Tag: i thou

Marina Abramovic invented conscious uncoupling way before that dude from Coldplay.

Marina Abramovic, The Lovers (Two Vases), 1966, C-print

“In 1988, Ulay and Abramovic decided to end their relationship and to mark this with a performance, which became the legendary endpoint of their collaboration. After years of negotiations with the Chinese authorities, the artists got the permission to carry out ‘The Lovers: The Great Wall Walk’, in which they started to walk from different ends of the Chinese Wall in order to meet in the middle and say good-bye to each other. Abramovic started walking at the eastern end of the Wall, at Shan Hai Guan, on the shores of the Yellow Sea, Gulf of Bohai, walking westward. Ulay started at the western end of the Wall, at Jai Yu Guan, the south-western periphery of the Gobi Desert, walking eastward. After they both continuously walked for 90 says, they met at Er Lang Shn, in Shen Mu, Shaanxi province. Here, they embraced each other to go on with their life and work separately from then on.”

Emmanuel Levinas, The Proximity of the Other, 98

“All encounter begins with a benediction, contained in the word ‘hello’; that ‘hello’ that all cogito, all reflection on oneself already presupposes and that would be a first transcendence. This greeting addressed to the other man is an invocation. I therefore insist on the primacy of the well-intentioned relation toward the other. Even when there may be ill will on the other’s part, the attention, the receiving of the other, like his recognition, mark the priority of good in relation to evil.”

Do not allow yourself to be imprisoned by any affection. Keep your solitude. The day, if it ever comes, when you are given true affection there will be no opposition between interior solitude and friendship, quite the reverse. It is even by this infallible sign that you will recognize it. Other affections have to be severely disciplined.

Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (via lazz)

As members of human society, perhaps the most difficult task we face daily is that of touching one another—whether the touch is physical, moral, emotional or imaginary. Contact is crisis. As the anthropologists say, “Every touch is a modified blow.”

Anne Carson, from Men in the Off Hours; “Dirt and Desire: Essay on the Phenomenology of Female Pollution in Antiquity” (via toeska)
Source: luthienne

Rowan Williams

If, by grace or hard work or both, we manage to broaden the scope of our love so that we are able to give patient attention, to respond joyfully and generously, to the presence of a wide variety of others, this suggests not that we have abandoned a point of view, but that we have learned not to let our responses be totally dictated by what we believe to be our needs, and to accept, or even celebrate as a gift, what in another person is irrelevant to my imagined need or expectation. 

“My value and security may come to depend entirely on my needs and wants being met by a particular kind of human relationship—by a variety of what we usually call human love…. I may manipulate or tyrannize over someone else, deny their right to be themselves or to have interests other than my supposed interests, and so do profound injury to them…. Weil’s claim is that this is endemic in ordinary human relations. If I love someone as a particular individual, this means that their particularity is attractive to me. These features of their reality meet or gratify my expectations, they are pleasing to my standards; my selection of them as objects of love means that I have found reason to ignore or discount other aspects of their reality and to withhold love from other individuals not possessed of the relevant desirable features. Thus my love of the individual as individual is necessarily an attempt to"cannibalize" them, to bring them into my world on my terms”. 

—Rowan Williams, “The Necessary Non-Existence of God,” in Simone Weil’s Philosophy of Culture, ed. R. Bell