Buchzitate

[romancenjoyer]

And this, among other reasons, is why I am against the word “grief,” which in contemporary culture seems to indicate a process that has an end point: the sooner you get there, the sooner you prove yourself to be a good sport at living, and the less awkward people around you will feel. Sometimes people ask me where I am in the grieving process, and I wonder whether they understand anything at all about losing someone. How lonely the dead would feel, if the living were to stand up from death’s shadow, clap their hands, dust their pants, and say to themselves and to the world, I am done with my grieving; from this point on it’s life as usual, business as usual.

I don’t want an end point to my sorrow. The death of a child is not a heat wave or a snowstorm, nor an obstacle race to rush through and win, nor an acute or chronic illness to recover from. What is grief but a word, a shortcut, a simplification of something much larger than that word?

– Yiyun Li, Things In Nature Merely Grow

[bunnyinatree]

“… sex assignment is not simply an announcement of the sex that an infant is perceived to be; it also communicates a set of adult desires and expectations. The infant’s future is often being imagined or desired through the act of sex assignment, so sex assignment is not a simple description of anatomical facts, but a way of imagining what they will mean, or should mean. That imagining comes from elsewhere, and it does not exactly stop after sex has been legally or medically determined at birth. The girl continues to be girled; the boy continues to be boyed; and these practices of girling and boying are repeated not just by parents, but also by a range of institutions that greet the child with boxes to be checked and norms to be embodied. In a sense, sex assignment does not happen just once. It is an iterative process, repeated by different actors and institutions, and depending on where one lives, it can be reiterated in ways that are not always in conformity with one another. Sex assignment is not a mechanism, but a process.”

— Judith Butler, “Who’s Afraid of Gender?”

[livrery]

Children do not give up their innate imagination, curiosity, dreaminess easily. You have to love them to get them to do that. Love is the path through permissiveness to discipline: and through discipline, only too often, to betrayal of self.

R. D. Laing, The Politics of Experience (p. 60)

[livrery]

Undoubtedly, most people take to be 'really' true only what has to do with grammar and the natural world. A man says he is dead but he is alive. But his 'truth' is that he is dead.

R. D. Laing, The divided self (p. 37)

[livrery]

The idea of becoming is one of Deleuze and Guattari’s means to reinterpret the concepts of being, identity and difference. As becoming refers to constant change rather than a one-way movement between two fixed states, the very idea of being is reformulated. Being is no more an identifiable state with a definite identity from which difference is derived. What we consider as being as relatively stable in the flow of time is actually repetition with difference, an unfolding of becoming.

Kaochen Liao, "Materializing the transgender becoming: Norms, failures and ethics of 'The Traveler's Book of Gender Wandering'" in Deleuze, Guattari and the Schizoanalysis of Trans Studies (pp. 154)

[the-end-of-the-chase]

In terms of [French] soldiers, the habit of being tattooed appears to have been well established by the time of the Revolution. […] Another veteran of the [First French] Empire, with twelve campaigns and fifteen wounds to his name, was given a medical examination and was found to have VIVE LE ROI (’Long live the king’) tattooed on his right forearm. For political expediency, the veteran quickly had this tattoo amended to read VIVE LE RÔTI (’Long live roast meat’).

 - Napoleon’s Infantry Handbook, Terry Crowdy

[acertainknot]

“If we lived in a culture with a higher tolerance for ambiguity, rather than obsession with measurement, fixed identity, and knowability, transition wouldn’t be so confounding to people, and the process might be more normal. Epistemologically, we are anal retentive. Not rigorous, just stressed out. We need to know what a trans girl is. What are you, trans people get asked. Where are you from, people of colour get asked. White supremacist capitalism wants to make a map of everything, and then monetize the ways that things move around the map. Basically literally. The museum.”

— Baer, H., 2022. Trans Girl Suicide Museum. Los Angeles: Hesse Press. pp. 131-132.

[probablyasocialecologist]

“We’re riddled with pointless talk, insane quantities of words and images. Stupidity’s never blind or mute. So it’s not a problem of getting people to express themselves but of providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say. Repressive forces don’t stop people expressing themselves but rather force them to express themselves. What a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, and ever rarer, thing that might be worth saying.”

— Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations, 1972-1990

[belacqui-pro-quo]

“The problem of ‘tolerance’ (liberalism, laxism, the ‘permissive society’, etc.) takes the same form. The fact that those who were once mortal enemies are now on speaking terms, that the most fiercely opposed ideologies ‘enter into dialogue’, that a kind of peaceful coexistence has set in at all levels, that morality is less strict than it was, in no sense signifies some 'humanist’ progress in human relations, a greater understanding of problems or any such airy nonsense. It indicates simply that, since ideologies, opinions, virtues and vices are ultimately merely material for exchange and communication, all contradictory elements are equivalent in the play of signs. Tolerance in this context is no longer either a psychological trait or a virtue: it is a modality of the system itself. It is like the total compatibility and elasticity of the elements of fashion: long skirts and mini-skirts 'tolerate’ each other very well (indeed they signify nothing other than the relationship which holds between them).  Tolerance connotes morally the generalized relativity of functions/ signs, objects/signs, beings/signs, relations/signs, ideas/signs. In fact, we are beyond the opposition between fanaticism and tolerance, as we are beyond that between sincerity and fakery. 'Moral’ tolerance is no greater than it was before. We have simply changed systems; we have moved on to functional compatibility.”

— Jean Baudrillard, The Consumer Society

[notchainedtotrauma]

“If you’ve ever fallen you know that the other person or persons don’t complete you. They incomplete you. They fuck you the fuck up. It doesn’t leave you intact. It plays you, undermines you. It disturbs and disrupts your individuation. It obliterates not only the possibility of but the desire for individuation. If you think about it in those terms, incompleteness is a consummation devoutly to be wished.”

— Fred Moten in conversation with Stevphen Shukaitis and Stefano Harney

[livrery]

Man kann die Phänomenalität nicht dadurch überwinden, dass man zu greifen versucht, was jenseits ihrer liegt, sondern nur durch die Erfahrung, dass es jenseits ihrer nichts gibt - dass dieses Jenseits gerade das Nichts der absoluten Negativität und der schieren Unangemessenheit der Erscheinung gegenüber ihrem Begriff ist. Das übersinnliche Wesen ist die "Erscheinung 'als' Erscheinung" - soll heißen, es reicht nicht zu behaupten, dass die Erscheinung ihrem Wesen niemals angemessen ist. Wir müssen hinzufügen, dass 'dieses "Wesen" selbst nichts anderes als die Unangemessenheit der Erscheinung gegenüber ihr selbst', gegenüber ihrem Begriff ist (und eben diese Unangemessenheit macht sie zu einer "bloßen Erscheinung").

Slavoj Žižek, Das erhabene Objekt der Ideologie (277)

[excessivebookshelf]

“As you read a book word by word and page by page, you participate in its creation, just as a cellist playing a Bach suite participates, note by note, in the creation, the coming-to-be, the existence, of the music. And, as you read and re-read, the book of course participates in the creation of you, your thoughts and feelings, the size and temper of your soul.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

[livrery]

[A]lle Begriffe, in denen sich ein ganzer Prozess semiotisch zusammenfasst, entziehen sich der Definition; definierbar ist nur das, was keine Geschichte hat.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Zur Genealogie der Moral (II/13)

[livrery]

Gender ambiguity and transsexuality is a traumatic-Real for so many cis subjects as it is a 'true unknown' to them. Ambiguity exists outside of them, which threatens to undermine their worldview where the phallic gender binary is primordial, and fundamental way of making sense of the world. The Real is precisely outside a place in the symbolic order; it isn't yet symbolised.

Xandra Metcalfe, “'Why Are We Like This?' The Primacy of Transsexuality” in Transgender Marxism (p. 226)

[livrery]

If we define cissexuality as a process of identification that actively reproduces itself in order to prevent a subject falling into transsexuality, then cissexuality begins to appear as in fact less 'natural' than transsexuality, as its aberration.

Xandra Metcalfe, “'Why Are We Like This?' The Primacy of Transsexuality” in Transgender Marxism (p. 220)

[livrery]

Most trans people are familiar with the difficulties of choosing a name. A trans epistemology doesn't demand fidelity to a given name, but rather to the process of naming itself. A given name should be a gift and not a catechism; kept if it's useful, and given away if it's not. To name yourself is to assert your active participation in shaping our shared reality. To claim a new name is to resist the call to submit to language as a vehicle for carrying (someone else's) objective meaning, and instead insist on meaning as a relationship, in this case made real by imagining and labouring towards a future self.

Nathaniel Dickson,  ‘Seizing the Means: Towards a Trans Epistemology’ in Transgender Marxism (p. 207)

[livrery]

Trans historian Jules Gill-Peterson notes how contemporary discussions of 'gender identity' largely efface its origins as a conservative response intended to suture over the epistemic crisis of sex as a clinical category. Rather than appearing through an emancipatory concern, 'gender' in this sense served as a sexological speculation, ushered in by eugenic experiments on trans and intersex children and adults. To their evident horror, clinicians discovered that neither genotype, gonads, hormones, genitals, internal organs, nor secondary anatomical features proved decisive. No one isolatable feature could provide the foundational, determining, and unambiguous influence on which binary sexuation could depend. As such, frameworks ranging from pathological reduction of transsexual experiences to the sensual impact of 'dysphoria', to the later framework of 'Disorders of Sex Development' to account for intersex variations, formed a rear-guard reaction to sustain a coneptual binary.

Jules Joanne Gleeson and Elle O’Rourke, Transgender Marxism (p. 24)