March 2012
1 post
January 2012
3 posts
The wolves we dreamed of incessantly as children no longer trouble our sleep. A crack between the curtain and the window no longer summons the demons from deepest imagination. Still, the terror that gave birth to such visions has not gone away. What the child dreams in fear is no mere delusion but a premonition of what awaits her in waking life: the nightmare for which there are no soothing...
For the new year
Of all the rituals that accompany the new year, few give voice to our collective delusion better than the so-called resolution. In a world where only a few can win, where strength is denied to all but the strong, there is something more than a little perverse in this practice that pretends otherwise. And yet, the delusion is not entirely that. For only the poorest vision could fail to detect the...
December 2011
3 posts
“Movement alone can succeed where deliberation fails.”
– Schoenberg, Theory of Harmony
2011
In a repeat of last year, my favourite books of 2011 were all ones I did not read. However, one of the books I did not read clearly stood out among all the others I did not read: Victor Harris’ 1949 All Coherence Gone.
Musically, the closest thing I found to something that exists was Psychic Reality’s Vibrant New Age. This song in particular was a fine example of something almost...
November 2011
4 posts
“What is done to all by the few always takes the form of the subduing of...”
– Adorno
“It would not be adequate even to say that the sterility of literary production...”
– Adorno
October 2011
0 posts
In pre-modern societies, the sacrificial victim is usually a hideous, mutilated creature. It acts as a scapegoat on to which the community can project its own violence and criminality, and in doing so can disavow them. The scapegoat is driven beyond the boundaries of the city, to suffer an ignominious death beyond its walls. By this ritual mechanism, the people cleanse themselves of pollution and...
September 2011
1 post
“Only there did I see the effect of that massive explosion called time, the...”
– Durs Grünbein, Brief Report to an Academy
August 2011
3 posts
3 tags
“I am come to send fire on the earth: and what is my desire but that it were...”
May 2011
5 posts
Big on suckers’ bets / Placed my soul in debt
“Consciousness is the last and latest development of the organic and hence also...”
April 2011
6 posts
“But here lieth the difficulty, that when a man is terrified and cast down, he is...”
“the true ruins are not those of ancient human splendor that the curious seek out...”
– Schelling, Clara (1810)
“An animal which could speak said: ‘humanity is a prejudice of which we...”
“The present form of society has in large measure denied satisfaction to the...”
– Adorno, Aldous Huxley and Utopia
March 2011
1 post
“…none but these words which barely manage to prevent silence from being...”
February 2011
1 post
In Praise of Dialectics
Who’s to blame if oppression remains? We are. Who can break its thrall? We can.
Whoever has been beaten down must rise to his feet! Whoever is lost must fight back! Whoever has recognized his condition – how can anyone stop him? Because the vanquished of today will be tomorrow’s victors And never will become: already today!
-Bertolt Brecht
January 2011
1 post
December 2010
5 posts
Broken Circle, Dotted Line
Nietzsche knew that the one sure way to prolong the suffering and misery of the human animal was to try to flee it. Christianity, in waging war on the body, only guarantees the eternal ache of the flesh. In order to coax nature out of itself, in order to turn water into wine, we must first let go of the fear, which, as a sign of our weakness, prepares us as prey and thereby hastens the kill.
Of all the cruel tricks in nature, the one played on the weak and loveless is perhaps the cruelest. You may love and be loved, but only on the condition that you do not need it. You may know strength, just as long as you are not weak.
November 2010
4 posts
“On the one hand, the time of life, and on the other, the time of capital, though...”
– via Braingrass
“And as Kierkegaard flees through the ethical sphere into the realm of pure...”
October 2010
1 post
September 2010
4 posts
Suspicion of those who fall too quickly in love is misguided. The true object of love is not, as is often assumed, the individual in all his particularity, but rather that which in the individual is more than individual. To be “only in love with the idea of someone” is in this sense to have things just about right.
Animals are the humans we have yet to become.
August 2010
1 post
What we fear in foreigners is not their foreignness but our own.
July 2010
1 post
“It has to be said that the avalanche of new books is also a crushing repetition;...”
– via This Space
June 2010
2 posts
mhsteger:
Mondnacht, the fifth song of the...
Good emails often look a lot like average ones: both usually treat of more than one idea or event. The difference, however, is in the way the elements relate. Average emails, in their multiplicity, often resemble lists. In good emails, by contrast, each additional element informs — and often surprises — the last. In good emails, multiplicity is not number.
May 2010
4 posts
Siblings? Those about whom one knows everything and nothing.
The White Ribbon
When someone or something hurts us, our tendency is to strike back at it. But this merely perpetuates the problem. What is needed is strength enough to endure the attack. If we meet a friend or lover’s pettiness and hatred with yet more pettiness and hatred, we create a loop in which both parties become trapped. If, however, we deny the impulse to injure, we give ourselves every...
