Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One
Tag: theory
Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 215
Real love wants to have a real object, and to know the truth of it, and to love it in its truth as it really is
Simone Weil, Notebooks
Levinas’ Interview with Francois Poirie in Is it Righteous to Be?: Interviews with Emmanuel Lévinas
It is a fault to wish to be understood before we have made ourselves clear to ourselves.
Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace
Love’s Grateful Striving: A Commentary on Kierkegaard’s Works of Love by M. Jamie Ferreira
Whoever takes up the sword shall perish by the sword. And whoever does not take up the sword (or lets it go) shall perish on the cross.
Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace
The body is also directly involved in a political field; power relations have an immediate hold upon it; they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs.
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, 2nd edn, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1995), 25
The sensitivity of the innocent victim who suffers is like felt crime. True crime cannot be felt. The innocent victim who suffers knows the truth about his executioner, the executioner does not know it. The evil which the innocent victim feels in himself is in his executioner, but he is not sensible of the fact. The innocent victim can only know the evil in the shape of suffering. That which is not felt by the criminal is his own crime. That which is not felt by the innocent victim is his own innocence. It is the innocent victim who can feel hell.
Simone Weil
Sin is not a distance, it is a turning of our gaze in the wrong direction
Simone Weil
Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet
All at once a self never known before, which now strikes you as the true one, is coming into focus. A gust of godlikeness may pass through you and for an instant a great many things look knowable, possible, and present. Then the edge asserts itself. You are not god. You are not that enlarged self. Indeed, you are not even a whole self, as you now see. Your new knowledge of possibilities is also a knowledge of what is lacking in the actual.
I must not forget that at certain times when my headaches were raging I had an intense longing to make another human being suffer by hitting him in exactly the same part of his forehead.
Simone Weil, Gravity & Grace
Little Bristling Soul 