What I’m Watching:

This is how I spent my day. Epic is really the only word.

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

earlyfrost:

Fast As You Can, Fiona Apple

I don’t know how to live without my hand on his throat
I fight him always and still

(via another-paper-girl)

thecakebar:

Pomegranate Spritzer!

Wow this looks so refreshing. Isn’t this the drink that King Solomon gave his wives in the Bible! Sensual stuff! hahaha :D

Recipe:

  • about 1 – 2 Tablespoons of fresh or concentrate pomegranate juice *for fresh, see note 1 for extracting
  • 2 T Sugar
  • 6 oz sparkling water or club soda

1. Add pomegranate juice, sugar and water. (Add pomegranate seeds if you are so inclined)  Pour into glasses filled with ice.

2. Add additional sugar, or pomegranate juice to personal taste, sweetness and tartness.

Recipe continues here!

(via thecakebar)

“

For decades I have been hearing voices, as they say, in my dreams. They are sometimes friendly voices, sometimes not. They are voices in me. All of them seem to be saying to me: why not recognize, clearly and publicly, once and for all, the affinities between your work and Adorno’s, in truth your debt to Adorno? Aren’t you an heir of the Frankfurt School?

Within me and outside me the response to this will always remain complicated, of course, and partly virtual. But from now on, and for this I say “thank you” once again, I can no longer act as if I weren’t hearing these voices. While the landscape of influences, filiations, or legacies, of resistances too, will always remain craggy, labyrinthine, or abyssal, and in this case perhaps more contradictory and overdetermined than ever, today I am happy that thanks to you I can and must say “yes” to my debt to Adorno, and on more than one count, even if I am not yet capable of responding adequately to it or taking up its responsibilities.

On September 2, 2001, Jacques Derrida was given the Theodor W. Adorno Prize by the city of Frankfurt. This is an excerpt from his address published in Paper Machine. (via movementsandmoments)

OH MAN THIS IS AMAZING

(via hookedonsemiotics)

Page 176

(via hookedonsemiotics)

7knotwind:

DAVID LETELLIER
Caten | 2012
Kinetic sound installation

Designed for the Saint Sauveur chapel in Caen, Caten is a site specific, kinetic sound installation comprised of 300 wires suspended in the chapel. Gravity pulls the wires into a parabolic shape that mimics the arched interior spaces of the church as a rotating arm  attached to the wires causes them to rise and fall. The motor emits a series of notes inspired by hymn to St John the Baptist,  as the new notes play, the lower frequency notes  continue to resonate throughout the space— referencing the incantations and chants that once filled the space.

(via adrowningwoman)

“

People will stare. Make it worth their while.

Harry Winston (via queerfatfemme)

(via mmmajestic)

A List:

I talk a lot on this tumblr about academic education and learning, but I thought it might be interesting to share some music as well. So…

Bands with perfect discographies:

Perfect cds, no need to skip tracks:

Other favorites:
“

Unlike Derrida, what is affirmed is not a form of haunting or afterliving (sur-vie) that interrupts and dislocates the organic form of a living being but the pulsing force of a nonorganic and impersonal life that has infinitely greater vitality than any organism. Indeed, Deleuze suggests that organisms do not genuinely embody life but trap and imprison it within an organized form. Organic life is only a form that actualizes the virtual singularities of the plane of immanence by stratifying the flow of forces and constraining singularities in individuals.

Pheng Cheah, Non-Dialectical Materialism (via rhizombie)

The full essay can be found here and the entire issue of diacritics volume 38, Numbers 1-2, Spring-Summer 2008 “Derrida and Democracy” can be found here.

“

…affirmative difference cannot be reduced to negation because it is prior to consciousness and the objects and things consciousness confronts…This affirmative power of difference is the key principle of Deleuze’s ontology of chance. Being, Deleuze suggests, is a matter of absolute chance because we do not know what it is and why there is being. Being is repeatedly constituted each and every time by events of chance (the fiat of creation) that are projectiles of being, throws of the dice that give rise to different singularities or commencements. These events of chance have the form of questions and imperatives. Ideas or problems arise in response to this clamor of Being. Hence, instead of being an attribute of a thinking substance, ideas are the neuralgic points where the I is fractured…since Being is absolute chance, it cannot be a simple origin or individuality from which the singularities of being issue through repeated throws. Instead, one must think Being itself as a repetition of singularities, the reprise or recommencement of being. The difference that characterizes being qua singularity would then issue from or be emitted by an originary repetition or difference. This movement of originary repetition and difference is not (yet) a being or an existent. But this nonbeing is not negative since this would imply something derived from a prior being. Nonbeing corresponds instead to the continuous field of an idea. When we define this nonbeing as a negative, we reduce it to the propositional language of consciousness and obscure the complexity of the problem as a field formed from an imperative of Being

Pheng Cheah, Non-Dialectical Materialism (via rhizombie)

The full essay can be found here and the entire issue of diacritics volume 38, Numbers 1-2, Spring-Summer 2008 “Derrida and Democracy” can be found here.

“

For Deleuze, materiality is nothing other than the plane of immanence…Unlike dialectical materialism, the dynamism of matter does not derive from the negativity of human creative labor as it shapes and changes the form of (that is, trans-forms) the inert matter of pregiven objects. It is an inhuman dynamism consisting of speeds and intensities that open up the composition of any individual being…The radical nature of Deleuze’s materialism lies in its overturning of the central principle of dialectical materialism: organization…For Deleuze, however, matter as the plan of immanence is a dynamism of the differentiations, speeds, and flows of particles that are prior to any organized form.

Pheng Cheah, Non-Dialectical Materialism (via rhizombie)

The full essay can be found here and the entire issue of diacritics volume 38, Numbers 1-2, Spring-Summer 2008 “Derrida and Democracy” can be found here.

“

In other words, the force of materiality is nothing other than the constitutive exposure of (the subject of) power to the other. For if the freedom of the rational subject comes in or as its response to the other, then decision is prompted by and also comes from the other. It is therefore in the original instance passive and unconscious, not active and conscious, unlike the sovereign decision of exception (Schmitt) and the deliberation of public reason (Habermas). The force in question is not a counterpower that can be deployed against a given state of power. It is not the dispersal of power into a mobile field of relations between micropowers (Foucault). It is instead the constitutive exposure of power as such, which has been conventionally thought in terms of the circular economy of appropriation or the return-to-self of self-mastery, to what makes it vulnerable and defenseless. As the undoing of the power of the subject, the force of materiality cannot lead to a political program. Indeed, it is what resists and confounds any teleology such as that of Marxism and even any purposive or end-oriented action that is based on rational calculations or the projection of an ideal end. But as that which opens power up unconditionally to the other, this force also has a messianic dimension. It aporetically implies an absolute or incalculable hospitality to the other that demands a response in which we calculate with given conditions in order to act in a responsible manner.

Pheng Cheah, Non-Dialectical Materialism

Wherein Pheng shows why Derrida owns Habermas, Butler, and even Foucault.

(via rhizombie)

The full essay can be found here and the entire issue of diacritics volume 38, Numbers 1-2, Spring-Summer 2008 “Derrida and Democracy” can be found here.

genderqueer: These are not indecent.

genderqueer:

These are not indecent.

“

To think of matter outside the oppositions that have imprisoned it therefore requires us to think of matter outside opposition itself, including the oppositions that most patently denote opposition, the inside / outside and subject/ object pairs. In its interdefinability with text, matter exceeds and confounds the oppositions between the positive and the negative, the immediate and the mediated, presence and its representation. We have conventionally mistaken this materialist understanding of text for a form of linguistic constructionism because we have not framed it through the problem of time. For the implied question here is, why is it that matter is text-ile, or woven? Why is it that any present being always overflows itself and intimates an absolute alterity? Derrida’s point is that in order to be present, any being must persist in time. This means that the form of the thing - that which makes it actual- must be identifiable as the same throughout all possible repetitions. But this iterability implies that any presence is in its very constitution always riven by a radical alterity that makes it impossible even as it makes it possible. By definition, this alterity cannot be a form of presence. Because it both gives and destabilizes presence, it subjects presence to a strict law of radical contamination. Strictly speaking, this force or dynamism, if we can use these words, is inhuman. It is prior to any figure of human consciousness such as the subject, reason, or spirit, and even practical action. Nor does it issue from anthropologistic structures that are commonly viewed as constituting reality through negativity or mediation such as society, culture, or language. In Derrida’s view, these are all forms of presence.

Pheng Cheah, Non-Dialectical Materialism

Re: WHY DERRIDA IS NOT A “SOCIAL/LINGUISTIC CONSTRUCTIVIST”

(via rhizombie)

The full essay can be found here and the entire issue of diacritics volume 38, Numbers 1-2, Spring-Summer 2008 “Derrida and Democracy” can be found here.

“

In these tantalizing hints of what a deconstructive materialism might involve, Derrida suggests that we might understand matter through the figure of the text in general. This figure depicts the opening up or overflowing of any form of presence such that it becomes part of a limitless weave of forces or an endless process or movement of referral. In contradistinction, a metaphysical concept of matter regards materiality either as the endpoint of this movement of referral or as an external presence that sets off and secures this movement. Matter as presence is the arrestation of the text in general. It is important to add here that this movement is not the “free play” of textual indeterminacy, the joyful interpretive anarchy celebrated by deconstructive literary criticism. Paul de Man’s definition of the text as an endlessly self-referential object that only offers an allegory of its own reading is well known. Derrida, however, immediately undermines such auto-referentiality by emphasizing the importance of materialism as a philosophy of the outside. It is important to understand the text as matter, he emphasizes, so as to prevent us from lapsing into a new idealism of the text as a self-interiority without an outside. For whether it is denigrated as contingent exteriority (as in Hegelian idealism) or celebrated as the actuality of sensuous corporeal existence (as in Marxist materialism), matter has always been the outside….Yet Derrida also warns us that this exteriority must not be thought in simple opposition to the inside.

Pheng Cheah, Non-Dialectical Materialism (via rhizombie)

The full essay can be found here and the entire issue of diacritics volume 38, Numbers 1-2, Spring-Summer 2008 “Derrida and Democracy” can be found here.