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Still cites the old magic (critical theory/history) | Eora Land | From the River to the Sea StreetliTweets at the Other Place

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Bluesky

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Streetlight@streetlight· 16h

Weiling around...

4 books of Simone Weil, laid out in a square - Gravity and Grace, Oppression and Liberty, The Need for Roots, and An Anthology.

Streetlight@streetlight· 1d

I keep returning, again and again, to this passage of Marriott's On Black Men, since yesterday:

"This is what the lynchers want. A memory, an imago, that will not go away. Not only the body, burned and stinking in the trees, but black men, women and children looking, and then looking away, from what the white men have done. 'Everybody was afraid' except the young back boy who, not knowing what to expect, keeps looking until he can see what has happened. something has been torn away and left lying on the ground, something private which confirms - as it seems, the tarred body cannot - that what has happened is a 'sin'. It's a vision which stays with this boy for the rest of his life - 'I can still see him hanging up like that' - a reminder of how fragile his possession of himself, his 'manhood', can be. The real difference between black and white men. ... The lesson with stay with you: blackness afflicted, mutilated, a fatal way of being alive." - David Marriott - On Black Men

Streetlight@streetlight· 7d

Post-Iliad Reading.

Simone Weil - The Iliad, or, The Poem of Force

Alice Oswald - Memorial: A Version of Homer's Iliad

Streetlight@streetlight· 7d

If you tweak this just a little, then Homer's answer to the paradox of motion is simply that motion is possible because the Gods abandon you.

Text from Homer's Iliad: "Like a chase in a nightmare when no one, pursuer or pursued, can move a limb, so Achilles could not catch up Hector, nor Hector shake off Achilles. How could Hector have escapes the demons of death, had not Apollo come to him for the last time and given him new drive and fresh speed? Achilles too had been signalling to his men with his head not to shoot at Hector, in case someone else hit him and won the glory, and he came second.

But when they reached the springs for the fourth time, the Father held out his golden scales and, putting death that lays men low in either pan, on one side for Achilles, on the other for horse-taming Hector, raised the balance by the middle of the beam. The beam came down on Hector's side, spelling his doom. He was on the way to Hades. Phoebus Apollo deserted him..."

Streetlight@streetlight· 8d

Frank Wilderson III I love you

“My presentation shits on the inspiration of solidarity,” I told her.
“I don’t give a rat’s ass about solidarity.”
Dove was an Oxbridge-educated don, who held her head so high
as she scolded me she could drown in the rain. Her eyes widened
at the sheer derision of my words. What, she must have wondered,
happened to the friendly black face and those snowy teeth that had
flashed when she winked the day before?
“That is so terrible,” she groaned. “That is such a shame.”
She went on to tell me that she had recently heard Angela Davis
say that she had transcended the slave stature. She said this two or
three times and I was about to ask her if she had heard of any other
Black people when Ian Bryce ended the session and said it was time
for lunch. - Afropessimism, p. 187

Streetlight@streetlight· 11d

find u someone who looks at you like the Briseis fresco in Pompeii

Briseis fresco, from the House of the Tragic Poet in Pompeii.

Streetlight@streetlight· 22d

Bataille on mathematics against dialectics:

"Thus mathematics-whether higher or not-underwent, during the nineteenth century, an evolution that in every way was contrary to Engels's program; it eliminated every appearance of a dialectic. Rigor in demonstrations, noncontradiction in principles, constant accord with logic; those are the ends pursued, and on the whole attained, by mathematics. One could object, certainly, that new difficulties reappeared with set theory and that the transfinite could give rise to developments having the appearance of the dialectic. But the mathematicians' attitude (their practical effort) toward these new paradoxes is the same as their attitude toward the old ones: far from seeing them as the result of a superior mode of thought, they examine them with horror. A new labor of logical reduction starts. We need mention here only the work of Hilbert and the Polish school". - Georges Bataille, "Critique of the Foundations of the Hegelian Dialectic"

Streetlight@streetlight· 26d

twinsies xoxoxo

On the left, Homer's The Odyssey, trans. Emily Wilson, on the right, Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment.

Streetlight@streetlight· Jul 13

Dedication page of George Ciccariello-Maher's Decolonizing Dialectics.

Streetlight@streetlight· Jul 5

Reading rn

Anton Jäger and Daniel Zamora Vargas - Welfare for Markets: A Global History of Basic Income

Streetlight@streetlight· Jun 28

Books I'm reading ig

Molly Smith and Juno Mac - Revolting Prostitutes: The Fight for Sex Worker Rights

Robert Chapman - Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism

Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant - Health Communism

Misha Frazer-Carroll - Mad World: The Politics of Mental Health

Streetlight@streetlight· Jun 15

"Hence our shame, the shame of those who did not know the camps and yet, without knowing how, are spectators of that match, which repeats itself in every match in our stadiums, in every television broadcast, in the normalcy of everyday life".

Hence the anguish and shame of the survivors, “the anguish inscribed in everyone of the ‘tohu-bohu,’ of a deserted and empty universe crushed under the spirit of God but from which the spirit of man is absent: not yet born or already extinguished” (Levi 1989: 85). But also hence our shame, the shame of those who did not know the camps and yet, without knowing how, are spectators of that match, which repeats itself in every match in our stadiums, in every television broadcast, in the normalcy of everyday life. If we do not succeed in understanding that match, in stopping it, there will never be hope.

Streetlight@streetlight· Jun 15

Been wrestling with the celebration of football in the midst of genocide, and then remembered it isn't the first time. Remnants of Auschwitz:

And yet Levi recalls that a witness, Miklos Nyszli, one of the very few who survived the last “special team” of Auschwitz, recounted that during a “work” break he took part in a soccer match between the SS and representatives of the Sonderkommando. “Other men of the SS and the rest of the squad are present at the game; they take sides, bet, applaud, urge the players on as if, rather than at the gates of hell, the game were taking place on the village green" (Leiv 1989:55).

This match might strike someone as a brief pause of humanity in the middle of an infinite horror. I, like the witnesses, instead view this match, this moment of normalcy, as the true horror of the camp. For we can perhaps think that the massacres are over — even if here and there they are repeated, not so far away from us. But that match is never over; it continues as if uninterrupted. It is the perfect and eternal cipher of the gray zone" which knows no time and is in every place.

Streetlight@streetlight· Jun 12

Good morning housewives prostitutes workers and capital

Leopoldina Fortunati – The Arcana of Reproduction: Housewives, Prostitutes, Workers and Capital

Streetlight@streetlight· Jun 4

Nicole Loraux - The Mourning Voice: An Essay on Greek Tragedy

Streetlight@streetlight· Jun 4

Loraux + Tragedy + Womanmaxxing

Nicole Loraux - Tragic Ways of Killing a Woman

Streetlight@streetlight· May 20

Suttie was doing anti-Oedipus before Anti-Oedipus.

It [this book] denies the sexual basis of culture-sublimation and it relegates the Oedipus Wish and Sexual Jealousy to third place in primacy and importance as disturbers of social development and harmony. It seems that Freudian opinion is trending in this direction; but no one seems to recognize that the logical conclusion is that the Oedipus Complex, being largely contingent on particular modes o f rearing and forms o f fam ily structure, culture and racial character must vary within wide limits—must be, as I said, Dimorphous. In other respects also the theory here sketched produces widely divergent interpretations from those of Freud. A vast mass of difficult (even transcendent) hypothetical con structions are swept away, and a very considerable body of hitherto admittedly intractable problems are seen to have a possible solution.

Streetlight@streetlight· May 20

Look at this gorgeous cover.

Ian Suttie - The Origins of Love and Hate

Streetlight@streetlight· May 18

I think what this text does better than any other I know is show how effortlessly language deforms the ordinary succession of time. What is a 'now' of language? You can't locate it, not really. Not when idioms themselves are agglutinations of linguistic history & projections of –

Daniel Heller-Roazen' Echolalias: On the Forgetting of Language

Streetlight@streetlight· May 15

Going Greek! Nicole Loraux's The Divided City: On Memory and Forgetting in Ancient Athens.

Streetlight@streetlight· May 14

Excerpt from The Hanging Poem, Imru al-Qays

Fatima, I’ve dallied
with countless women who wore the veil,
enjoyed no end
of cloistered fair-skinned virgins.
I’ve slipped past guards
and past whole tribes
who, in secret,
hoped to have me killed.

When the Seven Sisters appeared in the sky
like a sash adorned with jewels,
I came to Fatima again, found her
by the entrance to her tent.
Already undressed for sleep, she wore nothing
save a single undergarment.
“By God you’re hopeless,” she scolded.
“You’ll never stop with your sinful ways.”
But still I led her out, and as we walked
she trailed her robe of embroidered silk, erasing
our traces in the sand.

Streetlight@streetlight· May 12

oh oh oh oh

Streetlight@streetlight· May 11

Augustine's definition of intelligence - the faculty by which man can *enslave* another regardless of strength, and thus distinguishes man from animal - probably remains the most honest of its definitions, worth keeping in mind for debates around "A"I.

Since the human beast is clearly "inferior to many in strength and other physical capacities," and since, while in possession of the same faculties common to all animals, man nevertheless succeeds in dominating all others, this must be by a power to which he alone may lay claim. / It is that which furnishes humankind with the force "on account of which we," as the thinker proudly states, "are better than they". "What better name could one give it," he asks, with a rhetorical flourish, "than reason, or intelligence"? It is a definition of reason that has rarely been equaled in its frankness. "Intelligence," we learn, removes man from the realm of the other beasts by affording him that higher faculty which is domination: an animus subiugandi by which he can make inhuman animals the docile servants of his will, despite whatever physical forces they may muster in their own defense. "We," in short, "are better than they," because "we" enslave, as "they," devoid of intelligence, cannot.

Streetlight@streetlight· May 9

Univocal books 4eva

Streetlight@streetlight· May 4

Serres on the Harlequinian cogito // Deleuze on the sexual body as Harlequin's cloak everything patched and folded together

"It does not even suffice to say that the erogenous zones are cut up on the surface, since the surface does not preexist them. In fact, each zone is the dynamic formation of a surface space around a singularity constituted by the orifice. It is able to be prolonged in all directions up to the vicinity of another zone depending on another singularity. Our sexual body is initially a Harlequin's cloak. Each erogenous zone is inseparable from one or several singular points, from a serial development articulated around the singularity and from a drive investing this territory. It is inseparable from a partial object "projected" onto the territory as an object of satisfaction (image), from an observer or an ego bound to the territory and experiencing satisfaction, and from a mode of joining up with other zones. The entire surface is the product of this connection..." Deleuze, The Logic of Sense

Streetlight@streetlight· Apr 25

That time Wittgenstein designed a house and it just kinda looks like the Tractatus.

Wittgenstein Haus - minimalist, angular, monochrome

Streetlight@streetlight· Apr 23

My first Serres, pretty excited!

Michel Serres - The Fives Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies

Streetlight@streetlight· Apr 20

Jean Wahl, laying out the project of transcendental empiricism in 1944: "the higher empiricism ... that seeks to show the conditions, let us not say the possibility, but of the reality of experience".

When Kant said that being is that which is posited, he probably provided the starting point for the positive philosophy of Schelling and for what we might call the higher empiricism. There is a transcendental empiricism (the empiricism of Schelling) that seeks to show the conditions, let us not say of the possibility, but of the reality of experience. There is the radical empiricism of James, which welcomes the relations as well as the terms. There is even the possibility of a realism of essences like that of Moore, Russell, Husserl, and Santayana. There is, as in the Bergsonian and Schelerian philosophies, an affective realism. Transcendental, radical, non-intellectual ... this empiricism would be very different from that of the textbooks. It would allow us to unite tendencies of philosophers as different as Pascal, Schelling, and Hume, Scheler, Boutroux, and Russell, Bergson, Nietzsche, and Rauh, Whitehead, and Heidegger.

Streetlight@streetlight· Mar 24

"Against Kant, he pursues the plan of concrete ontology; against Hegel, he pursues the plan of an ontology that does not succumb to the existent by absorbing into itself. / Hegel is turned inside out: world history is for Hegel what the individual is for Kierkegaard."

binding measure of exalted existence as of "meaning,"' a meaning whose ubiquity threatens to reverse into being nowhere at all.

Kierkegaard's project is the precise antithesis of the Kantian thesis and the Hegelian synthesis. Against Kant, he pursues the plan of concrete ontology; against Hegel, he pursues the plan of an ontology that does not succumb to the existent by absorbing into itself. He therefore revises the process of post-Kantian idealism: he surrenders the claim of identity. What remains is, however, not the Kantian landscape of a transcendental subject whose forms of intuition and concepts of order objectify the manifold of perceptual data as experience.

Along with Hegelian identity, he sacrifices the Kantian transcendental objectivity. Whereas in Kant, "consciousness in general" persists - this side of the gap - as the guarantor of ontology, Kierkegaard renounces the scientific validity of "results" and contrasts particular consciousness of the individual person...

...as concrete, with the contingency of external experience. The individual becomes, for Kierkegaard, bearer of a material meaning that the philosophy of identity was unable to in contingent sensuous material, whereas the abstract Kantian "I think" did not suffice to confirm the existence it had mastered as meaningful. Hegel is turned inside out: world history is for Hegel what the individual is for Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard is not exempted from the obligation of paying the Kantian tribute contingency. For the person's existence and quiddity, which cannot be on the basis of any "meaning ," is as contingent as any perceptual data.

To prevent the individual's contingency from losing its "meaning," the concrete individual is subjected to a procedure that indeed ensures him of concrete meaning just as the Kantian ''idea" ensures the coherence of the intellect (Verstand) - yet renders the individual abstract: ...

Streetlight@streetlight· Mar 24

Adorno's condensed but punchy recap of the passage from Kant > Hegel > Kierkegaard, measuring the distance and nearness of each to the next: