theory – Page 16 – Little Bristling Soul

Three Dialogues
with Samuel Beckett and Georges Duthuit (full text behind link)

When a previously dominant group begins to speak the language of cultural unity or diversity, it is understandable if their subordinates detect in this rhetoric a way of perpetuating their privileges in displaced form. When men begin to speak of how much, after all, they and women share in common, feminists are properly on the alert.

Terry Eagleton, 1995, 271

Instead of sounding himself as to his
“being,” he does so concerning his place:
“Where am I?” instead of “Who am I?”
For that space that engrosses the deject,
the excluded, is never one, nor
homogeneous, nor totalizable, but
essentially divisible, foldable,
catastrophic … A tireless builder, the
deject is in short a stray. He is on a
journey, during the night, the end of
which keeps receding.

Julia Kristeva

Simone Weil remarked that if the cry of victims is Why? the cry of the tormenter is Why not?

Dehumanized still implies human – a dead human, but conceivable: because dead in human terms, still capable of being sublated in thought.

Jean-Franęois Lyotard, The Inhuman. Reflections on Time, tr. G. Bennington and R. Bovvlby (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993), p. 10.

this is the exalted melancholy of our fate, that every Thou in our world must become an It.

Martin Buber, I-Thou 2nd ed., trans. Ronald Gregor Smith (New York: Scribners, 1958), 16.

Zygmunt Bauman, “Searching for The Centre that Holds” in Global Modernities ed. Featherstone, Lash and Robertson, page 143

“The fear that we cannot grow beyond whatever distortion a we may find within ourselves”

audre lorde

From Sex Pots: Eroticism in Ceramics by Paul Mathieu

Rosemary Coombe, “Embodied Trademarks: Mimesis and Alterity on American Commercial Frontiers” and “The Properties of Culture and the Politics of Possessing Identity,” from The Cultural Life of Intellectual Properties (1998)

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