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“We know this world intimately and that is its uncanniness. We cannot bear our knowledge.”
― A Male Grief: Notes on Pornography and Addiction - An Essay
― A Male Grief: Notes on Pornography and Addiction - An Essay
“In a world where language and naming are power, silence is oppression, is violence.”
― On Lies, Secrets, and Silence. Selected Prose 1966-1978
― On Lies, Secrets, and Silence. Selected Prose 1966-1978
“Always historicize!”
― The Political Unconscious
― The Political Unconscious
“In the good old days of ‘actually existing Socialism,’ every schoolchild was told again and again of how Lenin read voraciously, and of his advice to young people: ‘Learn, learn, and learn!’ ... Marx, Engels, and Lenin were each asked which they preferred, a wife or a mistress. Marx, whose attitude in intimate matters is well known to have been rather conservative, answered ‘A wife’; Engels, who knew how to enjoy life, answered, of course, ‘A mistress’; the surprise comes with Lenin, who answered ‘Both, wife and mistress!’ Is he dedicated to a hidden pursuit of excessive sexual pleasures? No, since he quickly explains: ‘This way, you can tell your mistress that you’re with your wife, and your wife that you are about to visit your mistress…’ ‘And what do you actually do?’ ‘I go to a solitary place and learn, learn, and learn!”
― The Plague of Fantasies
― The Plague of Fantasies
“In a traditional German toilet, the hole into which shit disappears after we flush is right at the front, so that shit is first laid out for us to sniff and inspect for traces of illness. In the typical French toilet, on the contrary, the hole is at the back, i.e. shit is supposed to disappear as quickly as possible. Finally, the American (Anglo-Saxon) toilet presents a synthesis, a mediation between these opposites: the toilet basin is full of water, so that the shit floats in it, visible, but not to be inspected. [...] It is clear that none of these versions can be accounted for in purely utilitarian terms: each involves a certain ideological perception of how the subject should relate to excrement. Hegel was among the first to see in the geographical triad of Germany, France and England an expression of three different existential attitudes: reflective thoroughness (German), revolutionary hastiness (French), utilitarian pragmatism (English). In political terms, this triad can be read as German conservatism, French revolutionary radicalism and English liberalism. [...] The point about toilets is that they enable us not only to discern this triad in the most intimate domain, but also to identify its underlying mechanism in the three different attitudes towards excremental excess: an ambiguous contemplative fascination; a wish to get rid of it as fast as possible; a pragmatic decision to treat it as ordinary and dispose of it in an appropriate way. It is easy for an academic at a round table to claim that we live in a post-ideological universe, but the moment he visits the lavatory after the heated discussion, he is again knee-deep in ideology.”
― The Plague of Fantasies
― The Plague of Fantasies
Dania’s 2025 Year in Books
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