Search Results for: let the games begin

Samaranch & pals... --------------------------------------------------- A few disparate thoughts as the Olympics descend on us. The games of Dow Chemical, McDonalds, and British Petroleum. The games of UK swat teams on neighborhood roofs. The games of forced evictions. But anyway.... The "father" of the modern Olympics is Pierre deCourbetin. Born to parents Baron Charles Louis Frédy, Baron de Coubertin and Marie–Marcelle Gigault de Crisenoy, in 1863. Pierre's father was a royalist and dilettante painter; who's themes ran to the Roman Catholic Church and the royal family. Pierre developed an interest in education, fueled by a visit to England where he met Thomas … [Read more...]

"The hunter could have been the first 'to tell a story' because only hunters knew how to read a coherent sequence of events from the silent (though not imperceptible) signs left by their prey." Carlo Ginzburg "It is now necessary to ask ourselves a question: Why, in order to define the Nazi régime, should the argument regarding the one-party dictatorship be more valid than that of racial and eugenic ideology and practice? It is precisely from this sphere that the central categories and key terminology of the Nazi discourse derived. This is the case with Rassenhygiene, which is essentially the German translation of eugenics, the new science invented in England and successfully … [Read more...]

“Why is almost every robust healthy boy with a robust healthy soul in him, at some time or other crazy to go to sea? Why upon your first voyage as a passenger, did you yourself feel such a mystical vibration, when first told that you and your ship were now out of sight of land?" Herman Melville (Moby Dick) “It is possible that here we are facing a fourth ‘narcissistic wound’ namely that even the intelligence of which we are so proud, though analysts, is not our property but must be replaced or regenerated through the rhythmic outpouring of the ego into the universe, which alone is all knowing and therefore intelligent. But more of this another time.” Sandor Ferenczi (Diaries) "The … [Read more...]

“If freedom is the condition of life, it cannot be employed to abolish life and so to destroy and abolish itself … suicide is in no circumstances permissible…. Moral philosophers must, therefore, first and foremost show that suicide is abominable.” Immanuel Kant (Suicide) "Nessus, [a Centaur], carries the Poets across the river of boiling blood and leaves them in the Second Round of the Seventh Circle, The Wood of the Suicides. Here are punished those who destroyed their own lives and those who destroyed their substance. The souls of the Suicides are encased in thorny trees whose leaves are eaten by the odious Harpies, the overseers of the damned. " Dante (Canto 13, Inferno {Ciardi … [Read more...]

"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...]

“So many things happening, so many stories one inside the other, with every link hiding yet more stories … And I’ve hardly hatched from my egg,” thought an exultant Garuḍa, heading north. At last a place with no living creatures. He would stop and think things over there. “No one has taught me anything. Everything has been shown to me. It will take me all my life to begin to understand what I’ve been through. To understand, for example, what it means to say that I am made of syllables …” Roberto Calasso (Ka: Stories of the Mind and Gods of India ) "Much seems to be fixed...Perhaps it was once disputed. But perhaps, for unthinkable ages, it has belonged to the scaffolding of our … [Read more...]

“Art’s truth appears guaranteed more by its denial of any meaning in organized society, of which it will have no part—accomplished by its own organized absence of meaning—than by any capability of positive meaning within itself.” Theodor Adorno (Philosophy of Modern Music) "To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognised need of the human soul. It is one of the hardest to define. A human being has roots by virtue of his real, active and natural participation in the life of a community which preserves in living shape certain particular treasures of the past and certain particular expectations of the future." Simone Weil (The Need for Roots) "I can resist everything but … [Read more...]

“The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance." Karl … [Read more...]