“… the disaster is that the end has already happened, and we have survived it, no one knows when or what it was, there was no event – over time, the world ended, and yet here we all are with no world.”
Michael Cisco, “The Narrator”
“A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistably propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.”
Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History”
“Sometimes a painter introduces into his larger picture, or a poet into his long poem, an unpretending subordinate character who is himself. Thus the poet of the Odyssey has, I suppose, meant himself by the blind bard whom in the hall of the Phaeacians, sings about the battles of Troy and moves the battered hero to tears… To me, this seems to be the best simile of the bewildering double role of the mind. On the one hand, mind is the artist who has produced the whole; in the accomplished work, however, it is but an insignificant accessory that might be absent without detracting from the total effect.”
Erwin Schrodinger, “Mind and Matter”
Quoted in Francoise Dauvoine & Jean-Max Gaudilliere, “History Beyond Trauma”
“‘Lateness’ only means ‘selling more time than one has.’”
Gabriel Winant, “The Next Shift”
“A little boy whose mother has been widowed may be told, for example, that he is now the man of the family, and may experience ahead of the normal schedule some version of an adult male relationship with a woman. Even a little girl whose mother has been widowed may find herself filling some of the space left by her father’s death.
“But now imagine a being all of whose experiences are of this sort. Imitations; borrowings; analogues of the real thing, occurring in a biologically uncoupled, idiosyncratic order. This is the Lord God, a parentless, childless being. A cosmic orphan, literally the only one of his kind. Such a one has no alternative but to borrow, yet nothing that He borrows will ever quite fit. Herein lies the deep psychological peculiariyt, the unacnniness, the divine weirdness of the Lord God.”
Jack Miles, “God: A Biography.”
“Utopia: time stops, before disorder. The time created is a new time, a new alphabet for how to measure, consider, and live in that time.”
Annie G. Rogers, “Incandescent Alphabets”
“Nothing that literature contrives, after all, is so artificial as its endings. Real lives never end with artistic finality. Either they are rudely interrupted,, as Ecclesiastes says, or they end in a slow fade that has none of the rounded perfection of a well-wrought last page.
“Real lives end, we might say, just as God’s life ends; a supreme effort falls slightly short – the voice from the whirlwind. A long period opens in which one has progressively less to say, and the devotion of one’s friends is slowly overtaken by their silence. A final claim is mounted that one’s counsel has always mattered more than one’s prowess, and the claim helps, but only somewhat.
“And then the lights fail.”
Jack Miles, “God: A Biography”
“We are not spiritualists, we do not believe in ghosts, but our patients clutter up our offices with them.”
Francoise Davoine & Jean-Max Gaudilliere, “History Beyond Trauma”
“The children only want to pass the time pleasurably before life bares its jaws at them again. Which it will, even if they are reunited with their tormentors. The absence of love marks a child. Stigma eliciting the ambiguous contempt of adult authorities and making a homing beacon for bullies. You must fight all the time. You must be patient with powerlessness. Hold onto your hate until the right moment. Gird yourself for an adulthood that will be a version of the same stigma, fights, powerlessness, hate. The secretary is sitting in her office with the door open, saying its a vicious cycle. They go out and get themselves pregnant to get a council house and benefits, and then their wee uns grow up and that’s all they know so they do the same. Oh aye, you’re tootin there.
“All wised up and stunted, clever-stupid, the children are honing their verbal aggression on one another, sharpening their teeth with slaggings, and unconsciously jogging their knees. And I’m watching the girls, gluttonously, alert to every detail. They twist hair round their knuckles, they taste cruelty in the air, their mouths are sucking poison, and their eyes are full of memories. So, it’s all fuckin this in one ear, and yer ma in that one too, and bellend in the other, and I know how to play that game. Oh, children of the ruins, I say. One day, One day the ground beneath us will crumble, and we will all be sucked into the sewers with the flegs and fags, bookies and bonies, pubs and polis stations, balaclavas and boke, jobs and giros. And we’ll surf the tides of generations of other people’s crap. Suck the fat and sugar from the water. Fill the tunnels and sluices with our own strange music and rutting. Mark the walls with the indecipherable hieroglyphs of a murine intelligence. And start all over again. And we’ll think – my god, why? Why did we? Oh, why did we wait?”
Richard Seymour, “My Only Weakness: Part One”
“To this crib I always took my doll; human beings must love something, and, in the dearth of worthier objects of affection, I contrived to find pleasure in loving and cherishing a faded graven image, shabby as a miniature scarecrow. It puzzles me now to remember with what absurd sincerity I doted on this little toy, half fancying it alive and capable of sensation. I could not sleep unless it was folded in my night-gown; and when it lay there safe and warm, I was comparatively happy, believing it to be happy likewise.”
Charlotte Brontë, “Jane Eyre”
“People were nice if you found the right ones. The trouble was there were so many of the wrong ones.”
Dorothy B. Hughes, “The Expendable Man”
“As fascism has compressed the wildness of our political present through the repressive mechanisms of reactionary policy, we are left to look for the tics, phobias, and secondary gains of a population clinging to its symptoms, believing this dissimulation of truth to be a workable obviation of its ultimate confrontation. What makes this kind of repression different is that the ones who suffer are not the ones who wish not to know, but the ones whom power wishes not to know – the ones whom power wishes to repress, obliterate from view. They are kept at the gates of recognition…
“There’s a presumptive route towards what we might descrbe as empathetic action: the kind of collective galvanization whose tide crests out of boiled blood, a lovingly directed rage animated by a shared conception of humanity and a claim to life, safety, liberty and individual-communal sovereignty. Yet we need new psychosocial models for what it takes to turn knowledge into action – one that grapples with the persistence and immediacy with which we witness global suffering. Records of destroyed lifeworlds are contained in our pockets. Such atrocity images produce a multiplicity of contradictory responses: demands for peace and ceasefire, justifications for annihilation, evidence (for juridical assessment or for the court of public opinion) of atrocity, denialist and conspiratorial doubts about veracity. These reactions illustrate the spectrum of impulses that violence-as-spectacle can elicit: from the urge to consume and obliterate the Other to the urgency to defend and act in solidarity with the Other.
“Somewhere along the way though, a constant state of compassionate helplessness breeds inertia. There’s something about the atrocity image, as John Berger argues, that leads to an incapacitating arrest of the viewer: a moment of virtual engulfment into people’s suffering that we struggle to assimilate into our days, into our lives. The distance between the purportedly ethical act of witnessing (knowledge, awareness, empathic seeing) and our capacity to mobilize toward an emancipatory horizon reveals the presence (or absence) of the psychoanalytic animator in which resistance becomes a conceivable and claimable thing – the perpetually beautiful struggle to radically, dramatically reconstitute the ‘we.’”
The Editors, “The Blockage and the Blockade”
from Parapraxis 6: Resistance
“When your brain is in a stressed state, almost everything is perceived as a potential threat.”
Emily Nagoski, “Come As You Are”
“For the Trump White House, the beauty of using an already existing network is that it bypasses Congressional oversight and scrutiny and even obscures federal activity to governors and legislatures at the state level. States, cities, and local police have already signed Memoranda of Agreements with the feds to fight terrorism and officers are already assigned as task force officers.”
Ken Klippenstein, “Trump’s NSPM-7 Labels Common Beliefs As Terrorism ‘Indicators’”
“The Biden years and the 2024 election made it clear that an administration unable or unwilling to push through major political and economic changes cannot beat back authoritarianism. The pre-2016 status quo (neoliberalism anchored by U.S. global hegemony) was and is unsustainable. An exit from that order either in the direction of autocracy/fascism or robust democracy and people-over-profit economics has been on the agenda since the 2008 financial crisis.”
Max Elbaum, “A Path to Pushing MAGA Out Of Power”
“The origins of the late-style concept are appropriately fragmented: originating in the writing of Theodor Adorno, popularized by Edward Said, and further codified from Said’s lectures and essays after his death, resulting in the collection ‘On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain.’ Like the final girl of Carol Clover’s ‘Men, Women, and Chainsaws,’ the idea has gained a foothold in the culture and lost some of its shape in the process. The Said of On Late Style emphasizes an older artist’s consciousness of mortality, with particular attention to how “their work and thought acquires a new idiom.” The cases Said cites tend to include “intransigeance, difficulty, and unresolved contradiction” — works of disharmony that “leave the audience more perplexed and unsettled than before.” (Recent examples outside of comics arguably include Lou Reed’s varied, vexing final albums and the anti-nostalgia of Twin Peaks: The Return.)
Taking after Adorno, and citing Adorno’s writings on Beethoven, Said describes a form of exile for the late-style artist: a ‘contradictory, alienated relationship’ with the established order. In the case of Gilbert Hernandez, the PBS documentary on Love and Rockets provides an unintentional staging of this phenomenon. Gilbert exists in a kind of compartmentalized exile, with parts of his bibliography already treated as legacy, celebrated in his lifetime, and parts ignored entirely. ‘For Adorno,’ Said says, ‘lateness is the idea of surviving beyond what is acceptable and normal,’ and if there’s a satisfying frame for the Gilbert of the last decade, it’s this.”
Greg Hunter, “Latesploitation: An Examination of Recent Works by Gilbert Hernandez”
“As Andrew Elrod has described, Biden found, in the legislative implosion of his domestic social policy, a potent admixture of national security and public expenditure. Geopolitical rivalry was the ballast for costly industrial policy, completing a ‘national security synthesis’ between the national security base and new fiscal ambitions. While Biden campaigned as a ‘return to normalcy’ following Trump, his administration completed the economic-nationalist turn started by his predecessor, collapsing the distinction between economic interest and national security.”
Brian J. Chen, “Great Power Antinomies”
“The reality I want us to take care to not bring forward [is] realities that have us in the clinic, but instead realities that have us in the bedroom, in the dungeon, in conversation – in pleasure.”
Lucie Fielding on Ordinary Unhappiness Episode 123: Polymorphous Perversity and Gender Pleasure
“‘Oh,’ the dragon said sadly, ‘and I am not even a real dragon.’
“All this time, Minli had been cutting the twine ropes. At that very moment, Minli cut the last rope and rubbed the dragon’s arm. ‘You’re the only dragon I’ve ever met in real life,’ she said, ‘and you feel real to me. So I think you’re a real dragon. Or, at least, real enough. Anyway, if we’re going to Never-Ending Mountain together, let’s at least be real friends.’”
Grace Lin, “Where the Mountain Meets the Moon”
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