Tag: Philosophy

transpartisan

Erica AveyLeave a comment

“

The truth is that you don’t have the truth; and you never will. And even if you turn out to be right about something, there will always be a time when your opinion is outdated or at least incomplete. Whatever direction you move in, it will lead to a contradiction, self-destruction and decay, sooner or later. Your perspective or opinion always has a systemic limit, a breaking point; it always breaks down under its own weight, just like any engine, organism or economic system.”

-Hanzi Freinacht (Emil Ejner Friis and Daniel Görtz)
The Listening Society: A Metamodern Guide to Politics

Question

Erica AveyLeave a comment

What do environmental experts intuit/feel in this moment? What do they think we can learn from global quarantine?

(My friend Chelsea had an idea I find brilliant: After COVID, we could hold an annual twoish-week global quarantine as a reminder that we’re all on this planet together, we can help/impact each other from close/far, and we can minimize our destruction of the Earth. A reminder to slow consumption, input/output, and focus locally to prioritize health and slowing down.)

Question

Erica AveyLeave a comment

If psychedelics can help terminally ill people accept/face death, rather than deny/resist against it, then can’t they also help humanity accept extinction, rather than deny/persist against it—without it being seen as pessimistic? Could psychedelic states show people that there is something bigger than them, and that fighting solely for the continuation of the human race——rather than giving in to the planet’s needs and other species’ best interests——is anthropocentric/misguided? Could they inform us of the best way to preserve what’s left of our planet rather than altering it continuously for our own preservation?

in/to

Erica AveyLeave a comment

Mental diagnosis felt like an act. A script I shouldn’t have played into. Some do. Some need to. Those whose function cannot find place. Like mine at the time. But I was passing through—turbulent heartbreaks, growing pains, clashes with Hims—and mistook role for reality. I overthought my relation to it, that joy and suffering, and tied it to a being beyond. I regret that now. Or at least can see it as it was: seeking, clenching, grasping. Am I nothing more than a need to reach? Maybe. I’m human. Some childlike essence that shows in contours when ignoring and blurring details of pores. Take off my glasses and focus on the obscure. The fuzz. That uncertainty between me and it. Subject in/to object. Still disoriented in space, lost along the way, I may trip a few times too many, but that’s okay. Because it’s only and not me at all. 

Question

Erica AveyLeave a comment

Is speaking/(writing) subjectively an inherently selfish act? Is it possible to speak for others in speaking for self? Or speak for those who came before (especially those silenced) by speaking now? Do women get challenged more for speaking subjectively than men?

luce

Erica AveyLeave a comment

“

She is or ceaselessly becomes the place of the other who cannot separate himself from it. Without her knowing or willing it, she is then threatened because of what she lacks: a ‘proper’ place. She would have to re-envelop herself with herself, and do so at least twice: as a woman and as a mother. Which would presuppose a change in the world economy of space-time…

Who or what the other is, I never know. But the other who is forever unknowable is the one who differs from me sexually. This feeling of surprise, astonishment, and wonder in the face of the unknowable ought to be return to its locus: that of sexual difference… Sometimes a space for wonder is left to works of art. But it is never found to reside in this locus: between man and woman. Into this place came attraction, greed, possession, consummation, disgust, and so on. But not that wonder which beholds what it sees always as if for the first time, never taking hold of the other as its object. It does not try to seize, possess, or reduce this object, but leaves it subjective, still free…

A sexual or carnal ethics would require that both angel and body be found together. This is a world that must be constructed or reconstructed. A genesis of love between the sexes has yet to come about in all dimensions, from the smallest to the greatest, from the most intimate to the most political. A world that must be created or re-created so that man and woman may once again or at last live together, meet, and sometimes inhabit the same place…

How can we mark this limit of a place, of place in general, if not through sexual difference? But, in order for an ethics of sexual difference to come into being we must constitute a possible place for each sex, body, and flesh to inhabit.”

-Luce Irigaray
An Ethics of Sexual Difference