To submit one’s pleasures and desires to enumeration and definitive articulation is to submit processes and becomings, to entities, locations, and boundaries, to become welded to an organizing nucleus of fantasy and desire whose goal is not simply pleasure and expansion, but control, and the tying of the new to models of what is already… Continue reading Elizabeth Grosz
I am a weak, ephemeral creature made of mud and dream. But I feel all the powers of the universe whirling within me. — Nikos Kazantzakis, from “The Preparation : Second Duty,” The Saviors of God. (Simon & Schuster March 15, 1960) Originally published January 1st 1901.
Every corner in a house, every angle in a room, every inch of secluded space in which we like to hide, or withdraw into ourselves, is a symbol of solitude. […] Also, in many respects, a corner that is “lived in” tends to reject and restrain, even to hide, life. The corner becomes a negation… Continue reading Gaston Bachelard
To love is to struggle, beyond solitude, with everything in the world that can animate existence. — Alain Badiou, In Praise of Love. (Serpents Tail 2012)
In these violent and lazy times, in which we do not live what we live, we are read, we are forcibly lived, far from our essential lives, we lose the gift, we no longer hear what things still want to tell us, we translate, we translate, everything is translation and reduction, there is almost nothing… Continue reading Hélène Cixous
I have flowed, become stagnant, festered, I have fallen from above. Mass, rhythmic, in harmony with my millions of drops, I have rained. I have been earth with the earths. Foaming, humid, I have slept a faceless face down. I have. Had. Lived. Done. Been. All the words that grow before the tip of the… Continue reading Hélène Cixous
This is why we desire so often to die, when we write, in order to see everything in a flash, and at least once shatter the spine of time with only one pencil stroke. — Hélène Cixous, Stigmata: Escaping Texts. (Routledge November 12, 1998)
Remembrance restores possibility to the past, making what happened incomplete and completing what never was. Remembrance is neither what happened nor what did not happen but, rather, their potentialization, their becoming possible once again. ― Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy. (Stanford University Press; 1 edition January 1, 2000)
Blue gives us an impression of cold, and thus, again, reminds us of shade. We have before spoken of its affinity with black. — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Theory of Colours. (The M.I.T. Press; 1st edition March 15, 1970) Originally published 1810.
Literature is like phosphorus: it shines with its maximum brilliance at the moment when it attempts to die. — Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero. (Hill and Wang; Reissue edition April 1, 1977) Originally published 1953,
The Vale of Soul-Making 