Archives for November 2023

"For, according to Lacan, even the word "corpse" is a euphemism in reference to the real." Friedrich Kittler (Gramaphone, Film, Typewriter) "If all goes well, I will be able to treat myself again with one or two fashion shows." Walter Benjamin (in letter to Greta Karplus {Adorno}, quoted in Philipp Ekardt's 'Benjamin on Fashion') "They want a contact with the opposite sex—or perhaps simply access to sexuality itself—which cannot be named, a contact in which they can dissolve themselves while forcibly dissolving the other sex. They want to penetrate into its life, its warmth, its blood. It seems to me that they aren't just more intemperate, dangerous, and cruel than Freud's harmless … [Read more...]

"Art is not about creating polemical alternatives; art means rather, through nothing other than its form, resisting that world-course which everyday points a gun at mankind’s chest." Theodor Adorno (Notes to Literature) "My sword should bite it. Not the dreadful spout Which shipmen do the hurricane call, Constring’d in mass by the almighty sun, Shall dizzy with more clamor Neptune’s ear, In his descent, than shall my prompted sword Falling on Diomed." Shakespeare (Troilus and Cressida, Act 5 sc.2) “Freud thus introduces into the psyche what might be termed a universal of perverse difference: all human beings have a potential proclivity for crime, sex, transgression, madness, … [Read more...]