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7227e0f I am Damisa-sakri. And there is no escape. Not for my enemies. Not for my people. Not for my mother. Not for me. So much rage. So much hate. I must master all of it. I must not let it master me. Ta-Nehisi Coates
cfa0424 These men are Wakandan, even in rebellion. Pride in their nation was everything to them. And when the Golden City fell, they fell with it. Now they fashion their very bodies into living bombs, for they measure their lives in the blood of others. I know what haunts them-- shame, hate, rage. I know what shall save them. The Golden City fell. But Wakanda has not yet died. Ta-Nehisi Coates
07f0fb5 Poetry aims for an economy of truth--loose and useless words must be discarded, Ta-Nehisi Coates
27a39e0 I come back to the motherland and this is the thanks I get?" "Still better than the knife-wielding thugs I found in Harlem, Misty. You do remember, don't you?" "I resent the term "thug"." "That's 'cause you a thug." "For life." Ta-Nehisi Coates
9b6df17 You... kill... what you cannot control. Break... what you cannot bend. Is this what all my teachings have brought you to? Victory by any means? Conquest? Terror? You say you oppose kings, and yet your methods do not differ from theirs. You say you war against tyranny, but you too war against your own people. You say you bring the power of life. Then how did it happen that your very name became death? Ta-Nehisi Coates
aca8533 The question with no answer. This is what you wished us to consider. But there was an answer. And you knew it. "What is our remedy against the robber, who so broke into our house?" We burn down the house-- with the robber inside." Ta-Nehisi Coates
9b3fe72 Enslaved" is what the plunderer does to a righteous woman but "a slave" is a righteous woman who has accepted the plunderer's law." Ta-Nehisi Coates
e1041e9 The last slaveholder has been dead for a very long time. The last soldier to endure Valley Forge has been dead much longer. To proudly claim the veteran and disown the slaveholder is patriotism a la carte. A nation outlives it generations. We were not there when Washington crossed the Delawre, but Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze's rendering has meaning to us. We were not there when Woodrow Wilson took us into World War I, but we are still paying ou.. Ta-Nehisi Coates
336cd71 Black is beautiful Ta-Nehisi Coates
86d7fef You exist. You matter. You have value. You have every right to wear your hoodie, to play your music as loud as you want. You have every right to be you. Ta-Nehisi Coates
862540c When Abraham Lincoln declared, in 1863, that the battle of Gettysburg must ensure 'that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth,' he was not merely being aspirational; at the onset of the Civil War, the United States of America had one of the highest rates of suffrage in the world. The question is not whether Lincoln truly meant 'government of the people' but what our country has, throughout .. Ta-Nehisi Coates
4322fc6 All of these heroes had failed to cajole and coerce the masters of America. Their ambition of a better world had been frustrated. This was the story of my ancestors, the story I expected for myself. These were not stories of hope, but were they without import? If Celia, Margaret, and Ida had failed to help the country at large locate its morality, they had succeeded in living by their own. And that was all they could control. Within the sma.. Ta-Nehisi Coates
c0c6582 Here is what I would like for you to know: In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body - it is heritage. Enslavement was not merely the antiseptic borrowing of labor - it is not so easy to get a human being to commit their body against its own elemental interest. And so enslavement must be casual wrath and random manglings, the gashing of heads and brains blown out over the river as the body seeks to escape. It must be rape so r.. Ta-Nehisi Coates
3129067 I am speaking to you as I always have - as the sober and serious man I have always wanted you to be, who does not apologize for his human feelings, who does not make excuses for his height, his long arms, his beautiful smile. You are growing into consciousness, and my wish for you is that you feel no need to constrict yourself to make other people comfortable. None of that can change the math anyway. I never wanted you to be twice as good a.. Ta-Nehisi Coates
f44a11b I did not want to raise you in fear or false memory. I did not want you forced to mask your joys and bind your eyes. What I wanted for you was to grow into consciousness. I resolved to hide nothing from you. Ta-Nehisi Coates
3e535c9 I sought a world where peasants and kings were as brothers. But what new world was ever made without the sword? Now I am old, and I fear that some young dreamer shall resolve my contradiction, and commit to that which is both terrible and plain. On that day the era of theory will have passed. All the dreamers will be dead. Ta-Nehisi Coates
b114c51 I will be king. Your country needs me. I'm gonna bring out the best in Wakanda. And what is best in Wakanda is that fantastic pile of vibranium. I'm gonna make 'em love me, baby. Ta-Nehisi Coates
171065b Racism--the need to ascribe bone-deep features to people and then humiliate, reduce, and destroy them--inevitably follows from this inalterable condition. In Ta-Nehisi Coates
5a8846d Before the president spoke, George Zimmerman was arguably the most reviled man in America. After the president spoke, Zimmerman became the patron saint of those who believe that an apt history of racism begins with Tawana Brawley and ends with the Duke lacrosse team. Ta-Nehisi Coates
963aa36 The irony of Barack Obama is this: He has become the most successful black politician in American history by avoiding the radioactive racial issues of yesteryear, by being "clean" (as Joe Biden once labeled him)--and yet his indelible blackness irradiates everything he touches. This irony is rooted in the greater ironies of the country he leads. For most of American history, our political system was premised on two conflicting facts--one, a.. Ta-Nehisi Coates
620c94d suspicion, experience, perception, common sense--for Maston these were not the organs of fact. Paper was fact, Ministers were fact, John le Carré
97344a0 Man is the nobler growth our realms supply,And souls are ripened in our northern sky. Anna Letitia Barbauld
9a90164 there is nothing arrogant about mentioning ordinary people's material concerns: the poor have the right to do it, and to talk about a readiness for great sacrifices, or suffering 'whatever the price', is as a rule the ideology of the privileged, who are quite content to let the people suffer for them. Slavoj Žižek
f197e3c Critics such as Slavoj Zizek accuse him of being a poster child for the cultural excesses of postmodern capitalism ("Ongoing 'Soft Revolution'"). A recent round of denunciations underwritten by a mix of wonderment and red-baiting exclaim, "The founder of BuzzFeed wrote his senior thesis on the Marxism of Deleuze and Guattari!," adding to a long list of guilty associations--"the Israeli Defense Force reads A Thousand Plateaus!," "Deleuze spo.. Andrew Culp
bd2e2bc What if, however, humans exceed animals in their capacity for violence precisely because they speak? As Hegel was already well aware, there is something violent in the very symbolisation of a thing, which equals its mortification. This violence operates at multiple levels. Language simplifies the designated thing, reducing it to a single feature. It dismembers the thing, destroying its organic unity, treating its parts and properties as aut.. Slavoj Žižek
28a9015 Se no passado fingimos publicamente acreditar enquanto permaneciamos ceticos na vida privada, ou ainda envolvidos na troca obscena de nossas crencas publicas, hoje tendemos publicamente a professar nossa atitude cetica, hedonista e relaxada, enquanto na vida privada continuamos acossados pelas crencas e proibicoes severas. Nisso consiste, para Jacques Lacan, a consequencia paradoxal da experiencia de que "Deus esta morto". (...) O ateu mode.. Slavoj Žižek
76d5386 There is an irreducible scandal, something traumatic and unexpected, in the encounter with another subject, in the fact that the subject (a self-consciousness) encounters outside itself, in front of it, another living being there in the world, among things, which also claims to be a subject (a self-consciousness). As a subject, I am by definition alone, a singularity opposed to the entire world of things, a punctuality to which all the worl.. Slavoj Žižek
9a53ff9 First --we should restrain our anti-colonialist joy here-- the question to be raised is: if Europe is in gradual decay, what is replacing its hegemony? The answer is: 'capitalism with Asian values' (which, of course, has nothing to do with Asian people and everything to do with the clear and present tendency of contemporary capitalism as such to suspend democracy). From Marx on, the truly radical Left was never simply 'progressist'. It was .. Slavoj Žižek
d75ae15 When Zeno the Cynic was confronted with Eleatic proofs of the non-existence of movement, he simply raised and moved his middle finger, or so the story goes ... Slavoj Žižek
f215e6c the only choice is that between direct or indirect relations of domination and exploitation, with any alternative dismissed as utopian. Slavoj Žižek
ed96b7e By what right can we call this a system of "corrections"? Is it not, rather, the rubric for a slavishly obedient, oppressed, and humiliated existence?" Slavoj Žižek
cbd8ebf Every civilisation that disavows its barbarian potential has already capitulated to barbarism. Slavoj Žižek
8842fa4 Someone asked Herr Keuner if there is a God. Herr Keuner said: I advise you to think about how your behaviour would change with regard to the answer to this question. If it would not change, then we can drop the question. If it would change, then I can help you at least insofar as I can tell you: You already decided: You need a God." (Brecht) Brecht is right here: we are never in a position directly to choose between theism and atheism, sin.. Slavoj Žižek
c34d9a8 Postmodern politics definitely has the great merit that it 'repoliticizes' a series of domains previously considered 'apolitical' or 'private'; the fact remains, however, that it does not in fact repoliticize capitalism, because the very notion and form of the 'political' within which it operates is grounded in the 'depoliticization' of the economy. Slavoj Žižek
18ba3be So when the ruling ideology enjoins us to enjoy sex, not to feel guilty about it, since we are not bound by any prohibitions whose violations should make us feel guilty, the price we pay for this absence of guilt is anxiety. nonfiction philosophy philosophy-of-life psychology theology Slavoj Žižek
c866cb0 What this means is that we should reject not only all manifestations of 'alternative modernity' (which amount to a 'capitalism without capitalism', without its destructive aspect), but also all attempts to rely on particular traditional life-worlds (local cultures) as potential 'sites of resistance' against global capitalism. The only path to freedom leads through the zero-point of the brutal loss of roots, i.e., the bringing to an end the .. Slavoj Žižek
0607bb1 capitalism is for Karatani not a 'pure' reign of B, but a triad (or, rather, a Borromean knot) of nation-state-capital: nation as the form of communal solidarity, state as the form of direct domination, and capital as the form of economic exchange; all three of them are necessary for the reproduction of the capitalist society. Slavoj Žižek
8ce868a Two mutually exclusive readings of IoT impose themselves: IoT as the domain of radical emancipation, a unique chance to combine freedom and collaboration in which, to paraphrase Juliet's definition of love from Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, 'The more I give to thee, the more I have, for both are infinite,' versus IoT as a complete submersion into the divine digital Other, where I am deprived of my freedom of agency. Slavoj Žižek
7119669 When the world shook and the sun was wiped out of heaven, it was not at the crucifixion, but at the cry from the cross: the cry which confessed that God was forsaken of God. And now let the revolutionists choose a creed from all the creeds and a god from all the gods of the world, carefully weighing all the gods of inevitable recurrence and of unalterable power. They will not find another god who has himself been in revolt. Nay (the matter .. Slavoj Žižek
c635a55 La carta llega a su destino cuando ya no somos los 'ocupantes' de los lugares vacios de la estructura fantasmatica de otro, esto es, cuando el otro finalmente 'abre sus ojos' y compren- de que la carta real no es el mensaje que supuestamente traemos sino nuestro ser en si mismo, el objeto que en nosotros se resiste a la simbolizacion. Slavoj Žižek
652a4f4 The space of difference became now something exclusively cultural. In order for us to perceive political differences and divisions and to recognize them as such, they should first be translated into the language of culture and declare themselves as cultural identities [...] Culture thus became the ultimate horizon of historical experience. Slavoj Žižek
3f089fc It would be interesting to compare Tarkovsky's work with the Hollywood commercial rewritings of novels which have served as bases for movies: Tarkovsky does exactly the same as the lowest Hollywood producer, re-inscribing the enigmatic encounter with Otherness, the Thing, into the framework of the production of the couple. Slavoj Žižek
5e05d7c the immigrants who secure rights thanks to the anti-racist anti-colonial struggle might be securing the right to free capitalist enterprise, refusing to see, refusing to 'open your eyes', as the angry black yelled at the post-colonial immigrant. This right to free enterprise is another way to capital accumulation powered by the post-colonial entrepreneur: it produces 'unfree labour' and racialized class relations in the name of challenging .. Slavoj Žižek
09681b8 dangerous situation and we don't have any clear ethical guidance here. And did you notice, when you talk about the possible and the impossible, how strangely this is distributed? On the one hand, in the Slavoj Žižek