deadken posted:
ugh i brought a copy of the idiot to america fully intending to read it but i never did..... i brought like 100 books though lol and since then i've bought/stole a bunch more, shipping em back is gonna cost a fortune

on the other hand, ereaders

just as the victory of one player in a sporting match is not something like an originary state of the game that must be restored, but only the stake of the game (which does not preexist it, but rather results from it), so pure violence (which is the name Benjamin gives to human action that neither makes nor preserves law) is not an originary figure of human action that at a certain point is captured and inscribed within the juridical order (just as there is not, for speaking man, a prelinguistic reality that at a certain point falls into language). It is, rather, only the stake in the conflict over the state of exception, what results from it and, in this way only, is supposed prior to the law. Read more at location 825 • Delete this highlight
Add a note

What becomes of the law after its messianic fulfillment? (This is the controversy that opposes Paul to the Jews of his time.) And what becomes of the law in a society without classes? (This is precisely the debate between Vyshinsky and Pashukanis.) These are the questions that Benjamin seeks to answer with his reading of the "new attorney." Obviously, it is not a question here of a transitional phase that never achieves its end, nor of a process of infinite deconstruction that, in maintaining the law in a spectral life, can no longer get to the bottom of it. The decisive point here is that the law-no longer practiced, but studied-is not justice, but only the gate that leads to it. What opens a passage toward justice is not the erasure of law, but its deactivation and inactivity -that is, another use of the law.Read more at location 869 • Delete this highlight
Add a note

One day humanity will play with law just as children play with disused objects, not in order to restore them to their canonical use but to free them from it for good. What is found after the law is not a more proper and original use value that precedes the law, but a new use that is born only after it. And use, which has been contaminated by law, must also be freed from its own value. This liberation is the task of study, or of play. And this studious play is the passage that allows us to arrive at that justice that one of Benjamin's posthumous fragments defines as a state of the world in which the world appears as a good that absolutely cannot be appropriated or made juridical (Benjamin 1992, 41). Read more at location 876 • Delete this highlight
Add a note

In 1968, in a study of the idea of authority published in a Festgabe for Schmitt's eightieth year, a Spanish scholar, Jesus Fueyo, noted that the modern confusion of auctoritas and potestas ("two concepts that express the originary sense through which the Roman people conceived their communal life" ) and their convergence in the concept of sovereignty "was the cause of the philosophical inconsistency in the modern theory of the state"; and he immediately added that this confusion "is not only academic, but is closely bound up with the real process that has led to the formation of the political order of modernity" (213).Read more at location 1010 • Delete this highlight
Add a note

Of course, the task at hand is not to bring the state of exception back within its spatially and temporally defined boundaries in order to then reaffirm the primacy of a norm and of rights that are themselves ultimately grounded in it. From the real state of exception in which we live, it is not possible to return to the state of law , for at issue now are the very concepts of "state" and "law." But if it is possible to attempt to halt the machine, to show its central fiction, this is because between violence and law, between life and norm, there is no substantial articulation. Alongside the movement that seeks to keep them in relation at all costs, there is a countermovement that, working in an inverse direction in law and in life, always seeks to loosen what has been artificially and violently linked. That is to say, in the field of tension of our culture, two opposite forces act, one that institutes and makes, and one that deactivates and deposes. The state of exception is both the point of their maximum tension and-as it coincides with the rule-that which threatens today to render them indiscernible. To live in the state of exception means to experience both of these possibilities and yet, by always separating the two forces, ceaselessly to try to interrupt the working of the machine that is leading the West toward global civil war. Read more at location 1171 • Delete this highlight
Add a note

If it is true that the articulation between life and law, between anomie and nomos, that is produced by the state of exception is effective though fictional, one can still not conclude from this that somewhere either beyond or before juridical apparatuses there is an immediate access to something whose fracture and impossible unification are represented by these apparatuses. There are not first life as a natural biological given and anomie as the state of nature, and then their implication in law through the state of exception. On the contrary, the very possibility of distinguishing life and law, anomie and nomos, coincides with their articulation in the biopolitical machine. Bare life is a product of the machine and not something that preexists it, just as law has no court in nature or in the divine mind. Life and law, anomie and nomos, auctoritas and potestas, result from the fracture of something to which we have no other access than through the fiction of their articulation and the patient work that, by unmasking this fiction, separates what it had claimed to unite. But disenchantment does not restore the enchanted thing to its original state: According to the principle that purity never lies at the origin, disenchantment gives it only the possibility of reaching a new condition. Read more at location 1179 • Delete this highlight
Add a note

To show law in its nonrelation to life and life in its nonrelation to law means to open a space between them for human action, which once claimed for itself the name of "politics." Politics has suffered a lasting eclipse because it has been contaminated by law, seeing itself, at best, as constituent power (that is, violence that makes law), when it is not reduced to merely the power to negotiate with the law. The only truly political action, however, is that which severs the nexus between violence and law. And only beginning from the space thus opened will it be possible to pose the question of a possible use of law after the deactivation of the device that, in the state of exception, tied it to life. We will then have before us a "pure" law, in the sense in which Benjamin speaks of a "pure" language and a "pure" violence. To a word that does not bind, that neither commands nor prohibits anything, but says only itself, would correspond an action as pure means, which shows only itself, without any relation to an end. And, between the two, not a lost original state, but only the use and human praxis that the powers of law and myth had sought to capture in the state of exception. Read more at location 1187 • Delete this highlight

discipline posted:
lol sounds like a real hoot man

"spengler" is really ridic

eternal_virtue posted:
It's Not the End of the World, It's Just the End of You: The Great Extinction of the Nations
by David P. Goldman (as "Spengler")

http://www.amazon.com/Its-Not-End-World-Just/dp/1614122024

This book is a collection of essays by a man who writes Asia Times columns under the name "Spengler". An endorsement on the cover by a high-ranking ex-CIA member boasts that it has "More insight than the CIA, MI6, and Mossad combined." He is a secular-turned-religious Jew.

The core theory is that the civilizations of the world are in decline, and that this is a result of them losing their religious cultural foundation and subsequently embracing self-destructive liberalism. This shows itself most clearly in the demographics crises that faces Europe, Iran, or Japan. Birthrates are so low that civilized societies cannot replenish their populations. This, combined with their social programs which benefit the elderly at the expense of the younger, guarantee debt crises which will cause a global economic meltdown. These advanced civilizations also face the ever-encroaching threat of immigrant populations which breed much more than them. He prophecies, for instance, that German will not be spoken a hundred years from now aside for historians.

Also discussed are things such as: A defense of the Spanish Inquisition, and critique of Protestantism; how the popularity of Freud's ideas ruined love and femininity by turning all women into conflicted sex objects; how the Lord of the Rings supplanted Wagner's Ring in the popular consciousness, invalidating its ideals; how Wagner ruined the sacred form of classical music, the greatest creation of the West; why modern art is inherently repulsive, yet people pretend to appreciate it, as evidenced by the public's lack of appreciation for its musical form, "atonal music".

First paragraph sounds interesting but when you quote the examples in the second paragraph it just seems like you kids get off my lawn type stuff.

how the popularity of Freud's ideas ruined love and femininity by turning all women into conflicted sex objects;

lol just lol

dm posted:
gonna finally get around to reading all of the divine comedy

John Ciardi did the best translation of it... get that one... imo

animedad posted:
i was in one of those weirdo bookstores with mostly zines and graphic novels in chicago and found some novel with an eye-catching graffiti cover and tpaine-generated author name, A Mild Form of Madness by Robbie Rimsky. pretty neat so far-- it's a story about a dude that has taken and quit 18 crappy jobs in the past several yeras and lives in a tent in a wicker park garage and wants to tell you how it is. all in all im only about 20 pages in, the general sense i get is that this is not a likely novel to gain much attention-- it isn't begging you to assess its ideas or cleverness. he seems to have the same interest in chicago as noah cicero has in youngstown oh: a grim embrace of home, full of putrid characters that the author (+reader) isn't really better than despite pretensions. call it genre fiction for the disaffected but that's A-Ok by me.

was totally wrong about this ahahahah. it devolves into like the worst kind of beat-imitating self-righteousness. read my dang ol tumblr review http://adad2290.tumblr.com/post/21728253252/a-mild-form-of-madness-review-v2-the-reckoning

Impper posted:
lol i made a fake girl ok cupid account and got seriously 50+ messages already, including a guy that has a slave and asked me whether or not i would like to meet her

Ha, I was thinking about doing this. What sort of stuff did you write in the profile? "I love dick and videogames?"