benghini

[benghini]

"This art of dissimulation reaches its peak in man. Deception, flattering, lying, deluding, talking behind the back, putting up a false front, living in borrowed splendor, wearing a mask, hiding behind convention, playing a role for others and for oneself – in short, a continuous fluttering around the solitary flame of vanity – is so much the rule and the law among men that there is almost nothing which is less comprehensible than how an honest and pure drive for truth could have arisen among them."

—Friedrich Nietzsche, On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense

[benghini]

"Just as every porter wants to have an admirer, so even the proudest of men, the philosopher, supposes that he sees on all sides the eyes of the universe telescopically focused upon his action and thought."

—Friedrich Nietzsche, On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense

[benghini]

"Because he was lonely he became a theologian," wrote Dietrich Bonhoeffer's closest friend Eberhard Bethge, "and because he became a theologian he was lonely." . . . What Bethge is trying to express is that Bonhoeffer became a theologian because he sensed that his primal loneliness had its origin and end in God, and because he gave his life over to this pursuit, he became in some way unfit for ordinary happiness . . . [H]e was lonely in a way that only God eases, and he was Christian in a way that knows that God, insofar as he is fully Christ and thus fully human, never quite does (never quite can?). To put it differently, loneliness is a condition that God both eases and is.

Christian Wiman, Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair

[benghini]

Saturn and It's Moons Shot by Cassini

[benghini]

“The only cure will be a transformation of the whole society, and an entirely new knowledge order altogether—otherwise we will remain trapped in this. It is through language that you and I are able to now sit and talk with each other, develop a mechanism to understand one another, do you see the immense potential there?! Language is entirely the point!”

– Interview with Sylvia Wynter about the pandemic, Black studies, and contemporary radicalism

[benghini]

"And in that swaying blue sky that, like a fierce bird of prey with wings outstretched, alternatively swept down and soared upwards to infinity, I perceived that the true nature of what I had long referred to as 'tragic.' It was only when I, in my turn, saw the strange, divine blue sky perceived only by that type of person, that I at last trusted the universality of my own sensibility, that my thirst was slaked, and that my morbidly blind faith in words was dispelled. At that moment, I participated in the tragedy of all being."

—Yukio Mishima, Sun and Steel

[benghini]

"Words are a medium that reduces reality to abstraction for transmission to our reason, and in their power to corrode reality inevitably lurks the danger that the words themselves will be corroded too."

—Yukio Mishima, Sun and Steel

[benghini]

Denis Sarazhin | Pantomime No. 16 | 2017

[benghini]

"Many things to absorb I teach to help you become eleve of mine; Yet if blood like mine circle not in your veins, If you be not silently selected by lovers and do not silently select lovers, Of what use is it that you seek to become eleve of mine?"

—Walt Whitman, To a Western Boy

[benghini]

"Our consideration proceeds from the insight that the politicians’ stubborn faith in progress, their confidence in their “mass basis,” and, finally, their servile integration in an uncontrollable apparatus have been three aspects of the same thing."

—Walter Benjamin, Theses on The Philosophy of History

[benghini]

"The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the “state of emergency” in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight."

—Walter Benjamin, Theses on The Philosophy of History

[benghini]

Yves Klein | Peinture de feu sans titre (F27I) | 1961

[benghini]

"For the poetics of identification, the process of constructing a collectivity, or a solidarity, of political causes-gender, class, race-requires that each sign of identity be made to confront the contingent and multicausal identifications that constitute agency in complex, democratic societies."

—Home Bhabha, On Cultural Choice

[benghini]

"The poetics of identification strives to represent the process through which intercultural relations in-between class, gender, generation, race, religion, or region are articulated as hybrid identifications."

—Home Bhabha, On Cultural Choice

[benghini]

"But maybe the self has to be considered not as a reality which has to be liberated or excavated; but the self has to be considered as the correlate of technologies built and developed throughout our history. Then the problem is not to liberate the self, but those technologies, that means, the self."

—Michel Foucault, The Technology of the Self

[benghini]

Warpaint | Melting | From the Basement

[benghini]

"Our experience of ourselves seems to us, no doubt, to be that which is most original and immediate; but we have to remember that it has been constituted through historically formed practices."

—Michel Foucault, The Technology of the Self