We can no longer sit idly by as others steal our mouths, our anuses, our genitals, our nerves, our guts, our arteries, in order to fashion parts and works in an ignoble mechanism of production which links capital, exploitation, and the family.
We can no longer allow others to turn our mucous membranes, our skin, all our sensitive areas into occupied territory~territory controlled and regimented by others, to which we are forbidden access.
We can no longer permit our nervous system to serve as a communications network for the system of capitalist exploitation, for the patriarchal state; nor can we permit our brains to be used as instruments of torture programmed by the powers that surround us.
We can no longer allow others to repress our fucking, control our shit, our saliva, our energies, all in conformity with the prescriptions of the law and its carefully defined little transgressions. We want to see frigid, imprisoned, mortified bodies explode to bits, even if capitalism continues to demand that they be kept in check at the expense of our living bodies.
This desire for a fundamental liberation, if it is to be a truly revolutionary action, requires that we move beyond the limits of our “person,” that we overturn the notion of the “individual,” that we transcend our sedentary selves, our “normal social identities,” in order to travel the boundary-less territory of the body, in order to live in the flux of desires that lies beyond sexuality, beyond the territory and the repertories of normality.
~Félix Guattari
“In Order to End the Massacre of the Body” (Tr. Jarred Becker) ~ Soft Subversions ~ NY : Semiotext(e), 1996 / pgs 31-2
The “humaneness” of the future—When I contemplate the present age with the eyes of some remote age, I can find nothing more remarkable in present-day humanity than its distinctive virtue and disease which goes by the name of “the historical sense.” This is the beginning of something altogether new and strange in history: If this seed should be given a few centuries and more, it might ultimately become a marvelous growth with an equally marvelous scent that might make our old earth more agreeable to live on. We of the present day are only just beginning to form the chain of a very powerful future feeling, link for link—we hardly know what we are doing. It almost seems to us as if it were not a matter of a new feeling but rather a decrease in all old feelings; the historical sense is still so poor and cold, and many people are attacked by it as by a frost and made still poorer and colder. To others it appears as a sign of stealthily approaching old age, and they see our planet as a melancholy invalid who wants to forget his present condition and therefore writes the history of his youth. This is actually one color of this new feeling: Anyone who manages to experience the history of humanity as a whole as his own history will feel in an enormously generalized way all the grief of an invalid who thinks of health, of an old man who thinks of the dreams of his youth, of a lover deprived of his beloved, of the martyr whose ideal is perishing, of the hero on the evening after a battle that has decided nothing but brought him wounds and the loss of his friend. But if one endured, if one could endure this immense sum of grief of all kinds while yet being the hero who, as the second day of battle breaks, welcomes the dawn and his fortune, being a person whose horizon encompasses thousands of years past and future, being the heir of all the nobility of all past spirit—an heir with a sense of obligation, the most aristocratic of old nobles and at the same time the first of a new nobility—the like of which no age has yet seen or dreamed of; if one could burden one’s soul with all of this—the oldest, the newest, losses, hopes, conquests, and the victories of humanity; if one could finally contain all this in one soul and crowd it into a single feeling—this would surely have to result in a happiness that humanity has not known so far: the happiness of a god full of power and love, full of tears and laughter, a happiness that, like the sun in the evening, continually bestows its inexhaustible riches, pouring them into the sea, feeling richest, as the sun does, only when even the poorest fisherman is still rowing with golden oars! This godlike feeling would then be called—humaneness.
La Gaya Scienza, Nietzsche, Book Four, 337
”No member of a verbal community can ever find words in the language that are neutral, exempt from the aspirations and evaluations of the other, uninhabited by the other’s voice. On the contrary, he receives the word by the other’s voice and it remains filled in that voice…His own intention finds a word already lived in.” -Bakhtin
The pure work implies the disappearance of the poet as speaker, yielding his initiative to words, which are mobilized by the shock of their difference; they light up with reciprocal reflections like a virtual stream of fireworks over jewels, restoring perceptible breath to the former lyric impulse, or the enthusiastic personal directing of the sentence.
…
What good is the marvel of transposing a fact of nature into its almost complete and vibratory disappearance with the play of the word, however, unless there comes forth from it, without the bother of a nearby or concrete reminder, the pure notion.
I say: a flower! and outside the oblivion to which my voice relegates any shape, insofar as it is something other than the calyx, there arises musically, as the very idea and delicate, the one absent from every bouquet.
"People are so fucking dumb. Nobody reads anymore, nobody goes out and looks and explores the society and culture that they were brought up in. People have attention spans of 5 seconds and as much depth as a glass of water"
— David Bowie (via clonazepamm)
(Source: cicconeyouthh, via klonazepam)
By Georges Canguilhem
To know is to analyze. This point is more easily stated than justified, for the attention every philosophy preoccupied with the problem of knowledge gives to the operations of knowing distracts it from the meaning of knowledge. At best, one responds to the latter problem by affirming the sufficiency and purity of knowledge. And yet, knowing only in order to know is hardly more sensible than eating in order to eat, killing in order to kill, or laughing in order to laugh, since it is at ’ once an avowal-that knowledge must have a meaning-and a refusal to find in knowledge any meaning other than itself.
If knowledge is analysis, the matter is surely not to be left at that. To decompose, to reduce, to explain, to identify, to measure, to put into equations: all this must involve a benefit for intelligence, since, manifestly, it comes at the cost of enjoyment. One enjoys not the laws of nature but nature itself, not numbers but qualities, not relations but beings. And, all told, one does not live off knowledge. Vulgar? Perhaps. Blasphemous? But why? Must we believe that, because certain men dedicate themselves to a life of knowledge, man can only really live in and through science?
We accept far too easily that there exists a fundamental conflict between knowledge and life, such that their reciprocal aversion can lead only to the destruction of life by knowledge or to the derision of knowledge by life. We are then left with no choice except that between a crystalline (i.e., transparent and inert) intellectualism and a foggy (at once active and muddled) mysticism.
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