Archives for March 2016

"The mother’s silence—whatever reasons motivate it—is an experience that every child has in a repetitive way, an experience that will be fantasised as the mother’s refusal to offer the sound object that is a source of pleasure; moreover, this experience is very often something that the mother does not think that she has to justify, that she may impose without knowing that she is imposing it." Piera Aulagnier “The incomparable language of the death's-head: total expressionlessness- the black of the eye sockets- coupled with the most unbridled expression- the grinning rows of teeth.” Walter Benjamin "The knowledge to which the snake seduces, that of good and evil, is nameless. It … [Read more...]

"The idea of fine art which emerged in the eighteenth century, symbolized by Kant's aesthetics—and there was no concept of aesthetics in traditional philosophy—and then by the discourses by Reynolds, that that's on the way out, it's going. I think art is becoming very ideological, and it's less interested in mediating this special experience called the "aesthetic," which you can get outside of art but which is intensified and more concentrated within the, so to say, closed circle of discourse which is art." Donald Kuspit "The double nature of pleasure is something that I wanted to trace out. For pleasure to be what it is, it has to exceed a limit of what is altogether wholesome and … [Read more...]

"The central fact for me is, I think, that the intellectual is an individual endowed with a faculty for representing, embodying, articulating a message, a view, an attitude, philosophy or opinion to, as well as for, a public, in public. And this role has an edge to it, and cannot be played without a sense of being someone whose place it is to raise embarrassing questions, to confront orthodoxy and dogma (rather than to produce them), to be someone who cannot easily be co-opted by governments or corporations, and whose raison d'etre is to represent all those people and issues who are routinely forgotten or swept under the rug." Edward Said “He who affirms the Devil creates or makes the … [Read more...]

"The relationship between the intellectuals and the world of production is not as direct as it is with the fundamental social groups but is, in varying degrees, "mediated" by the whole fabric of society and by the complex of superstructures, of which the intellectuals are, precisely, the "functionaries." Gramsci (Prison Notebooks) "Art is always in some kind of relation with non-art. It does not, indeed it cannot, take place in a bubble cut off from the rest of culture." David Campany "If it is true that little boys bring back the past with bows and arrows, it is also true that youths easily become cliquish, seeking friends and above all a father, which their own one often was … [Read more...]