Petra

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Petra is Currently Reading

Petra is currently reading

Empire of Capital

by Ellen Meiksins Wood

bookshelves: history, marxism, philosophy, political-economy-and-theology, currently-reading

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Apr 25, 2026 07:28AM

Petra is currently reading

The German Ideology: Parts I & III

by Karl Marx

bookshelves: german-idealism, history-of-philosophy, marxism, philosophy, political-economy-and-theology, currently-reading

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Apr 19, 2026 08:47AM

Petra is currently reading

Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty

by Carl Schmitt

bookshelves: favorites, history, history-of-philosophy, philosophy, political-economy-and-theology, project, currently-reading

Reading for the 2nd time

read in December 2025

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Petra said: " 4.5 Stars.

An astonishing piece of work, full of razor-sharp insight. Each of the four essays are great in their own right, and they build on each other effectively.

The first essay, a galloping ten pages, defines Schmitt's conceptions of The Excepti ...more "

progress:

(page 57 of 121)
— Mar 30, 2026 07:06AM

Mar 30, 2026 07:06AM · see review

See all 32 books that Petra is reading…

Petra’s Quotes

“There he goes. One of God's own prototypes. A high-powered mutant of some kind never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream

674 likes

“A good statement of an inherently imprecise concern – and most important concerns in the world are imprecise – must capture that imprecision, and not replace it by a precise statement about something else. You should learn to speak in an articulate way about ideas that are inescapably imprecise (as a man called Aristotle explained more than two millennia ago). And that is one of the reasons why the humanities are important. A novel can point to a truth without pretending to capture it exactly in some imagined numbers and formulae.”
― Amartya Sen, A Wish a Day for a Week

5 likes

“However, there is another reaction to the never-ending plethora of unoriginal idiocies that life throws up with such erratic reliability, besides horror and despair.” “What’s that?” “A kind of glee. Once one survives the trough that comes with the understanding that people are going to go on being stupid and cruel to each other no matter what, probably for ever – if one survives; many people choose suicide at this point instead – then one starts to take the attitude, Oh well, never mind. It would be far preferable if things were better, but they’re not, so let’s make the most of it. Let’s see what fresh fuckwittery the dolts can contrive to torment themselves with this time.”
― Iain M. Banks, The Hydrogen Sonata

7 likes

“I have heard an argument that transgender people oppress transsexual people because we are trying to tear down the categories of male and female. But isn't this the same reactionary argument used against transmen and transwomen by those who argue that any challenges to assigned birth sex threaten the categories of man and woman? Transgender people are not dismantling the categories of man and woman. We are opening up a world of possibilities in addition. Each of us has a right to our identities. To claim one group of downtrodden people is oppressing another by their self-identification is to swing your guns away from those who really do oppress us, and to aim them at those who are already under siege.”
― Leslie Feinberg, Trans Liberation: Beyond Pink or Blue

tags: gender-identity, lgbt, trans, transgender, transsexual

10 likes

“When, therefore, a man is told, “You (your inner being) are so and so, because your skull-bone is so constituted,” this means nothing else than that we regard a bone as the man's reality. To retort upon such a statement with a box on the ear — in the way mentioned above when dealing with psysiognomy — removes primarily the “soft” parts of his head from their apparent dignity and position, and proves merely that these are no true inherent nature, are not the reality of mind; the retort here would, properly speaking, have to go the length of breaking the skull of the person who makes a statement like that, in order to demonstrate to him in a manner as palpable as his own wisdom that a bone is nothing of an inherent nature at all for a man, still less his true reality.”
― Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, Vol 1

tags: phrenology, physiognomy, retort

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