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JillJohnston ⋅ « ON A CLEAR DAY YOU CAN SEE YOUR MOTHER » ⋅ Lesbian Nation
Some old lines and some new ones thrown onto each other for the town hall affair The title of this episode is a new approach : All women are lesbians except those who don’t know it naturally they are but don’t know it yet I am a woman who is a lesbian because I am a woman and a woman who loves herself naturally who is other women is a lesbian a woman who loves women loves herself naturally this is the case that a woman is herself is all woman is a natural born lesbian so we don’t mind using…
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AnneBoyer ⋅ « Erotology III : Categories of Desires for Faces » ⋅ A handbook of disappointed fate
Consider the category of desire that is the desire to make a stony expression break. Think of those humans who are attractive for the primary reason of how the presentation of their face and body is impenetrable or brooding or fierce or impassive with brooding fierceness. This category of desire is simple, slightly mechanistic : to penetrate the brooding, fierce, impassive, impenetrable presentation. There are several ways to make a stony expression break. These include to enrage, to surprise, to humiliate, to sadden, and to give pleasure. The experts at impassive expression, however, are not so vulnerable to sadness, rage, or…
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BernadetteMayer ⋅ « The Arrangement : of Houses & Buildings, Birth, Death, Money, Schools, Dentists, Birth Control, Work, Air, Remedies, and so on… » ⋅ Utopia
Houses & buildings were not just left as they were : all doors are large, none are revolving, there are no cagelike places, elevators are transparent, all windows can open, places open out onto other places, hallways are generous, there is no rent, backyards behind city buildings are joined without fences so you could ride a horse behind the streets, some pavements have turned back to dirt, there isnt any money, money became so physically large that to accumulate five dollars it would take a whole old-fashioned room full of these big metal things ellipsoid in shape, all the sewage of…
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DipeshChakrabarty ⋅ Provincializing Europe. Postcolonial thought and historical difference
Let me make it clear that the raging Medusa of cultural relativism is not rearing her ugly head in my discussion at this point. To allow for plurality, signified by the plurality of gods, is to think in terms of singularities. To think in terms of singularities, however—and this I must make clear since so many scholars these days are prone to see parochialism, essentialism, or cultural relativism in every claim of non-Western difference—is not to make a claim against the demonstrable and documentable permeability of cultures and languages. It is, in fact, to appeal to models of cross-cultural and…
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JohnAshbery ⋅ « Whatever it is, wherever you are » ⋅ A Wave : poems
The cross-hatching technique which allowed our ancestors to exchange certain genetic traits for others, in order to provide their offspring with a way of life at once more variegated and more secure than their own, has just about run out of steam and has left us wondering, once more, what there is about this plush solitude that makes us think we will ever get out, or even want to. The ebony hands of the clock always seem to mark the same hour. That is why it always seems the same, though it is or course changing constantly, subtly, as though…
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AlfredSohn-Rethel ⋅ « L’idéal du cassé. À propos de la technique napolitaine » ⋅ Sur Naples
À Naples, les dispositifs techniques sont cassés par principe : ce n’est qu’exceptionnellement et par un hasard déconcertant qu’on y rencontre parfois quelque chose d’intact. Avec le temps, on finit par avoir l’impression que tout y est fabriqué dans cet état déglingué. Nous ne parlons pas ici des poignées de porte par exemple qui à Naples font encore partie des êtres mythiques et ne sont là qu’en tant que symboles, pour la représentation, ce qui tient au fait que les portes y ont pour seule fonction de rester ouvertes et, s’il arrive qu’un courant d’air les ait claquées, de se rouvrir…
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IrèneRosier-Catach ⋅ « Variation sur les formules » ⋅ La parole efficace. Signe, rituel, sacré ⋅ Annexe I
Variations sur le sujet seul Hic panis est corpus meum. (Hoc) Corpus meum est corpus meum. Substantia panis est corpus meum. Hic est corpus meum. Caro mea est cibus. Variations sur le verbe Hoc fit corpus meum. Hoc mutetur (vel transubstantietur) in corpus meum. Variations sur le temps et le mode du verbe Hoc sit corpus meum. Hoc erit corpus meum. Variations sur le prédicat Hoc est corpus Christi. Variations liées à l’acte Nutrio vos corpore meo. Haec est caro mea. Variations multiples, notamment, avec sujet non déictique et attribut non déictique Panis est corpus Christi. Variations sur la…
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AnneBoyer ⋅ « The harm » ⋅ A handbook of disappointed fate
The harm will come : it never doesn’t. It will open up our chests and enter here. Some days it will come by fortune, some days by no agent in particular, and sometimes others will bring it to us, either willfully or on accident. Those others might trip, the harm spilling out of their arms onto us. We might all look at each other startled. We might all have the harm then and eyes full of tears. The others might take one look at us or many looks at us and decide we deserve the harm. We will look back at…
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JackieWang ⋅ « Against innocence. Race, gender, and the politics of safety »
The discursive strategy of appealing to safety and innocence is also enacted on a micro-level when white radicals manipulate “safe space” language to maintain their power in political spaces. They do this by silencing the criticisms of POC under the pretense that it makes them feel “unsafe.” This use of safe space language conflates discomfort and actual imminent danger — which is not to say that white people are entitled to feel safe anyway. The phrase “I don’t feel safe” is easy to manipulate because it frames the situation in terms of the speaker’s personal feelings, making it difficult to…
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Robert G.Wallace, MaxAjl ⋅ « The Bright Bulbs » ⋅ repris dans R. G. Wallace, Dead epidemiologists. On the origins of COVID-19, Monthly Review Press, oct. 2020
The bad takes on COVID wend across the political continuum into the more recognizable left. Superficially more grounded anatomies of the crisis have leapt atop the backs of the dead animals and broken landscapes that did indeed help produce the pandemic. But in a classic riding trick, the acrobatics suddenly switches mounts mid-ride to characteristically Eurocentric hobbyhorses from which to herald imperium-old edicts on how to live, eat, and die. Should we eat meat, with source livestock an apparent driver in the emergence of deadly pathogens ? Documentarian Astra Taylor, environmental historian Troy Vettese, and political scientist Jan Dutkiewicz—TVD, for brevity’s…
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DavidAntin ⋅ « the theory and practice of post-modernism » ⋅ i never knew what time it was
about two years ago elly and i decided we needed a new mattress or maybe elly decided it because i didnt pay much attention to the problem we had an old mattress wed had it for years and the salesman wed bought it from had assured us it would last us a lifetime and it was getting older and lumpy or lumpy in some places and hollowed out in others and i just assumed it was part of a normal process of aging it was getting older we were getting older and wed get used to it but eleanor has a bad back and she was getting desperate to get rid of this…
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Quelque chose qui ne se voit pas
dans un endroit où il n’y a personneLe 30 avril dernier, pour Artichoke, une reading series perlinoise, Nathalie Quintane a lu un texte intitulé On va faire quelque chose qui ne se verra pas dans un endroit où il n’y a personne. Traduit en ENG et DE et couché sur PDF, format de propriétaire, le texte est augmenté d’une introduction (reproduite ci-dessous) et d’un appareil de notes qui ne manquent pas de produire leur petit effet French Civ 101. Claquer l’img pour accéd àl” pdf. La France, autrefois, c’était un nom de pays ; prenons garde que ce ne soit, en 1961, le nom d’une névrose. Sartre, préface…
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Heinrich vonKleist ⋅ « De l’élaboration progressive de la pensée par le discours » ⋅ Œuvres complètes
Wenn du etwas wissen willst und es durch Meditation nicht finden kannst, so rate ich dir, mein lieber, sinnreicher Freund, mit dem nächsten Bekannten, der dir aufstößt, darüber zu sprechen. Es braucht nicht eben ein scharfdenkender Kopf zu sein, auch meine ich es nicht so, als ob du ihn darum befragen solltest : nein ! Vielmehr sollst du es ihm selber allererst erzählen. Ich sehe dich zwar große Augen machen, und mir antworten, man habe dir in frühern Jahren den Rat gegeben, von nichts zu sprechen, als nur von Dingen, die du bereits verstehst. Damals aber sprachst du wahrscheinlich mit dem…
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Jeremy HalvardPrynne ⋅ « Numbers in Time of Trouble » ⋅ Kitchen Poems
Whichever time standard we’re on, the question of how fast and whether it’s worth it, we are underlaid by drift in the form of mantle, and that should be at least a start. If the woman gets up in the morning you could say it was to be anointed, if that (in this time) weren’t so puny and obsequious. The wrong standard makes it so, and the brutal fact is that there’s no simple difference of opinion involved : the wrong is an entailment, and follows into the glowing tail of “history” as for example the Marxist comet burns with such…
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IsaakRubin ⋅ « Content and form of value » ⋅ Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value
Can one find the concept of content of value in this sense in Marx’s work ? We can answer this question affirmatively. We remember, for example, in Marx’s words, that « exchange-value is a definite social manner of expressing the amount of labor bestowed upon an object » (C., I, p. 82). It is obvious that labor is here treated as the abstract content which can take this or that social form. When Marx, in the well-known letter to Kugelmann of July 11, 1868, says that the social division of labor is manifested in the commodity economy in the form of value, he…
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Robert G.Wallace ⋅ « Midvinter-19 » ⋅ repris dans R. G. Wallace, Dead epidemiologists. On the origins of COVID-19, Monthly Review Press, oct. 2020
In 2011, science journalist Laurie Garrett wrote on the “alarming regularity” of accidents in biosafety labs around the world. The accidents are as much a matter of numbers as any one lab’s poor safety record. A 2013 Princeton University study showed an increasing global population exposed to the risk of accidents from biosafety laboratories pursuing studies of some of the world’s most dangerous diseases. The study, conducted by health geographer Thomas Van Boeckel and colleagues, showed the population living within the commuting field of BSL‑4 labs increased by a factor of four from 1990 to 2012. The fields summed together…
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DipeshChakrabarty ⋅ Provincializing Europe. Postcolonial thought and historical difference
Consider the following description from the 1930s of a particular festival (still quite common in India) that entails the worshiping of machinery by workers : “In some of the jute mills near Calcutta the mechanics often sacrifice goats at this time [autumn]. A separate alter is erected by the mechanics… . Various tools and other emblems are placed upon it… . Incense is burnt… . Towards evening a male goat is thoroughly washed … and prepared for a … final sacrifice… . The animal is decapitated at one stroke … [and] the head is deposited in the … sacred Ganges.” This…
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Jean-MarieGleize ⋅ « Intégralement et dans un certain sens » ⋅ Sorties
1. J’ai besoin d’une certaine définition minimale de la poésie comme la seule pratique verbale, littéraire, échappant (ou tendant à échapper) aux contraintes et aux dogmes de la représentation : la poésie comme branchement direct (ah ! ah!) de la langue sur du réel (de l’inconscient, du physique, du pulsionnel), la poésie comme branchement direct (!) de la langue sur de la réalité « objective » (du réel rugueux à étreindre, du réel sans nom et sans images et dénué de sens, etc.) ; la poésie comme pratique intégralement (!) objective et « réaliste » en ce sens-là (qui est un peu le contraire du sens…
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Robert G.Wallace, AlexLiebman, Luis FernandoChaves, RodrickWallace ⋅ « COVID-19 and Circuits of Capital » ⋅ repris dans R. G. Wallace, Dead epidemiologists. On the origins of COVID-19, Monthly Review Press, oct. 2020
To avoid the worst outcomes here on out, disalienation offers the next great human transition : abandoning settler ideologies, reintroducing humanity back into Earth’s cycles of regeneration, and rediscovering our sense of individuation in multitudes beyond capital and the state. However, economism, the belief that all causes are economic alone, will not be liberation enough. Global capitalism is a many-headed hydra, appropriating, internalizing, and ordering multiple layers of social relation. Capitalism operates across complex and interlinked terrains of race, class, and gender in the course of actualizing regional value regimes place to place. At the risk of accepting the precepts of…
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PeterLinebaugh ⋅ Lizard Talk ; Or, Ten Plagues and Another ⋅ An Historical Reprise, in Celebration of the Anniversary of Boston ACT UP February 26, 1989
« It takes a plague to know a plague » may be said both of the principle of inoculation and of the historiography of epidemics. Certainly this was true of Daniel Defoe’s book, The Journal of the Plague Year, which was ostensibly about the Great Plague of London in 1665 but which actually was contribution to the planning of the plague in 1721 when both the bubonic plague and the smallpox re-appeared in Europe and the western Atlantic. In 1721 the bubonic plague appeared in Marseilles where it was met with religious piety and repressive quarantine. In the Dutch ports cargoes were…
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JohnWieners ⋅ « The Acts of Youth » ⋅ Selected Poems, 1958–1984
And with great fear I inhabit the middle of the night What wrecks of the mind await me, what drugs to dull the senses, what little I have left, what more can be taken away ? The fear of travelling, of the future without hope or buoy. I must get away from this place and see that there is no fear without me : that it is within unless it be some sudden act or calamity to land me in the hospital, a total wreck, without memory again ; or worse still, behind bars. If I could just get out of the country.…
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BertoltBrecht ⋅ « Flüchtlingsgespräche » ⋅ Gesammelte Werke in 20 Bänden ⋅ (FR : trad. G. Badia & J. Baudrillard, L’Arche, 1965, p. 84–87)
KALLE Wenn meine Mutter nichts gehabt hat, keine Butter, hat sie uns Humor aufs Brot gestrichen. Er schmeckt nicht schlecht, sättigt aber nicht. ZIFFEL Bei Humor denk ich immer an den Philosophen Hegel, vondem ich mir in der Bibliothek einiges geholt habe, damit ich Ihnen philosophisch gewachsen bin. KALLE Erzählens mir drüber. Ich bin nicht gebildet genug daß ich ihn selber les. ZIFFEL Er hat das Zeug zu einem der größten Humoristen unter den Philosophen gehabt, wie sonst nur noch der Sokrates, der eine ähnliche Methode gehabt hat. Aber er hat anscheinend Pech gehabt und ist in Preußen angestellt…
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Robert G.Wallace, MaxAjl ⋅ « The Bright Bulbs » ⋅ repris dans R. G. Wallace, Dead epidemiologists. On the origins of COVID-19, Monthly Review Press, oct. 2020
Even before COVID-19 arrived in the United States, it was apparent that in deploying the virus as a propagandistic parry against China, conservatives and liberals alike would make matters worse by imposing an opportunity cost. By crowding the social space with saber-rattling, the United States would fail to take notes about the outbreak and China’s responses pro and con—so as to make adequate and internationally teamed preparations. Certainly it’s a bipartisan miscalculation borne more out of structural decay than mere hubris or bad data, but the problem extends across the sweep of respectable politics. These broader cultural pathologies, entwined into…
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Robert G.Wallace, MaxAjl ⋅ « The Bright Bulbs » ⋅ repris dans R. G. Wallace, Dead epidemiologists. On the origins of COVID-19, Monthly Review Press, oct. 2020
The problem is a more general one, beyond this particular terroir. Why are so many figures on the bien pensant Anglophone left adopting anti-ecological politics that advocate technologies that are as inseparable from their funders as the looms were from the mill owners in the age of the Luddites ? Why are these positions serially platformed by allegedly critical podia, time and again, even as their logics are symmetrical to those underlying efforts to force meatpackers back to COVID-infested processing plants, where all that labor is “saved”? There’s a through line from Trump to what counts in much of the Global…
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DipeshChakrabarty ⋅ Provincializing Europe. Postcolonial thought and historical difference
Subaltern histories written with an eye to difference cannot constitute yet another attempt, in the long and universalistic tradition of “socialist” histories, to help erect the subaltern as the subject of modern democracies, that is, to expand the history of the modern in such a way as to make it more representative of society as a whole. This is a laudable objective on its own terms and has undoubted global relevance. But thought does not have to stop at political democracy or the concept of egalitarian distribution of wealth (though the aim of achieving these ends will legitimately fuel many…
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LouisZukofsky ⋅ « A12 » ⋅ « A » ⋅ (traduction parue chez Virgile, 2003, p. 86–88à
In my city one wished me death, Nevermind, The stars last more than one night – The hidden so disposes imagination, And so the body to take on a nature Opposed it seems to itself, of which no idea Can be given the mind, but that a man Out of need of his nature should try not to exist Or appear changed Is as impossible As for any thing to be made out of nothing, This everyone with a little reflection May see : Anyone can kill himself, compelled by some other Who twists his right hand Which holds perhaps…
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DavidAntin ⋅ « i never knew what time it was » ⋅ i never knew what time it was
i had an image we were talking about celebrating birthdays and people wanted to know if i wanted a birthday party and i said i dont know if i want a birthday party because birthdays are a little bit like being in a falling elevator and celebrating at every floor you fall and then i thought about this again and i realized id only thought about this since i got to be thirty because when i was a real little guy i always thought of getting older as an ascension you know how you have a different image of getting older when youre a kid how you cant wait i remember i was sitting…
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JeanStarobinski ⋅ « Les malentendus » ⋅ Jean-Jacques Rousseau, la transparence et l’obstacle
Avant de devenir écrivain, Rousseau a découvert la force et l’impuissance de la parole. À Bossey, chez les Lambercier, ses protestations d’innocence ne lui ont été d’aucun secours : « Les apparences me condamnaient. » À Turin, chez les Vercellis, où il a volé un ruban, il accuse la pauvre Marion, il ment avec « une impudence infernale », et les juges intègres se laissent prendre à son mensonge : « Les préjugés étaient pour moi. » La parole ne peut rien et peut tout : elle est incapable de vaincre les « apparences » mensongères, et elle est capable d’inspirer des « préjugés » qui résistent victorieusement à la vérité. Aucune parole…