All language is but a poor translation.
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… we could clasp each other in our arms as with clamps, and I would hide my face in you and you would hide your face in me, and nobody would ever see us any more.
– Franz Kafka (via philosoccult)Source: philosoccult
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People think of education as something they can finish.
– Isaac Asimov (via coooode)(via invisiblelad)
Source: youtu.be
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Like many writers of non-western backgrounds in the west, Rushdie had suffered the ambiguous fate of being hastily appointed as a representative and spokesperson of India, South Asia, the “third world”, multiculturalism, the immigrant condition – whatever seemed alien and incomprehensible to the white majority. In reality, there was little in common between Rushdie, an atheistic, Cambridge-educated upper-class intellectual from Bombay, and the devout guest-worker from Anatolia (representative of the mostly working-class Muslims of rural origins who had been imported to service Europe’s post-war economies), or the Pakistani trade unionist chased out by the torturers of Zia ul-Haq, the CIA-backed radical Islamist who had spent most of the 1980s facilitating an anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan. The Satanic Verses itself is less about the immigrant condition than a helplessly Anglophilic Indian’s profound ambivalence about a British ruling class that regards him as a wog.
–Pankaj Mishra just nails it on Salman Rushdie’s memoir in The Guardian.
This is so beautifully done that it requires a standing ovation, and stamps of Urdu’s equivalent for the word ‘fact’ - that is haqeeqat - all over it. Haqeeqat on haqeeqat on haqeeqat.
(via mehreenkasana)
(via mehreenkasana)
Source:
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The Marxist model privileges the activity of Black intellectuals and promotes their prophetic role. As Harold Cruse has noted, such privileging is highly circumscribed and rarely accents the theoretical dimension of Black intellectual activity. In short, the Marxist privileging of Black intellectuals often reeks of condescension that confines Black prophetic roles to spokespersons and organizers; only rarely are they allowed to function as creative thinkers who warrant serious critical attention. It is no accident that the relatively large numbers of Black intellectuals attracted to Marxism over the past sixty years have yet to produce a major Black Marxist theoretician.
–Cornel West (via planetsconverse)
holy SHIT yes yes yes!
taking a marxism class and noticing that everyone we read is a white man. ok i get that we have to read a lot from a time where basically only white men were in the know about marx the actual person, but its been a while. why arent marxist writers like angela davis, who is a professor with a phd and everything, who studied under MARCUSE, being listed on these syllabuses? why arent people like cornel west there? why are marxism classes, even those of ‘western’ marxism, not including west’s work on racism and marxism, or the works of other people of color/marginalizations? why do you have to take courses in ethnic studies to ever critically examine these texts?
this is that time the BPP got a call to come to some kind of a social justice event and huey realized they only wanted the panthers to be bouncers and shit. he told them to fuck off. huey had accomplished a lot of theoretical shit on his own, he got a goddamn phd too, but only 2 or so books have ever gone into Huey Newton The Intellectual.
i am also reading a piece right now by david graeber about a few autonomist marxists; and he describes this idea of theorists as ‘prophets’, and a tension between prophet-hood and social theory…
This is not only because prophets were invariably concerned with social justice. It is because they created social movements, even, new societies: as Spinoza emphasized, it was the prophets who effectively produced the Hebrew people, by creating a framework for their history.
Negri has always been quite up front about his own desire to play a similar role for what he likes to call “the multitude”. He is less interested in describing realities than in bringing them into being.
[…]
In contrast the main body of social theory as we know it today does not trace back to such performative revolutionary gestures, but precisely, from their failure. Sociology sprang from the ruins of the French revolution; Marx’s Capital was written to try to understand the failure of the revolutions of 1848, just as most contemporary French theory emerged from reflections on what went wrong in May ’68.
Social theory aims to understand social realities; social reality is in turn is first and foremost that which resists attempts to simply call prophet visions into existence, or even (perhaps especially) to impose them through the apparatus of the state. Since all good social theory does also contain an element of prophecy, the result is a constant internal tension…
thoughts are kinda all over the place with this quote but i mean, think about how there is this tension between a ‘prophetic’ intellectual versus a person trying to do work that is grounded in a historically marginalized experience. on some level, what scholars working from a gender/race/sex/sexuality/etc perspective have contributed to theory performs an explicit social work so they can never be considered truly intellectual.(via le-kif-kif)
Ralph Ellison actually really goes into the discussion of this exact thing in Invisible Man with the dynamics between the narrator and Tod Clifton with Brother Jack.
(via aynrandinaminiskirt)
I’m so glad there are other invisible man fans out there
(via dkyubey)
Source: wretchedoftheearth
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We have a volunteer military and they have to advertise for recruits somewhere. …. Do you think they should advertise at the philharmonic? Or maybe you think they should advertise at the ballet. We could surely get some burly, mean paratroopers if we advertised at the ballet.
– Rep. Bill Posey (R-Fla.) defending military sponsorship of sporting events for recruiting purposes. (via officialssay)(via officialssay)
Source:
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You know when you say goodbye to everyone in the room, and then you leave only to realize there’s something you forgot, so you have to go back? That’s how I feel all the time.
– Jonny Greenwood (via thatswhenyouseesparks)(via identikittens)
Source: thatswhenyouseesparks
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how do we hold people accountable for wrongdoing and yet at the same time remain in touch with their humanity enough to believe in their capacity to be transformed?
– bell hooks (via ancestryinprogress)(via secretaryofswagriculture)
Source: ancestryinprogress
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Instead of having a “war on drugs”—because we spend more on the war on drugs than the drug dealers make selling the drugs—at this point where we’re spending so much money on the war on drugs and it’s not really working, can we have a “war on abusive politics through systematic oppression,” or abusive law enforcement—that would be totally awesome if we could do that. Or [we could] get rid of the word “war” period, and stop having abusive and violent rhetoric fueling people’s minds. Let have a “fix it” project, or a project to actually get things done. Don’t hide abusive practices within the legislation.
– Bella Eiko January 17th Oakland City Council Speech (via humanformat)(via invisiblelad)
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(via identikittens)
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There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.
– Ernest Hemingway (via graceinmyheart)(via identikittens)
Source: graceinmyheart
