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Quotes

“[...] the false can have an affirmative power and [...] the deep opponent of both the true and the false (and life) is stupidity - defined as the desire for simple oppositions, for common sense and for transcendent life-denying values.”

Williams feat. Deleuze

"Sve što ima status, ima i neki oblik moći, a moć uvek korumpira i zato mora biti moguće da se ona ismeva. Ako to više nije moguće, dešavaju se gadne stvari - diktatura i tako to."

Hans Teeuwen

The superiority of Western culture is sustained only by the desire of the rest of the world to join it. When there is the least sign of refusal, the slightest ebbing of that desire, the West loses its seductive appeal in its own eyes.

Baudrillard, Jean. "The Pyres of Autumn." in: New Left Review. Vol. 37, January-February 2006.

Long after, Oedipus, old and blinded, walked the roads. He smelled a familiar smell. It was the Sphinx.
Oedipus said, “I want to ask one question. Why didn't I recognise my mother?”
“You gave the wrong answer”, said the Sphinx.
“But that was what made everything possible”, said Oedipus.
“No”, she said. “When I asked, What walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon, and three in the evening, you answered, Man. You didn't say anything about woman”.
“When you say Man”, said Oedipus, “you include women too. Everyone knows that”.
She said, “That's what you think”.

Muriel Rukeyser, Myth (1935)

Only the yearning for sustainable futures can construct a liveable present. The anticipation of endurance, of making it to a possible “tomorrow”; transposes energies form the future back into the present.

Rosi Braidotti

“The other is a threshold of transformative encounters. The 'difference' expressed by subjects who are especially positioned as 'other-than', that is to say always already different from - has a potential for transformative or creative becoming. This 'difference' is not an essential given, but a project and a process that is ethically coded. “

Rosi Braidotti

Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.

Hannah Arendt

Prior to being a generous life-style in the service of others, altruism is indeed the foundational principle of a self that knows itself to be constituted by another: the necessary other.

Adriana Cavarero

This ethic finds therefore a fundamental principle in the recognition that every human being, whatever her qualities, has her unjudgable splendor in a personal identity that is irrefutably her story.

Adriana Cavarero

Consider the situation in which one is named without knowing that one is named, which is, after all, the condition of all of us at the beginning and even, sometimes, prior to the beginning. The name constitutes one socially, but one may well imagine oneself in ways that are quite to the contrary of how one is socially constituted; one may, as it were, meet the socially constituted self by surprise, with alarm or pleasure, even with shock. And such an encounter underscores the way in which the name wields a linguistic power of constitution in ways that are indifferent to the one who bears the name. One need not know about or register a way of being constituted for that constitution to work in an efficacious way. For the measure of that constitution is not to be found in a reflexive appropriation of that constitution, but, rather, in a chain of signification that exceeds the circuit of self-knowledge.

Judith Butler

Stumm ist nur die Gewalt, und schon aus diesem Grunde kann die schiere Gewalt niemals Anspruch auf Größe machen.

Hannah Arendt

The new always happens against the overwhelming odds of statistical laws and their probability, which for all practical, everyday purposes amounts to certainty; the new therefore always appears in the guise of a miracle.

Hannah Arendt

Where all are guilty, no one is; confessions of collective guilt are the best possible safeguard against the discovery of culprits, and the very magnitude of the crime the best excuse for doing nothing.

Hannah Arendt

Perhaps most importantly, we must recognize that ethics requires us to risk ourselves precisely at moments of unknowingness, when what forms us diverges from what lies before us, when our willingness to become undone in relation to others constitutes our chance of becoming human. To be undone by another is a primary necessity, an anguish, to be sure, but also a chance - to be addressed, claimed, bound to what is not me, but also moved, to be prompted to act, to address myself elsewhere, and so to vacate the self-sufficient; as a kind of possession. If we speak and try to give an account from this place, we will not be irresponsible, or, if we are, we will surely be forgiven.

Judith Butler

Wir fangen etwas an; wir schlagen unseren Faden in ein Netz der Beziehungen. Was daraus wird, wissen wir nie. Wir sind alle darauf angewiesen zu sagen: Herr vergib ihnen, was sie tun, denn sie wissen nicht, was sie tun. Das gilt für alles Handeln. Einfach ganz konkret, weil man es nicht wissen kann. Das ist ein Wagnis. Und nun würde ich sagen, daß dieses Wagnis nur möglich ist im Vertrauen auf die Menschen. Das heißt, in einem - schwer genau zu fassenden, aber grundsätzlichen - Vertrauen auf das Menschliche aller Menschen. Anders könnte man das nicht.

Hannah Arendt 

"To appropriation without consciousness and to consciousness without enjoyment criticism opposes the enjoyment of what cannot be possessed and the possession of what cannot be enjoyed."

Giorgio Agamben