Tasos Droulias

“Imagine if you were Jewish and someone tells you that you are not. Imagine if you are lesbian and someone laughs in your face and says you are confused since you are really heterosexual. Imagine if you are Black and someone tells you that you are white, or that you are not racialized in this ostensibly post-racial world. Or imagine you are Palestinian and someone tells you that Palestinians do not exist (which people do). Who are these people who think they have the right to tell you who you are and what you are not, and who dismiss your own definition of who you are, who tell you that self-determination is not a right that you are allowed to exercise, who would subject you to medical and psychiatric review, or mandatory surgical intervention, before they are willing to recognize you in the name and sex you have given yourself, the ones to which you have arrived? Their definition is a form of effacement, and their right to define you is apparently more important than any right you have to determine who you are, how you live, and what language comes closest to representing who you are. Perhaps we should all just retreat from such a person who denies the existence of other people who are struggling to have their existence known, denies the use of the categories that let many of us live, but if such a person has allies, if they have power to orchestrate public discourse and occupy the position of victim exclusively, and if they seek to deny you of basic rights, then probably at some point you will feel and express rage, and you will doubtless be right to do so.”
― Judith Butler, Who’s Afraid of Gender?

“... το να αποδίδεις ισχύ σε αφαιρέσεις μέσα στην πραγματικότητα σημαίνει να καταστρέφεις την πραγματικότητα.”
― Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the philosophy of history, by G. W. F. Hegel. Tr. from the 3d German ed. by J. Sibree. 1884 [Leather Bound]

“If there is a sense of reality...then there must also be something we can call a sense of possibility... the sense of possibility could be defined outright as the ability to conceive of everything there might be just as well, and to attach no more importance to what is than to what is not... It is reality that awakens possibilities, and nothing would be more perverse than to deny it.”
― Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities

“Why is freedom so frightening? Is that even the question? Or is rather: How has freedom been made to seem so frightening that people find themselves longing for authoritarian rule?”
― Judith Butler, Who’s Afraid of Gender?