Utopian Rapport

  

[tearsofrefugees]

In Morocco, 1,000 mothers and sisters join forces to speak about their loved ones' disappearances

For nearly a decade, Moroccan mothers and sisters of missing persons have been running an association to make their voices heard in a countr

[proustian-dream]

Theory has shifted questions. It is no longer: what is literature, what is poetry? But: what does poetry do? Poetry is not expression. Everything is expression and everyone expresses themselves. We owe it at least to Roman Jakobson – to his six functions of language – to consider this reductive view of poetry as pure regression due to ignorance. Poetry is not signification. To say that a poem signifies, is to ask what that poem signifies, to presuppose that it partakes of the sign, thus to separate it into a sense and a form, which is the residue of sense. The usual way out of this trap is itself a trap: it turns poetry into the anti-arbitrariness of the sign. A triple status as nature, as celebration, as sacred. The cosmic and the religious betray the historicity of language and of poetry. It is why poetry is the critique of the sign, of the serial opposition of the body and the soul, of the letter and the spirit, of form and content, signifier, signified. Just when everything was going well for the sign, poetry introduced a question to which it obstructed the answer: what is to signify?

Henri Meschonnic, "Critique of Rhythm", The Henri Meschonnic Reader

[proustian-dream]

Critique is the very interaction of theoretical activity and poetic activity. To which it probably owes its share of non-conceptualised, of nonconceptualisable matter. It works towards the concept. There is a passion, a theoretical affectivity. Saussure’s theoretical writing was his way of writing his life. Nothing is more opposed to it than, for instance, Hjelmslev’s arrogance and lack of precision. There is a poetics, and an ethics, of theory. What the theoretical discourse and the activity of the poem have in common is that they are both specific modes of the subjective tending at once towards the referential and the intersubjective, the impersonal, which should be called the transpersonal.

Henri Meschonnic, "Critique of Rhythm", The Henri Meschonnic Reader

[fuckyeahmarxismleninism]

Puerto Rico: Thousands of People Protest for Independence

July 19, 2026 Organized by 20 organizations, the protesters gathered at Plaza Colón to march to the Federal Court in Old San Juan

Thousands of citizens gathered this Saturday in the historic streets of Old San Juan to participate in the traditional March for Puerto Rican Independence. During the march, participants demanded the archipelago’s right to self-determination and sovereignty as they made their way through the city to the beat of protest songs performed by Bad Bunny and Residente. Puerto Rico has held the status of a U.S. Commonwealth since 1952.

“We are here to underscore the demand and the right of the people of Puerto Rico to self-determination and independence, which is the means that allows us, as a people, to have the political, economic, and social authority necessary for our full development, to join the world, and to overcome the problems caused by a bankrupt colonial model which has plunged us into poverty and drives our young people to emigrate,” said Juan Dalmau Ramírez, former gubernatorial candidate and secretary-general of the Puerto Rican Independence Party (PIP).

[a-quiet-green-agreement]

What I will say next will lead many of my readers to laugh and shrug their shoulders. Yet I will say it anyway, because the present age has been excessive in inculcating in us the cult of "common sense." We observe inexplicable phenomena out of the corner of our eye and pretend that we have not seen them; we read in bolder authors about ghosts or the dead, and regard them as phantasms, products of a sick imagination—anything so as not to jeopardize our "common sense" or to be propelled into the ambit of another dimension, beyond the threshold of "verifiable, tangible reality." We pass through life with one eye all too sharp, yet the other blind, as if covered with a film. Is it enough just to see? No, it is not enough.

– Gustaw Herling, Don Ildebrando

[mervynbunter]

Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968)

[toiich]

Audrey Hepburn in her kitchen, 1955

[toiich]

David Bowie smoking

by Andrew Kent, 1976

[64mpg]

unironically when i’m sick i just chant this shit in my head until it’s over

[commonplacebuddhism]

From The Upajjhatthana Sutta ("Subjects for Contemplation"). I was unable to determine whose translation this is. It differs quite a bit from the scriptural versions I am used to seeing and I like it!

[neoyorzapoteca]

(via What You Need (feat. Soft Glas) | Jay Som)

[vortexstreet]

Wifredo Lam in his painting studio, 1964, Cuba

[orpheuslament]

Let My People, Pádraig Ó Tuama. The Book of Queer Prophets, edited by Ruth Hunt

[tonreihe]

“For his fault,—and therein lies the mystery. Before the Fall, man had to nourish himself exclusively on herbs and fruits. And the animals themselves, no matter what wisemen may say, had no need for other aliments. The text of Genesis is definite on these two points. The Fall came and dislocated that order, and we are still in the period of dislocation. Nothing is in its proper place.

“In punishment for that first crime, the plenitude of which is another absolutely impenetrable mystery, man was condemned to devouring the animals; and those among the animals that most resembled the guilty Leader who led them into his disgrace, those which are called, for that reason, beasts of prey, were condemned, by the same stroke, to eating other beasts, to eating man himself. Such is the human order substituted for the divine Order, in other words, the frightening disorder that makes you suffer and that can only be glimpsed by individuals such as yourself, rare species, take it from me.

“No one else but God could reestablish all that, and it is in this sense that King David, directly inspired, wrote: ‘Your judgments are a great abyss, Lord, you will save men and beasts.’ You who speak affectionately of the humble creatures who warm the infant Jesus, know that this same Jesus, the Son of God, was born expressly to die for them, as well as for us, and that it is the Holy Spirit who said that. But do not forget that the poor Jesus could only save creation ‘in expectation,’ as Saint Paul asserts; that his Sacrifice is not consummated; that he is still nailed to his Cross; that he continues, after nineteen centuries, to suffer with those who suffer; and that his Redemption cannot be fulfilled except by the coming of the Third Person through whom all must be ‘restituted.’”

—Léon Bloy, in a letter to Henry de Groux. (The Ungrateful Beggar, entry for December 3, 1894.)

[philosophybits]

“If theory were to wait for experience it would never come about.”

— Novalis, Logological Fragments I

[nobrashfestivity]

William Steig Illustration for Wilhelm Reich’s Listen, Little Man!, 1945

[tonreihe]

“Jesus is at the center of everything, he takes everything on himself, he bears everything, he suffers everything. It is impossible to strike another being without striking Him, to humiliate someone without humiliating Him, to curse or kill whomever it might be, without cursing or killing Him. The vilest of all louts is forced to assume the Face of Christ to receive a slap, from whatever hand. Otherwise, the clout could never reach him and would remain suspended between the interval of planets, for centuries upon centuries, world without end, until it would have finally met the Face that pardons…”

—Léon Bloy, in a letter to Henry de Groux. (The Ungrateful Beggar, entry for December 3, 1894.)

[edwordsmyth]

Giovanni Arrighi