Weekend Woundup 3
It's that time again, when whatever's gone on the sideblog over the last seven days gets dumped all into one post. Enjoy.
Sexuality is never a destination or an origin. It's a bridge and a vehicle, and you have limited control of where or how far they take you.
Sexuality is about breeding the same way language is about communicating, food is about nutrition and death is about the failure of biology.
The interesting thing about sexuality is not that it has this or that function, but that it can become attached to any function, any symbol.
Humans are social but not gregarious. We need a small stable peer group, not a crowd of aquaintences.
One reason film, photographs and paintings grab your attention is that they don't look like what they show. The colours, focus, sharpness, lines and textures are all unlike what the eye sees.
It's not just that the imperfections of the medium give it its character, but that without imperfections there could be no character - it would be as mundane as a window.
The emotions they provoke are also unlike those provoked by what they show. Beauty, humour, joy, anger, despair, revulsion - all are real but different.
The desire produced by pornography is not for the scene to become real and enter the viewer's life, but for the viewer to enter the unreal scene, become part of it and become unreal.
A little money and technology, some friends and luck, a lot of enthusiasm and invention. With these you can make a film.
"Voilà! In view, a humble vaudevillian veteran cast vicariously as both victim and villain by the vicissitudes of Fate. This visage, no mere veneer of vanity, is a vestige of the vox populi, now vacant, vanished. However, this valorous visitation of a bygone vexation stands vivified and has vowed to vanquish these venal and virulent vermin vanguarding vice and vouchsaving the violently vicious and voracious violation of volition! The only verdict is vengeance; a vendetta held as a votive, not in vain, for the value and veracity of such shall one day vindicate the vigilant and the virtuous. Verily, this vichyssoise of verbiage veers most verbose, so let me simply add that it's my very good honor to meet you and you may call me "V".
- V, V for Vendetta
"The problem of evil is not hedonism. The problem is that of envy, when preventing the other's enjoyment becomes more important than your own enjoyment. The logic of envy has nothing to do with hedonism."
- Slavoj Zizek
There is a slovenian folk tale in which a magician offers a farmer a choice. The magician will either give the farmer one cow and two to his neighbour, or take one from the farmer and two from the neighbour.
Of course, the farmer chooses the second option.
"It is easier to accept inequalities if one can claim that they result from an impersonal blind force."
Slavoj Zizek, paraphrasing Frederich Hayek
"The fact that capitalism is not just, far from being something which makes it more intolerable, is precisely what makes it palpable for the majority. What makes it palpable is its very injustice, and that we knwow it's unjust."
- Slavoj Zizek
"If you look at the thing too directly - the oppressive social dimension - you don't see it. You can see it in an oblique way only if it remains in the background."
- Slavoj Zizek
The genius of the truly stupid is they can make any insight fit their beliefs, simply by failing to understand it.
The reason to follow your heart is not because it takes you to better places, but it's more likely to get you there.
There's a difference between explaining and idea and encouraging me to believe it. The former make me interested in the idea, the latter makes me suspicious of the person presenting it.
"Today the main mode of politics is fear. Politically groups today are bands of people who are afraid - people who are mobilised by fear."
- Slavoj Zizek
"When people fall in love with what seems to be a perfect theory - a set of rules - and they love those rules more than they love people or places, they start to see the messy reality of life as interfering with the imagined beauty which exists only in their texts."
- Naomi Klein
"We need to fear people who love systems more than people."
- Naomi Klein
"Utopias can't co-exist with other ideas."
- Naomi Klein
"Suffering here is a product of what we admire and consider prosperous and desirable there."
- Saskia Sassen
Optimism is not a strategy.
"It is much easier to have sympathy for suffering than for thought."
- Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man under Socialism
"'Public opinion' is a mirage."
- Richard Seymour, Lenin's Tomb
Which word do you prefer? Milinillion or Quingentilliard
"Out of sight and out of mind
Are deadly traits when they're combined
But it's easier that way."
- VNV Nation, Legion
Scienceblogging.com. Lots and lots of science blogs.
"Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception."
- George Orwell
It's easier to play the victim than resist.
It's easier to find a scapegoat than a solution.
It's easier to believe in a cause than believe it.
"I'm stuck in a loveless relationship with myself."
- Charlie Brooker
"Hold the newsreader's nose squarely, waiter, or friendly milk will countermand my trousers."
- Stephen Fry
"Colourless green ideas sleep furiously"
- Noam Chomsky
"Quadruplicity drinks procrastination"
- Bertrand Russell
"The exquisite corpse will drink the new wine."
- French Surrealists c1925
"The vertebral silence indisposes the licit sail"
- Lucien Tesnière
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment