Emily

“In capitalism, sex can exist but only as a productive force at the service of procreation and the regeneration of the waged/male working and as a mean of social appeasement and compensation for the misery of everyday existence.”
― Silvia Federici, Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women

“If the state is just the accumulated results of past conflicts, and if preservation of the state becomes the end that grounds necessity, then the fact of violence becomes a kind of law, and the law, grounded in the need to preserve what fate has established, blurs into the fact of organized violence”
― Ted Smith, Weird John Brown: Divine Violence and the Limits of Ethics

“In the wake of divine violence...the commandment [to not kill] 'exists not as a criterion of judgement, but as a guideline for the actions of the persons or communities who have to wrestle it in solitude and, in monstrous cases, to take on themselves the responsibility to abstain from it'. Divine violence offers not legitimation but renewed occasions for responsibility. It breaks the binding obligations of an order that lets a person evade responsibility by saying, 'I am just following the law'- whether that law is rooted in the legal means of positive law or the just ends of natural law. Divine violence forces free action. It demands responsibility.”
― Ted Smith, Weird John Brown: Divine Violence and the Limits of Ethics

“Divine violence expiates; it releases from guilt. It operates not by the destruction of bodies but by the destruction of the systems of laws or ethics that declare an action to be right or wrong.”
― Ted Smith, Weird John Brown: Divine Violence and the Limits of Ethics