A moving prism

From “The Earthly Paradise.” I. The Singer’s Prelude  __William Morris (1834–96)

» The Student of Prague | Hanns Heinz Ewers, (1913)  „Und wo immer ich ruhen wollt‘ und wo immer ich sterben wollt‘ und wo ich ging/ und wo ich schlich- trat vor mich hin zu jeder Zeit ein fremder Mann in schwarzem Kleid/ der mir- so wie ein Bruder glich. – Alfred de Musset-"

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