Status Updates From The Pasteurization of France

Things in themselves lack nothing just as Africa did not lack whites before their arrival. However, it is possible to force those who did perfectly well without you to come to regret that you are not there. Once things are reduced to nothing, they beg you to be conscious of them and ask you to colonize them. Their life hangs by no more than a thread, the thread of your attention.

2.1.11. If magic is the body of practice which gives certain words the power to act over "things", then the world of logic, deduction, and theory must be called "magical": but it is our magic.

. . . A Kantian reduces things to grains of dust and then reassembles them with synthetic a-priori judgements that are as fecund as a mule.

... What is "betrayed" is rather the transcription of practices by the new practices of bacteriology. The new language can be adopted only if it made equivalent to everything that was said in the old one.

[D]istinctions among types of actors [the unconscious, the rabies virus, the print worker] matter less than the fact they are all renegotiating what the world is made up of, who is acting in it, who matters, and who wants what. They area all creating [...] new sources of power and new sources of legitimacy, which are irreducible to those that hitherto coded the so-called political space.

My roommate and I are hosting a book club for this at our place in Hayes Valley! We’ll start Feb 17 and meet every Sunday for four weeks, starting at 4pm. Message me if of interest!