Tag: quotations

Politicians do social metaphysics

“There is no such thing as society. There is living tapestry of men and women and people and the beauty of that tapestry and the quality of our lives will depend upon how much each of us is prepared to take responsibility for ourselves and each of us prepared to turn round and help by our own efforts those who are unfortunate.”

—Margaret Thatcher (Sept 23, 1987), then Prime Minister of the UK, Interview for Woman’s Own

 

“The reality is international law is a set of political constructs which actually countries abide by or depart from in a number of circumstances – including the Euroepan Union itself. For example it didn’t apply WTO rules on Airbus. Arguably that’s a violation of international law but the EU did it because the EU felt it was inappropriate to do that.

“It is not unusual for there to be disputes over international law, it is not unusual in certain limited limited circumstances for countries not to comply with all obligations under international law.”

—Theresa Villiers (Sept 14, 2020), Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, Sky News (as reported by Jon Stone in the Independent)

A Little Fable (Kleine Fabel) – Franz Kafka

“Alas”, said the mouse, “the whole world is growing smaller every day. At the beginning it was so big that I was afraid, I kept running and running, and I was glad when I saw walls far away to the right and left, but these long walls have narrowed so quickly that I am in the last chamber already, and there in the corner stands the trap that I am running into.”

“You only need to change your direction,” said the cat, and ate it up.

—Franz Kafka, a short story written some time between 1917 and 1923

Truth

“What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms – in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.”

– Friedrich Nietzsche (1873), On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense

A more daring approach to writing theory

“What if we took a more daring, modernist, defamiliarizing approach to writing theory? What if we asked of theory as a genre that it be as interesting, as strange, as poetically or narratively rich as we ask our other kinds of literature to be? What if we treated it not as high theory, with pretentions to legislate or interpret other genres, but as low theory, as something vulgar, common, even a bit rude—having no greater or lesser claim to speak of the world than any other? It might be more fun to read. It might tell us something strange about the world. It might, just might, enable us to act in the world otherwise. A world in which the old faith in History is no more, but where there are histories that still might be made—in a pinch.”

– McKenzie Wark (2019). Capital is dead.

The limits of technoscientific capitalism

“I am not a man. I am not a woman. I am not heterosexual. I am not homosexual. I am not bisexual. I am a dissident of the genus-gender system. I am the multiplicity of the cosmos trapped in a binary political and epistemological system, shouting in front of you. I am a uranist confined inside the limits of technoscientific capitalism.”
– Paul B. Preciado (2020), An Apartment on Uranus

Judith Butler on the social construction of sex and gender

‘We are assigned a sex, treated in various ways that communicate expectations for living as one gender or another, and we are formed within institutions that reproduce our lives through gender norms. So, we are always “constructed” in ways that we do not choose. And yet we all seek to craft a life in a social world where conventions are changing, and where we struggle to find ourselves within existing and evolving conventions. This suggests that sex and gender are “constructed” in a way that is neither fully determined nor fully chosen but rather caught up in the recurrent tension between determinism and freedom. […] Gender theorists who call for gender equality and sexual freedom are not committed to a hyper-voluntarist view of “social construction”…’

Judith Butler (2019), in New Statesman

The first mention of genderqueer in print

‘The fight against gender oppression has been joined for centuries, perhaps millennia. What’s new today, is that it’s moving into the arena of open political activism. And nope, this is not just one more civil rights struggle for one more narrowly defined minority. It’s about all of us who are genderqueer: diesel dykes and stone butches, leatherqueens and radical fairies, nelly fags, crossdressers, intersexed, transexuals, transvestites, transgendered, transgressively gendered, intersexed, and those of us whose gender expressions are so complex they haven’t even been named yet. More than that, it’s about the gender oppression which affects everyone: the college sweetheart who develops life-threatening anorexia nervosa trying to look “feminine,” the Joe Sixpack dead at 45 from cirrhosis of the liver because “real men” are hard drinkers. But maybe we genderqueers feel it most keenly, because it hits us each time we walk out the front door openly and proudly. And that’s why these pages are only going to grow. We’re not invisible anymore. We’re not well behaved. And we’re not going away. Political activism is here to stay.

‘So get out. Get active. Picket someone’s transphobic ass. Get in someone’s genderphobic face. And while you’re at it, pass the word: the gendeRevolution has begun, and we’re going to win.’

Riki Anne Wilchins, In Your Face No. 1 (Spring 1995)

What is love?

“… romantic love is a syndrome because it is an arational, projected attitude with a plethora of symptoms that vary across cultures and individuals. Some core symptoms have been identified by Tennov’s concept of limerence, including obsessive thinking and idealization.”

“… all norms applicable to romantic love are extrinsic rather than intrinsic to it because romantic love is arational. For this reason, it is up to the lovers to accept, reject, and modify the norms that govern their loves.”

– Arina Pismenny (2018), The Syndrome of Romantic Love.

Disease vs. drug-centred model of psychiatric medication

“The disease-centred model suggests that psychiatric drugs work because they reverse, or partially reverse, the disease or abnormality that gives rise to the symptoms of a particular psychiatric disorder. Thus ‘antipsychotics’ are thought to help to counteract the biological abnormalities that produce the symptoms of psychosis or schizophrenia… the ‘drug-centred’ model suggests that far from correcting an abnormal state, as the disease model suggests, psychiatric drugs induce an abnormal or altered state. Psychiatric drugs are psychoactive substances, like alcohol and heroin… The drug-centred model suggests that the psychoactive effects produced by some drugs can be useful therapeutically in some situations. They don’t do this in the way the disease-centred model suggests by normalising brain function. They do it by creating an abnormal or altered brain state that suppresses or replaces the manifestations of mental and behavioural problems.” 

Blog post by Joanna Moncrieff

Poetical science

The interdisciplinary struggle experienced by Ada Lovelace, world’s first computer programmer, described by Betty Toole (1996):

Her mother, Lady Byron, had the reputation of being a fine mathematician; her father was the famous poet. Ada’s struggle to unite the conflicting strains in her background was especially difficult, since her parents separated when she was only five weeks old. Yet her father’s heritage could not be ignored. In frustration Ada described this struggle when she wrote in an undated fragment to Lady Byron: “You will not concede me philosophical poetry. Invert the order! Will you give me poetical philosophy, poetical science?”