A moving prism

Debord  often cited a letter of Marx's, saying that 'the hopeless conditions of the society in which I live fill me with hope'. Any radical thought always adopts the most extreme position of desperation. Simone Weil said 'I do not like those people who warm their hearts with empty hopes'. Thought, for me, is just that: the courage of hopelessness. And is that not the height of optimism?  — from  an interview  with Giorgio Agamben

Watch out for intellect, because it knows so much it knows nothing and leaves you hanging upside down, mouthing knowledge as your heart falls out of your mouth. — Anne Sexton, The Complete Poems ( + )

I do not come with timeless truths.  My consciousness is not illuminated with ultimate radiances.  Nevertheless, in complete composure, I think it would be good if certain things were said.  These things I’m going to say, not shout. For it is a long time since shouting has gone out of my life.  So very long… Why write this book? No one has asked me for it.  Especially those to whom it is directed.  Well? Well, I reply quite calmly that there are too many idiots in this world. And having said it, I have the burden of proving it. — Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon

The Wood of the Self-Murderers: The Harpies and the Suicides, c. 1824–27. William Blake -- Escape but not forever, the presence will come, the hour will come, a strange truth enter the universe, death shows its Being as before.

» But what if the truth is neither in the represented nor in the representation? What if the truth is in its material configuration? What if the medium is really a message? Or actually—in its corporate media version—a barrage of commodified intensities? To participate in an image—rather than merely identify with it—could perhaps abolish this relation. This would mean participating in the material of the image as well as in the desires and forces it accumulates. How about ackn owledging that this image is not some ideological misconception, but a thing simultaneously couched in affect and availability, a fetish made of crystals and electricity, animated by our wishes and fears—a perfect embodiment of its own conditions of existence? As such, the image is—to use yet another phrase of Walter Benjamin’s—without expression. It doesn’t represent reality. It is a fragment of the real world. It is a thing just like any other—a thing like you and me. — A Thing Like You and Me , Hito Steyerl

» The young man thought, I'll just stay here, I'll just stay here. but then he rose and followed the others onto the bus.  [...] there was nothing else to do. just to listen to the sound of the engine, the sound of the tires in the snow. - 'Nirvana' A poem by Charles Bukowski, read by Tom Waits 

Walter Benjamin: 1892-1940 | written by: Arendt