[mostrestless]

Ni dans la littérature que j’ai consultée, ni dans l’enquête, je n’ai rencontré de situations d’inceste (ou de jeux sexuels) entre des jumeaux, ou des cousins du même âge. Les jumeaux, et les cousins du même âge, vont explorer la sexualité ailleurs qu’au sein de leur famille. Si la différence d’âge entre les protagonistes est une condition nécessaire pour qu’advienne un « jeu sexuel » dans la fratrie, c’est bien parce que la différence d’âge amène avec elle une asymétrie des positions et un rapport d’autorité. Les seuls « jeux sexuels » qui existent dans la fratrie relèvent en réalité exclusivement de l’exercice d’une domination des aînés sur leurs cadets, sur lesquels ils ont une autorité à laquelle il n’est pas aisé de se soustraire. [...] Le concept de jeux sexuels entre frères et sœurs est un mythe. D’ailleurs, l’enquête approfondie montre que, devenus adultes, seuls les aînés désignent encore rétrospectivement les pratiques sexuelles dans la fratrie comme des jeux.

Dorothée Dussy, Le Berceau des dominations - Anthopologie de l'inceste (2021)

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Je me rejouais en boucle la réponse de Dorothée [Dussy] quand je lui demandais si elle avait été surprise de découvrir l'ampleur du problème. Dussy: Je crois que ce qui m'a surprise, ce n'est pas tellement ça, parce que je m'y attendais [...]. Ce qui m'a surprise, c'est de réaliser que, s'il y en a tant que ça, chaque personne qui a vécu l'inceste a l'impression d'être la personne qui souffre le plus au monde. C'est une douleur qui dévaste intérieurement. Les gens sont dévastés et doivent vivre avec cette dévastation intérieure, cette construction de traviole qui fait qu'on est dans la confusion, qu'on ne sait pas bien ce qu'on ressent, qu'on confond le bien et le mal, ce qu'on aime, ce qu'on aime pas, parce qu'on a été habitué depuis tout petit à ne pas pouvoir faire confiance à ce qu'on ressent. [...] Ma surprise, c'était de me dire, comment est-ce possible qu'il y ait autant de gens qui souffrent autant et pensent être les seuls à souffrir autant, alors qu'ils sont en fait légion ? Comment notre société vit et fonctionne avec autant de gens qui ont autant souffert ?

Charlotte Pudlowski pour Louie Media, Ou peut-être une nuit episode 3, "L'Ampleur du problème" (2022)

[mostrestless]

Shakespeare songe ; loin du Versailles éclatant, Des buis taillés, des ifs peignés, où l'on entend Gémir la tragédie éplorée et prolixe, Il contemple la foule avec son regard fixe, Et toute la forêt frissonne devant lui. Pâle, il marche, au dedans de lui-même ébloui ; Il va, farouche, fauve, et, comme une crinière, Secouant sur sa tête un haillon de lumière. Son crâne, dont on voit la lueur du dehors ; Le monde tout entier passe à travers son crible ; Il tient toute la vie en son poignet terrible ; Il fait sortir de l'homme un sanglot surhumain, Dans ce génie étrange où l'on perd son chemin, Comme dans une mer, notre esprit parfois sombre ; Nous sentons, frémissants, dans son théâtre sombre, Passer sur nous le vent de sa bouche soufflant, Et ses doigts nous ouvrir et nous fouiller le flanc. Jamais il ne recule ; il est géant, il dompte Richard Trois, léopard, Caliban, mastodonte ; L'idéal est le vin que verse ce Bacchus. Les sujets monstrueux qu'il a pris et vaincus Râlent autour de lui, splendides ou difformes ; Il étreint Lear, Brutus, Hamlet, êtres énormes, Capulet, Montaigu, César, et, tour à tour, Les stryges dans le bois, le spectre sur la tour ; Et, même après Eschyle, effarant Melpomène, Sinistre, ayant aux mains des lambeaux d'âme humaine, De la chair d'Othello, des restes de Macbeth, Dans son oeuvre, du drame effrayant alphabet, Il se repose ; ainsi le noir lion des jungles S'endort dans l'antre immense avec du sang aux ongles.

Victor Hugo, "Le Poëte", Les Contemplations (1856)

[mostrestless]

Of course, the coordination between these three types of relationships is neither uniform nor constant. In a given society there is no general type of equilibrium between finalized activities, systems of communication, and power relations. Rather, there are diverse forms, diverse places, diverse circumstances or occasions in which these interrelationships establish themselves according to a specific model. But there are also "blocks" in which the adjustement of abilities, the resources of communication, and power relations constitute regulated and concerted systems. Take, for example, an educational institution: the disposal of its space, the meticulous regulations which govern its internal life, the different activities which are organized there, the diverse persons who live there or meet one another, each with his own function, his well-defined character ⎯all these things constitute a block of capacity-communication-power. The activity which ensures apprenticeship and the acquisition of aptitudes or types of behavior is developed there by means of a whole ensemble of regulated communications (lessons, questions and answers, orders, exhortations, coded signs of obedience, differentiation marks of the "value" of each person and of the levels of knowledge) and by the means of a whole series of power processes (enclosure, surveillance, reward and punishment, the pyramidal hierarchy).

Michel Foucault, "The Subject and the Power" (1982)

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What is the fear? It is something to do with death and time and age. Simply: I am eighteen in my mind I am eighteen and if I do nothing if I stand still nothing will change I will be eighteen always. For always. Time will stop. I’ll never die. Very banal, this fear. Everybody has it these days. What else? She is happy enough in the moment they are in. She feels she deserves exactly what she has, no more, no less. Any change risks fatally upsetting this balance. Why must the moment change?

Zadie Smith, NW (2012)

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Mahogany gained cultural value in this period because consumers' imaginations transformed rough logs, extracted by slaves from the depths of tropical rainforests, into newly important emblems of refinement. As Richard Bushman argues, socially ambitious eighteenth-century people pursued an aura of polished refinement, which extented to the careful enhancement of their physical surroundings. From this perspective, "A polished environment was as much the essence of gentility as polished manners." Mahogany objects fit this aesthetic as they were quite literally polished until they shone (often with linseed oil and brick dust). Such objects also implied their owners' expenditure in and reliance on the labor of household servants whose job it was to clean, dust, and endlessly polish.

Jennifer L. Anderson, "Nature's Currency: The Atlantic Mahogany Trade and the Commodification of Nature in the Eighteenth Century" (2004)

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Michel-Rolph Trouillot wrote of the "Certain Idea of Man", which emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, stating "The more European merchants and mercenaries bought and conquered other men and women, the more European philosophers wrote and talked about Man" —or a certain idea of (White) man. Subaltern Europeans manned slave ships, fought in colonial contests, and seized lands from Indigenous communities, often learning of their White status through these encounters.

Beverly Lemire, "Material Technologies of Empire: The Tobacco Pipe in Early Modern Landscapes of Exchange in the Atlantic World" (2021)

[mostrestless]

English entry into the Americas was shaped by competition in Europe with Spain, a desire to suppplant the Catholicisation of the Americas with aggressive Protestantism and a utopian urge to end English poverty through the exploitation of Atlantic resources. In one sense, this early colonisation was a last act of the Renaissance more than an act that looked forward to the Enlightenment. English colonists tended to look back to older precedents when envisioning their empire in the early seventeenth century. The treasurer of Virginia in 1626, George Sandys, for example, published an edition of Ovid's Metamorphoses, which he wrote in his spare time. Sandys was interested in how the classical works on civility that Ovid represented could be reproduced in the Virginian wilderness, a wilderness in which the Virginians had only just survived a massacre of them by Native Americans of the Powhatan nation in 1622. In London, William Shakespeare was inspired by colonisation in Bermuda in 1609 to write his last play The Tempest (1611) about how colonisation wrought a "sea-change" in Europeans so that the Europeans were transformed in the America —metamorphosing, in short— "into something rich and strange".

Trevor Burnard, "England enters the world, 1600-1700", Britain and the Wider World, 1603-1800 (2020)

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T.S. Eliot, "Ash Wednesday", Collected Poems 1909-1962

[mostrestless]

The Waste Land can come to no conclusion about this basic contradiction. To recognize that art neither flees violence, nor transcends it, nor merely represents it, but rather that it trades on its power, at times appropriating its force and creating something especially brilliant, at other times succumbing to the sheer waste that violence leaves in its wake: such an insight represents, in poetic form, one of the signal achievements of Eliot's poem.

Sarah Cole, "Enchantment, disenchantment, war, literature" (2009)

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If you could choose an hour of wakefulness out of the whole night, it would be this. Since your sober bedtime, at eleven, you have had rest enough to take off the pressure of yesterday's fatigue; while before you, till the sun comes from 'far Cathay' to brighten your window, there is almost the space of a summer night; one hour to be spent in thought, with the mind's eye half shut, and two in pleasant dreams, and two in that strangest of enjoyments, the forgetfulness alike of joy and woe. The moment of rising belongs to another period of time, and appears so distant, that the plunge out of a warm bed into the frosty air cannot yet be anticipated with dismay. Yesterday has already vanished among the shadows of the past; to-morrow has not yet emerged from the future. You have found an intermediate space, where the business of life does not intrude; where the passing moment lingers, and becomes truly the present; a spot where Father Time, when he thinks nobody is watching him, sits down by the way side to take breath. Oh, that he would fall asleep, and let mortals live on without growing older!

Nathaniel Hawthorne, "The Haunted Mind" (1835)

[mostrestless]

Her face was turned partly inward to the pillow, and had been hidden there to weep; but a look of motionless contentment was now visible upon it, as if her heart, like a deep lake, had grown calm because its dead had sunk down so far within.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, "The Wives of the Dead" (1832)

[mostrestless]

The question of romance versus novel turns into and illuminates a moral question: the meaning and value of the inner life... The American romancer's concern with the deeper art is synonymous with his search for the buried life; and he is of necessity an evoker of ghosts and a resurrector of dead bodies.

Joel Porte, The Romance in America: Studies in Cooper, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, and James (1969) [quoted]

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Oresteia (2015), Aeschylus adapted by Robert Icke

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Oresteia (2015), Aeschylus adapted by Robert Icke

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T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land, "V. What the Thunder Said", Collected Poems 1909-1962

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T.S. Eliot, "Whispers of Immortality", Collected Poems 1909-1962