#exigence

[fanfanlemoko]

"Ce qui importe n'est pas que nous vivions mais qu'il redevienne possible de mener dans le monde une vie de grand style et selon de grands critères. On y contribue en aiguisant ses propres exigences."

— Ernst Jünger, "Le Travailleur" (Der Arbeiter), 1932

[pocketfullofmarsies]

The Drama (Spoiler Warning)

Everyone Is Missing the Point.

The Drama is a 2026 “romantic comedy drama” starring Zendaya and Robert Pattinson. While the film is good, it isn't really the self-proclaimed “romantic comedy” it advertised to be. Though our main characters, Charlie and Emma, are in love — the movie has a clear shift in plot after the wine tasting scene that prevails during the rest of the film.

During this scene, the movie shifts from a quirky romance to a dark social commentary on not only gun violence, but also gun culture. Charlie asks Emma what even drew her to the idea of guns and Emma explains that the “aesthetics” of doing a school shooting was intriguing to her. After this, Charlie throughout the movie tries to rationalize and minimize what Emma had done — a direct reflection of American gun culture. People (online) speculate about the psychology of shooters, assuming that they either had a hard personal or school life, without any evidence to believe so. Society must find someone else to blame for a person’s violent, anti-social behavior, rather than admitting that some people are simply born with the chemical imbalance of being violent. Charlie combed through Emma’s childhood and tried to find anything else to blame for Emma’s violent tendencies, and though Emma does tell him about her past, the movie shows the audience that she exaggerated her situation heavily and left a good amount of shit out. The situation of bullying she went through wasn’t crazy mean like she pretends it was and her parents were happily married and treated her well. She even admitted that her neighbor who died from a car accident was a year older, not close with her, and that she did not even see it happen — Charlie is who exaggerated that. Charlie’s character does have his own separate issues, but his character also serves to mimic society’s reaction to gun violence, system-justification theory.

Audiences are completely neglecting Emma’s anti-social, mentally ill behavior and actions. The film shows us that even though yes, she was picked on, it was not harsh bullying in the way she acted like it was. During her wedding scene, her father and mother are both beside each other, showing that they are happily married. It is also in this scene that we see that her parents clearly loved her. All details about her life that she was not transparent about to Charlie when he was asking about her youth, she even left out a key detail to her personality. Audiences defend Emma by claiming that because she did not act on her violence then she is innocent, but this is actually not true. Emma did act on her violent urges; she shot a dog. Now, even though shooting a dog is not a personalized violent crime, it is a textbook sign of complex and intense mental illness. Emma checks off plenty of the characteristic of being mentally ill; she has a need for power, she disregards rules, she lacks accountability, childhood behavior problems, abnormal thinking, she has aggressive tendencies even as an adult, and she has no friends. Emma shows very direct signs of anti-social behavior, qualities that are not normal.

That is where audiences are misinterpreting the film. Believing the movie to be a criticism on Emma’s actions and audiences defending her due to that belief, boosting the second point of the movie. Mental illness, especially in media, is rationalized by society. The wine tasting scene is not meant to be a reveal scene for Emma alone, but for all four of them at the table. Rachel locked a disabled child in a closet for a whole night and lied to the police when they asked her if she knew, Mike used his girlfriend as a human shield against violent dogs on her birthday in a foreign country, Charlie is a compulsive liar to literally everyone (including his girlfriend), and Emma planned a school shooting. Comparing Emma’s secret to the rest that was shared is also rationalization. The things Mike and Rachel confess are not normal things to do, and neither is the compulsive lying on Charlie’s part. Yet, viewers (me included) rationalize the others by comparing what Emma admitted to, further proving a second central point of the movie.

Despite my clear distaste for the misinterpretation of the movie, I do believe that this film is a very nuance way to discuss American gun culture. The reasoning behind the reaction I have towards the misreading of this movie stems from the mere fact that the leading cause of death in kids has been guns. Not only does the movie reflect gun culture, but it also reflects mental health culture and demonstrates society’s reaction to mental illnesses. All of the characters are extremely disfunctional and abnormal, and the movie poses good questions about society, mental health, and human nature across multiple sources of media. If you have read all of this and still have not seen the film, you should watch it yourself and see what you think.

[extrait-livre]

"Chaque fois que l'on arrive à la limite des exigences d'autrui, on se trouve face à face avec le même problème - être soi-même !"

Henry Miller - Tropique du capricorne

[jensjskdm]

exigence [Chapter 1/?]

read on ao3

summary: The war ends on Harry's twenty-fourth birthday. Three years later, he gets the chance to go back and prevent it from ever happening.

------------------

“One can only enter another alternate universe by entering their own body in that universe. This means it is impossible to travel to a world in which one never existed. Interdimensional travel has been tried by Wizardkind before, but most have died and only a few survived. We’ve learned that this is because a wizard and the alternate version of themselves existing in one body is detrimental to the mind, and this arrangement will kill both if the original wizard does not retreat back to their universe. There is a theory, of course, that travelling into the alternate body after the alternate version of themselves has already passed would work, but it’s never been proven.”

[Excerpt from esteemed author H. Potter’s “Anti-Dimensional Travel and the Reverse Paradigm Theory.”]

six days

Harry misses being young.

Of course, he thinks this as his knees pop as he stands, groaning about his entire twenty-eight years of existence.  Harry laughs softly at the irony and yawns, surveying the day’s work on the large mahogany desk in front of him. Parchments and papers mix under stacks of books on dimensional theory.

I’ve found it, reverberates through his skull, creeping up his neck and echoing the words through every nerve ending in his brain.

Harry straightens. “Found what?”

An alternate universe safe for you to travel to.

“Oh my god. How long from now?” Harry says, grabbing the thin, worn notebook and unwrapping the twine around it. He opens the notebook and flips through years’ worth of notes to get to the most recent entries.

Six days. It’s a universe where you die in your sleep, Death hisses. It’s perfect.

Harry swallows. “I could prevent Sirius’ death. Fred’s. Tonks’. Remus’. Molly’s.”

In that world, yes.

Harry exhales deeply and raps his desk with his knuckles twice. “I have to talk to Ginny.”

Of course you do, Death replies.

“I sense annoyance,” Harry muses as he scribbles down a few messy thoughts in his chicken scratch handwriting.

You would be right. Ginny this, Ginny that. It’s like you don’t even care about me anymore.

Harry snorts and scrubs at his stubble absently as he considers his notes, then closes the notebook. “Six days,” he mutters. “I have six days to decide if I’m going, I suppose.”

He exits his study and silently goes down the hall, lighting a soft lumos so he can navigate through the dark and sleepy house.

At Teddy’s room, he pauses and stands in the doorway. Teddy is sprawled out on his bed, snoring lightly. Harry watches on, smiling softly, and then moves away down the corridor and into his room.

Ginny’s asleep, covers pulled up past her waist, so he’s quiet as he enters their bathroom. He shuts the door before he turns the lights on.

Scarred hands turn on the sink as he looks at himself in the mirror. One long scar stretches from his left cheekbone to the right side of his jaw, splitting through his lips and leaving a light, slightly glossy groove in its path. Another breaches his eyebrow and disappears into his hairline. The rest are smaller, mottled and pale on his brown skin.

That’s what war does, he supposes as he pulls off his glasses and blinks at the blurriness of everything around him. The scars on his body are nothing compared to the ones on his mind, and he often pities his mind-healer for the bullshit she has to deal with.

He pulls off his cotton shirt and shimmies out of his jeans. His leather wand holster slips off of his forearm and his wand gets put in the little holder on the sink, then he turns on the shower, testing the water with his hand until it's warm enough to get in.

The water runs down his face, soaking his hair and trailing down his skin until it pools around the drain. Harry cleans himself as he thinks upon the discovery Death made.

Six days until he has to make the choice of going to an alternate universe to prevent a war like their own from happening. He’s been waiting for an opportunity like this since he’s known it was a possibility, and now it’s here.

He wants to do it. But he has a family in this world that he will have to leave for months. Not to mention his ptsd that periodically cripples him that will likely be exacerbated by going back to a time when many people that he loved were still alive.

Harry shuts off the water, steps out of the shower and exhales. The wand holster slips on before he dries himself off; constant vigilance is a language his bones are fluent in after a decade of fighting.

He slips on a night shirt and boxers and yawns as he flicks off the light. He pads across the silent bedroom and slips into their bed. Ginny mumbles something incoherent and Harry smiles as he pulls the sheets over himself. He looks at her sleeping back and reverently reaches out a hand to press his fingertips to her back. She’s beautiful, and alive, and raising a child with him, and he cannot breathe for how grateful he is that he survived to have this.

“I’m awake,” Ginny murmurs, moving around so that she can face him. She smiles sleepily. “You’re louder than you think you are.”

“Sorry,” Harry whispers.

“Up late studying?” she asks, then snorts. “Hermione.”

“Am not!” he protests, and now both of them are barely whispering. “Actually… Death found something. An alternate world that I can safely travel to. In that world, my alternate self dies in his sleep in the middle of fifth year. He’ll die in six days, and I’ll travel to the world that same night so that I wake up in the other version of myself and nobody notices a thing.”

“You need the other Harry to die first so that you won’t melt your brain by shoving two souls into one body?” Ginny asks, and Harry nods. “I see. So you’re going to go?”

Harry bites his lip thoughtfully. “I feel like I have to.”

“Hero complex,” she says warningly, and he huffs.

“Probably a bit. But to think… a world in which I can prevent the rest of the war? All of the deaths?”

“How grateful do you think the people there would be once they realise that they lost their Harry in the process?” Ginny asks genuinely.

Harry sighs. “I don’t… know. But they’ll recover. Besides, the other me is dying either way. I’m just… going in after it happens.”

“Yeah.” Ginny stares up at the ceiling. “What about your ptsd? Months without your mind healer, in a very stressful, new environment?"

Harry sighs. "She's... taught me techniques. And I really think I can handle it."

Ginny reaches her hands out and slips it into his. She squeezes it twice. "I trust you, and I know you can handle yourself. If you say it’s worth it then it is. I’ll support you either way.”

Harry’s heart swells at how much he loves this woman. “Thank you, Gin.”

She looks over at him and smiles. He can barely make it out in the darkness of the night. “Yeah, yeah. You’re doing dishes for a month when you get back.”

Harry grins and draws her in to cuddle with him. She rests her chin on his arm and curls up against him. After a few minutes of silence, he can hear her breath even out into sleep.

He falls into the murky waters of slumber an hour later.

[freaks309k]

Blog Post #1

Hello everyone! I’m not sure if I’m posting this in the right section of our blog, I’m new to Tumblr but I like it so far! Personally, I really enjoyed this week’s readings more than I thought I would, and I hope you all did too. One idea I really found interesting (and a term that was completely new to me) was the idea of exigence. I guess it’s a concept I was familiar with in other areas of life but never in rhetoric. I especially never knew there was a word for it. Nicotra discusses exigence in chapter 2 as “whatever situation has invited or made possible some sort of response” (28). I thought the use of the word invited was especially interesting here. Nicotra uses the example of receiving a gift inviting a thank you card (28). I then thought about my own life and how these instances of action/response happen constantly. We experience exigence when we receive food from a food truck and promptly hand money to the cashier. It’s expected and invited. We also experience exigence in traffic when another driver makes a dangerous mistake and we honk at them. The second example might just be me, but I found this idea of one thing inviting another into existence fascinating. I will now overuse the word “exigence” in my daily life, thanks academia.

[lyatheo]

L'amour a l'exigence du rien,       il veut tout.

(Ile Eniger)

[nativeband]

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