Aphorisms: On America and other things
What is tragic is that if anything is worth living for, it is worth dying for.
What is hopeful is that if anything is worth dying for, it is worth living for.
https://www.questionsducinema.com/literary/2020/8/30/what-is-at-stake-couplet
The legacy of theological metaphysics today is that the political is always a gesture towards an immanent outside.
https://www.questionsducinema.com/new-blog/2020/8/13/against-spiritualism-and-romanticism-politics-as-immanent-critique
The world divides politically, not by nations and religions. The difference may be summed up as that between practices of piety on the right and inquiry on the left: or, churches and museums. The former affirms an inside, and finds identity in community; the latter is a quest for an outside. The one has sincerity and reassurance, the other, rigor and courage.
https://www.questionsducinema.com/new-blog/2020/8/13/against-spiritualism-and-romanticism-politics-as-immanent-critique
Art is the Eros of a society so repressive and boring and horrible that the only ethics credible within it is a politics.
https://www.questionsducinema.com/new-blog/2020/9/7/art-and-politics-in-the-fourth-reich-in-search-of-a-concrete-other-and-after
The sole function today of all that is invoked by the religiously pious is to try to discipline workers with the sole message that they should shut up, get back to work, and obey.
The hidden name of the coming utopia is kindergarten.
The bastard has forgotten the history of his ancestors; but the true son or daughter who will triumph is pure myth. Better to be myth’s bastard than her heir.
https://www.questionsducinema.com/literary/2020/4/22/the-hidden-name-of-the-enemy-of-the-new-american-revolution-is-the-bastards-old-father-europe
Totalitarianism is the mentality of a society run by a bureaucracy as it outlaws metaphor. Images are either enforced or invented.
https://www.questionsducinema.com/literary/2020/5/11/poetry-against-capital-a-short-note-on-the-totalitarianism-of-prose
The bureaucratic mind has a remarkable tendency to be at once idealistic and cynical. There is no contradiction in this.
Don’t speak truth to power! Criticize your friends, and send your enemies a Trojan Horse, delivered in honeyed words with a practiced smile.
Hitler’s regime was built less on hatred than shining ideals. Its gestures therefore were of inclusion and exclusion. Its god was a state devoted to ideas of normality, health, and purity. For bullies do not lack real moral values; the trouble lies elsewhere.
If feminism were the institution of a normative femininity, God’s sole names would be Relationships and Feelings. The world would then seek to be happy without needing to be just.
In the School of Tyrants, is posted this placard:
To get a man to fight, call his duty so noble he cannot but resign himself to it, being as expendable as every man. To get a woman to fight is even simpler: kill her sons and blame it on the enemy.
“You Americans worry about whether you or your neighbor is a man or a woman, or wants a man or a woman. We always worried mainly about which friend or neighbor is STASI. The most beautiful identities they might display were of no importance to this.”
—A former resident of East Germany
Blessed and cursed is the one with visibly strong passions: His devoted friends will balance out his earnest enemies, as the intensity of his life will balance out its brevity.
Europe is the name of all that American radicals of every stripe have sought to exchange for something innocent and new. About this, determined people have always been remarkably self-assured and intolerant.
In America, the unmastered past, in the persistent afterlife of our defining national trauma (slavery and its consequences), is reflected in the problematic of absolutes of both liberty and authority. The dirty secret is that they go together.
https://www.questionsducinema.com/literary/2020/3/10/sexual-liberation-as-slavery-or-america-in-the-wake-of-pasolini-and-the-film-sal
What if they staged a revolution, and all you got was a guillotine?
In America, we do not elect our leaders so much as invite them to help choose who we are. In so doing, we help them elect a people.
If you want to hate a person, you are well-advised to be persuaded that they hate you. What crimes or excesses cannot be authorized if “the Other“ is the guilty one?
Americans only seem to be anti-intellectual. The truth is just that their idea of rational thinking is modeled on the law court and not, as in France, the philosophy seminar. The meaning of this is that the self is presumed innocent and the other guilty.
https://www.questionsducinema.com/literary/2020/5/22/bureaucratic-thinking-and-the-american-mind
Great ideas and artworks should either be as exciting as fuck or exciting to fuck with.
https://www.questionsducinema.com/new-blog/2020/9/7/art-and-politics-in-the-fourth-reich-in-search-of-a-concrete-other-and-after
Medicine in our time has brought us the triumph of normality over morality.
https://www.questionsducinema.com/new-blog/2020/8/29/the-concept-of-mental-health-and-normality-observations-on-the-third-reich-and-medical-authority-today
Black people in America are oppressed because of capitalism and how it has used race, not by white or European people and how all of us have used capitalism.
https://www.questionsducinema.com/new-blog/2020/8/13/some-observations-on-oppression-and-morality-involving-race-and-other-matters
In America whoever is in a position of superior power is always right, and they are always right for a specific reason that they are prepared to give and that must be acknowledged, even though it does not much matter what this reason is.
https://www.questionsducinema.com/new-blog/2020/8/10/statements-and-enunciation-as-sites-of-truth-and-power-foucault-contra-hegel-a-note
Identity politics fails because it treats inequality as difference.
https://www.questionsducinema.com/new-blog/2020/7/9/dont-tread-on-my-identity-did-someone-say-bourgeois
The lie of all knowledge is the hubris of hermeneutics: “What this means is that.”
https://www.questionsducinema.com/new-blog/2020/6/13/what-this-means-is-that-note-on-the-semantics-of-bureaucracy-and-the-police-state
What most people fail to understand about bullies is that they are highly moral. Not for them to neglect the gods of the city and the services they require. True, they don’t much love their neighbors, especially if they seem weak, but their scorn is not out of desire for their own advantage so much as respect for the rules that for them represent the state of things. They are cynics, whose envy is for those who don’t sacrifice enough of their own desire to the cruel gods whose impersonal order (karma or fate) demands blood and tears.
Heidegger's thought is as discredited by Nazism, as Marxism is by the Gulag, Christianity by the Inquisition, Judaism by Israel's war against the Palestinians, or American notions of democracy by how lightly they have been taken in enforcing them everywhere.
https://www.questionsducinema.com/new-blog/2020/6/12/heidegger-reading-the-history-of-thought-and-politics-today
Scientific thinking does not solve problems; it invents them. It does not know; it thinks.
https://www.questionsducinema.com/new-blog/2020/6/8/forget-evidence-based-practices-science-is-a-form-of-thinking-not-a-collection-of-represented-facts
Physical distance and contact do not determine personal distance and contact. They only give it a certain form.
https://www.questionsducinema.com/new-blog/2020/4/16/rethinking-respect-friendships-and-social-life-in-the-coronavirus-era
Today our sufferings may be justified by the yesterday that caused them or the tomorrow that will end them. The former is a deception, the latter a lie. Meanwhile, our task is one not of justice but experience. Nothing justifies happiness either, but that we will it.
Politics, like love and friendship, is both a sharing and a contestation. Love is radical contestation of the Being of lover and beloved alike. Only in risking itself, is it equal in power to death.
https://www.questionsducinema.com/new-blog/2020/5/31/what-is-politics-a-note
We seize not the night in the light,
but the light in the night.
https://www.questionsducinema.com/literary/2020/10/13/footnote-on-passion