Kathleen

“[W]e must recognize that ethics requires us to risk ourselves precisely at moments of unknowingness, when what forms us diverges from what lies before us, when our willingness to become undone in relation to others constitutes our chance of becoming human. To be undone by another is a primary necessity, an anguish, to be sure, but also a chance--to be addressed, claimed, bound to what is not me, but also to be moved, to be prompted to act, to address myself elsewhere, and so to vacate the self-sufficient "I" as a kind of possession. If we speak and try to give an account from this place, we will not be irresponsible, or, if we are, we will surely be forgiven.”
― Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself

“When I was twelve, I was interviewed by a doctoral candidate in education and asked what I wanted to be when I grew up. I said that I either wanted to be a philosopher or a clown, and I understood then, I think, that much depended on whether or not I found the world worth philosophizing about, and what the price of seriousness might be.”
― Judith Butler

“Ecologically considered, it is not primarily our verbal statements that are "true" or "false," but rather the kind of relations that we sustain with the rest of nature. A human community that lives in a mutually beneficial relation with the surrounding earth is a community, we might say, that lives in truth. The ways of speaking common to that community—the claims and beliefs that enable such reciprocity to perpetuate itself—are, in this important sense, true. They are in accord with a right relation between these people and their world. Statements and beliefs, meanwhile, that foster violence toward the land, ways of speaking that enable the impairment or ruination of the surrounding field of beings, can be described as false ways of speaking—ways that encourage an unsustainable relation with the encompassing earth. A civilization that relentlessly destroys the living land it inhabits is not well acquainted with truth, regardless of how many supported facts it has amassed regarding the calculable properties of its world.”
― David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World

“What would white people become if they (we) actually confronted the fact that being white was not inherent in a person, in ourselves and others, but actually a demand that others make on us, a role we must play to fulfill a certain responsibility? Part of what is demanded is that we see others as different, yet attribute that difference to those others and not to ourselves, who are told to see it. Who would white people become if they saw their own eye as an active agent in the production of race though that eye's attribution to others? The so-called colorblindness that has become a prevalent notion these days would be impossible. Is the essence of race, for which color is a symbol (of the imposed categorization), exists in the eye itself and not in the object seen by the eye, which has its own qualities, to what could the eye be blinding itself? Who would we become if we saw those others not as different but as living under an imposition of difference? Who would we become if we saw that imposition as something in which we were not only implicated but active agents in producing? Who would we become if we sought to interpose ourselves in that process of imposition, to obstruct it in its primordial moment? Who would white people become if they saw themselves through the eyes of those on whom they impose themselves?”
― Steve Martinot, The Machinery of Whiteness: Studies in the Structure of Racialization