It’s hard to recognize that your whole being, your soul doesn’t move at the speed of your cognition… That it could take you a year to really know something that you intellectually believe in a second… how not to feel ashamed of the amount of time things take, or the recalcitrance of emotional or personal change.
writing a post-doc application on how we can methodologically and theoretically re-do/re-think the way we marginalize women’s art histories and contributions with the way we archive their work.
also crying.
It is as though desire were a law of disturbance unto itself to which the subject must submit to become a subject of her own unbecoming.
Lauren Berlant
Little Girl at MoMA With Calder Mobile, c. 1950s. Alfred Statler
Desire
Desire describes a state
of attachment to something or someone, and
the cloud of possibility that is generated by the
gap between an object’s specificity and the
needs and promises projected onto it. This gap
produces a number of further convolutions.
Desire visits you as an impact from the outside,
and yet, inducing an encounter with your
affects, makes you feel as though it comes from
within you; this means that your objects are not
objective, but things and scenes that you have
converted into propping up your world, and so
what seems objective and autonomous in them
is partly what your desire has created and
therefore is a mirage, a shaky anchor. Your style
of addressing those objects gives shape to the
drama with which they allow you to
reencounter yourself.—Lauren Berlant
What if we shift the question from ‘who do I want to be?’ to the question, ‘what kind of life do I want to live with others?’? It seems to me that then many of the questions you pose about happiness, but perhaps also about ‘the good life’ – very ancient yet urgent philosophical questions – take shape in a new way. If the I who wants this name or seeks to live a certain kind of life is bound up with a ‘you’ and a ‘they’ then we are already involved in a social struggle when we ask how best any of us are to live.
Judith Butler interviewed by Sara Ahmed
(via dirrtmirror)
(via lazz)
judith butler is my parenting manual.
(sara ahmed is my life manual. i’ve spent most of alice’s life regularly re-reading queer phenomenology. new moms and toddlers are natural phenomenologists.)
(via karaj)
I, too, have early on noted that babies are phenomenologists. It has been one of the most exalting processes of parenthood.
Every person I have loved has told me this too.
Tammy Rae Carland
Rusty Love
from Post Partum Portraits
I am a collection of dismantled almosts.
Anne Sexton, A Self-Portrait in Letters (via quotethat)
INTERVIEWER Do you think of yourself as having a relationship with God?
CARSON No. But that’s not bad. I think in the last few years, since I’ve been working on Decreation and reading a lot of mystics, especially Simone Weil, I’ve come to understand that the best one can hope for as a human is to have a relationship with that emptiness where God would be if God were available, but God isn’t. So, sad fact, but get used to it, because nothing else is going to happen.
INTERVIEWER He’s not available because he chooses to remove himself or he’s not available because he doesn’t exist?
CARSON Neither. He’s not available because he’s not a being of a kind that would fit into our availability. “Not knowable,”as the mystics would say. And knowing is what a worshiper wants to get from God—the sense of being in an exchange of knowledge, knowing and being known. It’s what anybody wants from any relationship of love, and the relationship with God is supposed to be one of love. But I don’t think any kind of knowing is ever going to materialize between humans and gods.
INTERVIEWER Is it stymied because of the nature of the beast?
CARSON Because of the difference of the two orders. If God were knowable, why would we believe in him?
Anne Carson, The Art of Poetry No. 88 (via objectsource)
epimeleia heautou: care of self
It is clear that in the course of its history the notion becomes broader and its meanings are both multiplied and modified… let’s say that within this notion of epimeleia heautou we should bear in mind that there is:
- First, the theme of a general standpoint, of a certain way of considering things, of behaving in the world, undertaking actions, and having relations with others. The epimeleia heautou is an attitude towards the self, others, and the world;
- Second, the epimeleia heautou is also a certain form of attention, of looking. Being concerned about oneself implies that we look away from the outside to… I was going to say “inside.” Let’s leave to one side this word, which you can well imagine raises a host of problems, and just say that we must convert our looking from the outside, from others and the world, etc, towards “oneself.“ The care of the self implies a certain way of attending to what we think and what takes place in our thought.The word epimeleia is related to meletē, which means both exercise and meditation.
- Third, the notion of epimeleia does not merely designate this general attitude or this form of attention turned on the self. The epimeleia also always designates a number of actions exercised on the self by the self, actions by which one takes responsibility for oneself and by which one changes, purifies, transforms, and transfigures oneself. It involves a series of practices, most of which are exercises that will have a very long destiny in the history of Western culture, philosophy, morality, and spirituality. These are, for example, techniques of meditation, of memorization of the past, of examination of conscience, of checking representations which appear in the mind, and so on.
Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, 10-1; emphasis added.
Marie Howe, “The Gate” in What the Living Do