i. > Recent Status Updates

"...the foundations for loneliness begin in the dreamscapes you create. Their resemblance to reality reflects disappointment first."

"Life is a form of hope? / If you are hopeful. / Maybe hope is the same as breath--part of what it means to be human and alive. / Or maybe hoping is the same as waiting. It can be futile. / Waiting for what? / For a life to begin. / I am here. / And I am still lonely."

"It strikes me that what the attack on the World Trade Center stole from us is our willingness to be complex."

"The weight on his heart was his heart."

"Define loneliness? / Yes. / It's what we can't do for each other. / What do we mean to each other? / What does a life mean? / Why are we here if not for each other?"

"Maybe, or death is second. / Second to what? / To loneliness. / Define loneliness."

"...the settler colonial foundation of biopolitical sovereignty transforms itself into an expansionist, imperial security state that finds new enemies abroad, new obstacles to its endless expansion..."

"The state of nature is...[a] highly abstract geographical imagining and...Hobbes displaces it from a time to a condition to a place to a metaphor, eventually determining that it never existed at all, even as a hermeneutic."

"Lorenzo Veracini has argued that settler colonialism is distinct from other types of colonialism insofar as it seeks consistently to erase itself as settler colonial..."

"A significant consequence of this reading is that the sovereign effectively constitutes the very meaning and content of life itself. For, considered temporally...there is no distinction between life and death in the state of nature...as there is no way to tell present from future."

"Futurism is less an ahistorical or universalized psychoanalytic theory of the subject and its (de)formation than it is a fundamental baseline of modern culture and the workings of modern, necessarily European and Eurocentric politics."

"...necropolitics is the very operation of biopolitics that establishes life, the value of life, and those whose lives are valuable."

"...at the heart of European sovereign biopolitics is an oppressive, heteronormative ordering of time that queers all of those beyond, before, or or outside its civilized progress narrative as specters of death, 'savage' and immoral others who become valid targets of necropolitical elimination...in the sanctimonious name of preserving 'life itself' and upholding its value."

"...sovereignty is what constitutes life aslife to begin with....life is not a 'bare' biological phenomenon that is only subsequently and inappropriately politicized....it is political through and through."

"However, [Agamben] relying on an Arendtian biopolitical analysis of the human condition will not allow for [the rejection of a biopolitical regime] since her analysis weds us to an apolitical understanding of life that requires the repudiation and denigration of its very existence and strands us in the mire of perpetual, 'natural' enslavement....the logic of bare life vs. proper life must be abandoned entirely."

"[According to Arendt] Unlike 'Oriental' despots, the Greeks understood the distinction between polis and oikos and conducted themselves accordingly. What makes Orientals oriental is the same as what makes them despotic...their failure to distinguish public and private, superior and inferior....In failing to realize the proper sphere of despotism, Asian civilizations were themselves despotic."

"For Arendt...slavery is necessary for freedom. Put more precisely, the enslavement of some is necessary for the freedom of others....a foundational principle of Arendt's political theory is the 'terrible truth' that the subordination of some is necessary so that others can be free." Schotten's critique of Arendt has resonances with Robinson's critique.