the start outside myself and open to the world.”

— Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception

[tamarrud]

I have never been in despair about the world. I am enraged by it. I can't afford despair. You can't tell the children there's no hope.

— James Baldwin