#modern humanity

[marejadilla]

Pamela Wilson, "Derailed By Heart", ca 2015, oil on Linen. Pamela Wilson is an American Postwar & Contemporary painter who was born in 1954.

[athousandgateaux]

It is perhaps not surprising...that modern humanity continues to be ever less capable of mastering a knowledge and a pleasure that, to an increasing extent, do not belong to it. Between knowledge of the subject and knowledge without subject, between the I and the Other, an abyss has opened that technology and economy seek in vain to bridge...It is perhaps at this point that we are able to grasp the sense of the Greek project for a philo-sophia, for a love of knowledge and a knowledge of love, that would be neither knowledge of the signifier nor knowledge of the signified, neither divination nor science, neither knowledge nor pleasure. So, too, may we now grasp that the concept of taste constitutes an extreme and late incarnation of this very project. For only a knowledge that does not belong either to the subject or the Other but instead is situated in the fracture that divides them can claim to have truly ‘saved the phenomena’ in their pure appearance, without either referring them back to being and an invisible truth or abandoning them to divination as an excessive signifier.

Giorgio Agamben, Taste, pg. 73-75

[modernshxmxn]

Man has become to so great a degree merely a cog in an intricate social system that alienation from the self is almost universal, and human values themselves have declined. As a result of innumerable outstanding contradictions in our civilization a general numbness of moral perception has developed. Moral standards are so casually regarded that no one is surprised, for instance, to see a person a pious Christian or a devoted father one day, conducting himself like a gangster the next. There are too few wholehearted and integrated persons around us to offer contrast to our own scatteredness

Karen Horney M.D., Our Inner Conflicts: A Constructive Theory of Neurosis (1945)