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Fragmentary, No. 11
My wing is ready for flight, I would like to turn back. If I stayed everliving time, I’d still have little luck. —Gerhard Scholem, “Greetings from the Angelus” There is a picture by Klee called Angelus Novus. It shows an angel who seems about to move away from something he stares at. His eyes are wide, […]
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Fragmentary, No. 9
The rule that secret files must contain only information already known is essential for the operation of a secret service, and not just in this century. Likewise, if you go to a bookshop specializing in esoteric publications, you will see that every new book (on the Holy Grail, the mystery of Rennes-le-Château, the Knights Templar, […]
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Fragmentary, No. 8
[T]he four theses of modernity. We cannot not periodize. Modernity is not a concept, philosophical or otherwise, but a narrative category. The narrative of modernity cannot be organized around categories of subjectivity; consciousness and subjectivity are unrepresentable; only situations of modernity can be narrated. No ‘theory’ of modernity makes sense today unless it comes to […]
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Fragmentary, No. 7
In the age of pictorial reproduction the meaning of paintings is no longer attached to them; their meaning becomes transmittable: that is to say it becomes information of a sort, and, like all information, it is either put to use or ignored; information carries no special authority within itself. When a painting is put to […]
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Fragmentary, No. 6
But watching [12 Years a Slave], being forced to confront its depiction of the unrelieved brutality and sorrow of slavery in the context of the brutalities being committed in the here and now, should turn all our heads sharply backwards and unloose our tongues to revive King’s question for our times: “How Long?” And in […]
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Fragmentary, No. 5
Lecturer, n. One with his hand in your pocket, his tongue in your ear and his faith in your patience. ♦ Abrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary
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Fragmentary, No. 4
[I]t must be remembered, that while our language is yet living, and variable by the caprice of every tongue that speaks it, these words are hourly shifting their relations, and can no more be ascertained in a dictionary, than a grove, in the agitation of a storm, can be accurately delineated from its picture in […]
IMPENSIVE
". . . and remember Lady Macbeth, who had her mind in her hand. We can't all be as safe as that."
IMPENSIVE 