Today, the self is the body. Subjectivity has been reduced to the body, to its appearance, its image, its performance, its health, its longevity. The predominance of the bodily dimension in the constitution of identity allows for talk of a bio-identity. We no longer face a body made docile by disciplinary institutions, a body striated by the panoptical machine, the body of the factory, the army, the school. Today in gyms or in cosmetic surgery clinics, everyone voluntarily submits him or herself to an ascesis following the scientific and aesthetic precept. This is also what Francisco Ortega, following Foucault, calls bioascesis. On the one hand, we find the adequation of the body to the norms of show business, according to the celebrity-type format. Given the infinite possibilities to transform the body genetically, chemically, and electronically, the obsession for physical perfection, and the compulsion of the self to arouse the other’s desire, even at the cost of one’s own well-being, ultimately substitutes the promised erotic satisfaction with a self-imposed mortification.
Peter Pal Pelbart, Cartography of Exhaustion: Nihilism Inside Out
Peter Pal Pelbart, Cartography of Exhaustion: Nihilism Inside Out
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With the inflation of apocalyptic rhetoric has come the increasing unreality of the apocalypse. A permanent modern scenario: apocalypse looms… and it doesn’t occur. And it still looms… Apocalypse has become an event that is happening and not happening. It may be that some of the most feared events, like those involving the irreparable ruin of the environment, have already happened. But we don’t know it yet, because the standards have changed. Or because we do not have the right indices for measuring the catastrophe. Or simply because this is a catastrophe in slow motion. (Or feels as if it is in slow motion, because we know about it, can anticipate it; and now have to wait for it to happen, to catch up with what we think we know.) Modern life accustoms us to live with the intermittent awareness of monstrous, unthinkable […]
Susan Sontag, AIDS and Its Metaphors
Susan Sontag, AIDS and Its Metaphors
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I hope you live without the need to dominate, and without the need to be dominated. I hope you are never victims, but I hope you have no power over other people. And when you fail, and are defeated, and in pain, and in the dark, then I hope you will remember that darkness is your country, where you live, where no wars are fought and no wars are won, but where the future is. Our roots are in the dark; the earth is our country. Why did we look up for blessing — instead of around, and down? What hope we have lies there. Not in the sky full of orbiting spy-eyes and weaponry, but in the earth we have looked down upon. Not from above, but from below. Not in the light that blinds, but in the dark that nourishes, where human beings grow human souls.
Ursula K. Le Guin, ”A Left-Handed Commencement Address” (Mills College, 1983)
Ursula K. Le Guin, ”A Left-Handed Commencement Address” (Mills College, 1983)
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