Category: Fragments
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Fragmentary, No. 28
This reciprocal determination operates elsewhere as well, although by other means and with other aims. It involves a double displacement, which renders a concept plausible or true by pointing to an error and, at the same time, by enforcing belief in something real through a denunciation of the false. The assumption is made that what…
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Fragmentary, No. 27
Looks like what drives me crazyDon’t have no effect on you—But I’m gonna keep on at itTill it drives you crazy, too. ✧ Langston Hughes, “Evil”
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Fragmentary, No. 26
Lecturing in JapanStephen Hawking was askednot to mention that the universe had a beginning(and so likely an end)because it would affect the stockmarket.Speculation aside,we all need a prehistory. According to Freud,we do nothing but repeat it.Beginnings are special because most of them are fake.The new person you becomewith that first sip of wine was already…
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Fragmentary, No. 25
The moderns confused products with processes. They believed that the production of bureaucratic rationalization presupposed rational bureaucrats; that the production of universal science depended on universalist scientists; that the production of effective technologies led to the effectiveness of engineers; that the production of abstraction was itself abstract; that the production of formalism was itself formal.…
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Fragmentary, No. 24
“The strongest guard is placed at the gateway to nothing. . . . Maybe because the condition of emptiness is too shameful to be divulged.” ✧ F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night
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Fragmentary, No. 23
poets are useless, . . . are not only ‘non-utilitarian’,we are ‘pathetic’: this is the new heresy;but if you do not even understand what words say, how can you expect to pass judgementon what words conceal? ✧ H.D., The Walls Do Not Fall
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Fragmentary, No. 21
Sex, like being human, is contextual. Attempts to isolate it from its discursive, socially determined milieu are as doomed to failure as the philosophe‘s search for a truly wild child or the modern anthropologist’s efforts to filter out the cultural so as to leave a residue of essential humanity. And I would go further and…
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Fragmentary, No. 20
I do not present this view of history as one that is stable and must prevail. Whatever validity it may claim, it is certain, on its own premises, to be supplanted . . . However accurately we may determine the ‘facts’ of history, the facts themselves and our interpretations of them, and our interpretation of…
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Fragmentary, No. 19
We must be aware of the dangers that lie in our most generous wishes. Some paradox of our nature leads us, when once we have made our fellow men the objects of our enlightened interest, to go on to make them the objects of our pity, then of our wisdom, ultimately of our coercion. ♦ Lionel Trilling,…
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