the tombs of forgotten kings

    Privacy and affection, separately or together, never come cheap in the crowded city. Public displays of affection are not necessarily encouraged in Delhi, and only the well-to-do can afford the luxury of seclusion in love. Rooftop apartments with independent entrances in family-owned town houses, love nests in hotels, the back seats of capacious SUVs, weekend getaways in hill stations and guest-houses, or keys to the flats of pliant friends are conveniences that few can access. And those who can also go to clubs, bars, and parties where public displays of affection do not lead to instant assault. The public that displays its affections to its own charmed circle finds ways to do so behind high walls, high cover charges and high gates with vigilant watchmen in attendance.
   This public does not carve love letters on the tombs of forgotten kings. They do not tarry at the milk booth to catch someone's eye, or make small talk across rooftops in a squatter settlement while hanging out clothes to dry. They do not take long rides on the afternoon bus that takes them nowhere close to where they live, work, or study, where the space of the bus ride is also the only time in which to have a conversation, uninterrupted, veiled by an invisible film of brace indifference that guards against the mocking stares of co-passengers.
   The abandoned cenotaph, the river-front walkway, the downtown underpass, the ruined urban fortress, the crowded or empty bus, the broken-down playground, the shade of a generous tree, the derelict back street of a commercial complex, the corner seat in the cinema that only shows B movies, the street corner snack stall, the park bench, the dank corridors of public toilets, and the steps of a public library. These spaces, rife with presence, riddles with curious gazes, and awash with the traffic of millions of human beings, become theatres of urban intimacy for millions of people in cities like Delhi. Here, public and private life become contagious, contiguous, continuous facets of the same messy reality. Public architecture and the accidents of urban planning yield themselves to the steadfast pressure of private life.

   People fall in love, have sex, are born, defecate, cook, eat, sleep, work, play, read, sing, dance, pray, curse, quarrel, fight, riot, go mad, get possessed, enter trance states, cry, laugh, fall sick, get drunk, get arrested, get shot, get run over, and die on the street. The street is heaven and hell, factory and prison, morgue and nursery, market and office, boutique and salon, club and bar, library and university, high court and parliament, shrine and brothel, school and playground. The street is the city, the world, the bed you take your lover to. The street is the epic that people narrate their life into. The street is cruel and generous and indifferent and curious and concerned and hostile. The street is the hyphen that conjoins every public stance to every private longing. The street redeems every privation, hears every prayer, and kicks every dream into the gutter. It should come as no surprise then that often the most intensely emotional, even melodramatic moments in Hindi cinema are precisely those that get to be staged on the street. Here, in full public view, the most intense desires, the most painful humiliations, the darkest anger, the greatest joy, the strongest love, and the most profound loneliness find their fullest expression. The street is where the public act and the private motive get to know each other.
   A phone tap of a conversation on a crowded Delhi street between a Kashmiri lecturer in Arabic at Delhi University and his stepbrother in Kashmir about why his wife is not going back to her maternal home for a few days becomes evidence in a terrorism show-trial and the cornerstone of proof of a so-called conspiracy to attack the Indian parliament that prompts the largest military mobilization since the second world war. Its words, which point to banal domestic issues, are twisted and mistranslated to mean justifications of a terrorist attack. A very private conversation gets construed, retrospectively, as a very public statement.
   A call centre worker in India, when catering to North American customers, is often expected to take on a different "private identity." Sunita becomes Susan, her places of work and residence glide over time zones. The weather report on her computer tells her of the climate in another part of the world, which she makes her own as she slips into a different accent to deal with her client. In the course of her conversation, she invokes her client's credit history, purchase decisions, and other private information.
   The shift between one private identity and another and negotiating the contours of an "other's" (the client's) private life is the ground on which her public persona as a worker in the service sector of the global new economy is constructed.

Raqs Media Collective, Public Privations (found in Public 39: 2009)

the law of indifference

From the external and visible world there comes an old adage: "Only one who works gets bread." Oddly enough, the adage does not fit the world in which it is most at home, for imperfection is the fundamental law of the external world, and here it happens again and again that he who does not work does get bread, and he who sleeps gets it even more abundantly than he who works. In the external world, everything belongs to the possessor. It is subject to the law of indifference, and the spirit of the ring obeys the one who has the ring, whether he is an Aladdin or a Noureddin, and he who has the wealth of the world has it regardless of how he got it.

It is different in the world of the spirit. Here an eternal divine order prevails. Here it does not rain on both the just and the unjust; here the sun does not shine on both good and evil. Here it holds true that only the one who works gets bread, that only the one who was in anxiety finds rest, that only the one who descends into the lower world rescues the beloved, that only the one who draws the knife gets Isaac. He who will not work does not get bread but is deceived just as the gods deceived Orpheus with an ethereal phantom instead of the beloved, deceived him because he was soft, not boldly brave, deceived him because he was a zither player and not a man. Here it does not help to have Abraham as father or to have seventeen ancestors. The one who will not work fits what is written about the virgins of Israel: he gives birth to wind—but the one who will work gives birth to his own father.

There is a knowledge that presumptuously wants to introduce into the world of spirit the same law of indifference under which the external world sighs. It believes that it is enough to know what is great—no other work is needed. But for this reason it does not get bread; it perishes of hunger while everything changes to gold. And what in fact does it know?

Søren Kierkegaard, Fear & Trembling

Fable of the Rhododendron Stealers

I walked the unwalked garden of rose-beds
In the public park; at home felt the want
Of a single rose present to imagine
The garden's remainder in full paint.

The stone lion-head set in the wall
Let drop its spittle of sluggish green
Into the stone basin. I snipped
An orange bud, pocketed it. When

It had opened its orange in my vase,
Retrogressed into blowze, I next chose red;
Argued my conscience clear which robbed
The park of less red than withering did.

Musk satisfied my nose, red my eye,
The petals' nap my fingertips:
I considered the poetry I rescued
From blind air, from complete eclipse.

Yet today, a yellow bud in my hand,
I stalled at sudden noisy crashes
From the laurel thicket. No one approached.
A spasm took the rhododendron bushes:

Three girls, engrossed, were wrenching full clusters
Of cerise and pink from the rhododendron,
Mountaining them on spread newspaper.
They brassily picked, slowed by no chagrin,

And wouldn't pause for my straight look.
But gave me pause, my rose a charge,
Whether nicety stood confounded by love,
Or petty thievery by large.

Sylvia Plath, Collected Poems (1981: 103-04)

the vision of things as "disenchanted"

The Epicureans and Sceptics achieved a notion of self-definition by withdrawal from the world; their weapon was scepticism about cosmic order, or a plea for the irrelevance of the Gods. By contrast the modern shift to a self-defining subject was bound up with a sense of control over the world - at first intellectual and then technological. That is, the modern certainty that the world was not to be seen as a text or an embodiment of meaning was not founded on a sense of its baffling impenetrability. On the contrary, it grew with the mapping of the regularities in things, by transparent mathematical reasoning, and with the consequent increase of manipulative control. That is what ultimately established the picture of the world as the locus of neutral, contingent correlations. Ancient sceptics while denying our ability to know the nature of things, had claimed that men had enough immediately relevant grasp on their situation to go about the business of life. While sometimes taking up the same formulae, the seventeenth century changed their content radically. The immediately relevant knowledge which was not to be compared with knowledge of final causes came to enjoy a higher and higher prestige. It came to be understood as the paradigm of knowledge.

This control over things which has grown with modern science and technology is often thought of as the principal motivation behind the scientific revolution and the development of the modern outlook. Bacon's oft-quoted slogan, 'knowledge is power' can easily give us this impression, and this 'technological' view of the seventeenth-century revolution is one of the reasons why Bacon has often been given a greater role in it than he deserves, alongside Galileo and Descartes. But even in Bacon's case, when he insists on the nullity of a philosophy from which there cannot be 'adduced a single experiment which tends to relieve and benefit the condition of man', we can read his motivation in a different way. We rather see the control as valuable not so much in itself as in its confirmation of a certain view of things: a view of the world not as a locus of meanings, but rather of contingent, de facto correlations. Manipulability of the world confirms the new self-defining identity, as it were: the proper relation of man to a meaningful order is to put himself into tune with it; by contrast nothing sets the seal more clearly on the rejection of this vision than successfully treating the world as object of control. Manipulation both proves and as it were celebrates the vision of things as 'disenchanted' (entzaubert) to use Max Weber's famous phrase.

Technological progress has so transformed our lives and produced so many things we could barely do without, that we easily think of the 'pay-off' of the seventeenth-century revolution in terms of these benefits (if such they unambiguously are). But in the seventeenth century itself, this pay-off was very slim. For Bacon and the other men of his time, control was more important for what it proved. In the very passage quoted above where he speaks of relieving and benefitting the condition of man, Bacon says: 'For fruits and works are as it were sponsors and sureties for the truth of philosophies.' And later he makes an explicit comparison of the relative importance of the two considerations: 'works themselves are of greater value as pledges of truth than as contributing to the comforts of life'. We have no reason to think of this as false scientific piety.

Bacon later defines this goal which 'is in itself more worthy than all the fruits of inventions' as 'the very contemplation of things as they are, without superstition or imposture, error or confusion'. My suggestion is that one of the powerful attractions of this austere vision, long before it 'paid off' in technology, lies in the fact that a disenchanted world is correlative to a self-defining subject, and that the winning through to a self-defining identity was accompanied by a sense of exhilaration and power, that the subject need no longer define his perfection or vice, his equilibrium or disharmony, in relation to an external order. With the forging of this modern subjectivity there comes a new notion of freedom, and a newly central role attributed to freedom, which seems to have proved itself definitive and irreversible.

Charles Taylor, Hegel, 7-9

Confucius, Lao Tzu, & Buddha

ONE day Confucius, Lao Tzu and Buddha, the founders of the three sects of religion professed in China, were talking together in fairyland of the want of success which attended their doctrines in the world, and proposed a descent to see if there were any right-minded persons who might be commissioned to awaken the age. After travelling for some days, they came at length to a desert place where the smoke of human habitations was not visible. The three sages, being weary with their journey and their lack of success, looked about for some place where they might quench their thirst, when suddenly they espied a fountain, and an old man sitting by it on guard. They concluded that they had better ask him for a little drink, and consulted together upon whom the task should fall of soliciting the favour.

"Come," said the other two to Buddha, "your priests are in the habit of begging, you go forward and ask." Buddha accordingly put the request. The old man asked: "Who are you?" "I am Shikayamuni," replied Buddha, "who formerly appeared in the west." "Oh, you are the celebrated Buddha, then, of whom I have heard so much; you have a reputation of being a good man, and I cannot refuse you a drink; but you must first answer me a question, which, if you do, you may have as much water as you please; but if not, you must go empty away." "What is it?" said Buddha. "Why," said the old man, "you Buddhists constantly affirm that men are equal, and admit neither of high nor low; how is it then that in your monasteries you have abbots, priests and novices?" Buddha could not answer, and was obliged to retire.

The sages then deputed Lao Tzu to ask for water, who, on coming up to the old man, was asked his name. "I am Lao Tzu," was the reply. "Oh, the founder of the Tao sect," said the old man. "I have heard a good account of you; but you must answer me a question or you will get no water." "Pray ask it," Lao Tzu answered. "You Taoists talk about the elixir of immortality; have you such a thing?" "Yes," said Lao Tzu, "it is the partaking of this that has rendered me immortal." "Well then," said the old man, "why did you not give a little to your own father, and prevent his decease?" Lao Tzu could not reply and was obliged to retire, saying to Confucius, "Come, brother, you must try your skill, for I can make nothing of the old man."

Confucius therefore advanced with the same request. "And who are you?" said the ancient. "I am Confucius," said he. "Oh, the celebrated Confucius, the sage of China; I have heard much of your discourses on filial piety, but how is it that you do not act up to them? You say, When parents are alive do not wander far; and if you do, have some settled place of abode; why then have you strayed away to this uninhabited region?" Confucius was unable to reply, and retired.

Upon this the three worthies consulted together about the old man, and came to the conclusion that he was so intelligent, they could not light upon a better person to revive their doctrines, and spread them through the world. They therefore made the suggestion. But the old man replied with a smile; "Gentlemen, you do not seem to know who or what I am? It is the upper part of me only that is flesh and blood, the lower part is stone; I can talk about virtue, but cannot follow it out."

This, the sages found, was the character of all mankind, and in despair of reforming the world they returned to the aerial regions.

complete subordination to the undertaking and those who run it

The power which the bourgeoisie has to exploit and oppress the workers lies at the very foundations of our social life, and cannot be destroyed by any political and juridical transformation. This power consists in the first place and essentially in the modern system of production itself, that is to say big industry. Pungent dicta abound in Marx’s writings on this subject of living labour being enslaved to dead labour, “the reversal of the relationship between subject and object,” “the subordination of the worker to the material conditions of work.” “In the factory,” he writes in Capital, “there exists a mechanism independent of the workers, which incorporates them as living cogs.... The separation of the spiritual forces that play a part in production from manual labour, and the transformation of [these spiritual forces] into power exercised by capital over labour, attain their fulfilment in big industry founded on mechanization. The detail of the individual destiny of the machine-worker fades into insignificance before the science, the tremendous natural forces and the collective labour which are incorporated in the machines as a whole and constitute with them the employer’s power.” Thus the worker’s complete subordination to the undertaking and to those who run it is founded on the factory organization and not on the system of property. Similarly, “the separation of the spiritual forces that play a part in production from manual labour,” or, according to another formula, “the degrading division of labour into manual and intellectual labour,” is the very foundation of our culture, which is a culture of specialists. Science is a monopoly, not because public education is badly organized, but by its very nature; non-scientists have access only to the results, not to the methods, that is to say they can only believe, not assimilate. “Scientific socialism” has itself remained the monopoly of a select few, and the “intellectuals” possess, unfortunately, the same privileges in the working-class movement as they do in bourgeois society. And the same applies, furthermore, on the political plane.

Simone Weil, "The Causes of Liberty and Social Oppression" in Oppression and Liberty (2002: 40)

Wise and simple?

The aim of [Aristotle's Ethics] is the acquisition and propagation of a certain kind of knowledge (science), but this knowledge and the thinking which brings it about are subsidiary to a practical end. The knowledge aimed at is of what is best for man and of the conditions of its realisation. Such knowledge is that which in its consumate form we find in great statesmen, enabling them to organise and administer their states and regulate by law the life of the citizens to their advantage and happiness, but it is the same kind of knowledge which on a smaller scale secures success in the management of the family or of private life.

It is characteristic of such knowledge that it should be deficient in "exactness," in precision of statement, and closeness of logical concatenation. We must not look for a mathematics of conduct. The subject-matter of Human Conduct is not governed by necessary and uniform laws. But this does not mean that it is subject to no laws. There are general principles at work in it, and these can be formulated in "rules," which rules can be systematised or unified. It is all-important to remember that practical or moral rules are only general and always admit of exceptions, and that they arise not from the mere complexity of the facts, but from the liability of the facts to a certain unpredictable variation. At their very best, practical rules state probabilities, not certainties; a relative constancy of connection is all that exists, but it is enough to serve as a guide in life. Aristotle here holds the balance between a misleading hope of reducing the subject-matter of conduct to a few simple rigorous abstract principles, with conclusions necessarily issuing from them, and the view that it is the field of operation of inscrutable forces acting without predictable regularity. He does not pretend to find in it absolute uniformities, or to deduce the details from his principles. Hence, too, he insists on the necessity of experience as the source or test of all that he has to say. Moral experience—the actual possession and exercise of good character—is necessary truly to understand moral principles and profitably to apply them. The mere intellectual apprehension of them is not possible, or if possible, profitless.

...

[The first parts of the Ethics] lay down a principle which governs all Greek thought about human life, viz. that it is only intelligible when viewed as directed towards some end or good. This is the Greek way of expressing that all human life involves an ideal element—something which it is not yet and which under certain conditions it is to be. In that sense Greek Moral Philosophy is essentially idealistic. Further it is always assumed that all human practical activity is directed or "oriented" to a single end, and that that end is knowable or definable in advance of its realisation. To know it is not merely a matter of speculative interest, it is of the highest practical moment for only in the light of it can life be duly guided, and particularly only so can the state be properly organised and administered. This explains the stress laid throughout by Greek Moral Philosophy upon the necessity of knowledge as a condition of the best life. This knowledge is not, though it includes knowledge of the nature of man and his circumstances, it is knowledge of what is best—of man's supreme end or good.

But this end is not conceived as presented to him by a superior power nor even as something which ought to be. The presentation of the Moral Ideal as Duty is almost absent. From the outset it is identified with the object of desire, of what we not merely judge desirable but actually do desire, or that which would, if realised, satisfy human desire. In fact it is what we all, wise and simple, agree in naming "Happiness" (Welfare or Well-being).

In what then does happiness consist? Aristotle summarily sets aside the more or less popular identifications of it with abundance of physical pleasures, with political power and honour, with the mere possession of such superior gifts or attainments as normally entitle men to these, with wealth. None of these can constitute the end or good of man as such. On the other hand, he rejects his master Plato's conception of a good which is the end of the whole universe, or at least dismisses it as irrelevant to his present enquiry. The good towards which all human desires and practical activities are directed must be one conformable to man's special nature and circumstances and attainable by his efforts. There is in Aristotle's theory of human conduct no trace of Plato's "other worldliness", he brings the moral ideal in Bacon's phrase down to "right earth"—and so closer to the facts and problems of actual human living. Turning from criticism of others he states his own positive view of Happiness, and, though he avowedly states it merely in outline his account is pregnant with significance. Human Happiness lies in activity or energising, and that in a way peculiar to man with his given nature and his given circumstances, it is not theoretical, but practical: it is the activity not of reason but still of a being who possesses reason and applies it, and it presupposes in that being the development, and not merely the natural possession, of certain relevant powers and capacities. The last is the prime condition of successful living and therefore of satisfaction, but Aristotle does not ignore other conditions, such as length of life, wealth and good luck, the absence or diminution of which render happiness not impossible, but difficult of attainment.

Introduction to Aristotle's Ethics

the rules of perspective

If we are too young our judgement is impaired, just as it is if we are too old.
Thinking too little about things or thinking too much both make us obstinate and fanatical.
If we look at our work immediately after completing it, we are still too involved; if too long afterwards, we cannot pick up the thread again.
It is like looking at pictures which are too near or too far away. There is just one indivisible point which is the right place.
Others are too near, too far, too high, or too low. In painting the rules of perspective decide it, but how will it be decided when it comes to truth and morality?

Blaise Pascal, Pensees

all motivations working simultaneously

A psychological interpretation of science begins with the acute realization that science is a human creation, rather than an autonomous, non-human, or per se "thing" with intrinsic rules of its own. Its origins are in human motives, its goals are human goals, and it is created, renewed, and maintained by human beings. Its laws, organization, and articulations rest not only on the nature of the reality that it discovers, but also on the nature of the human nature that does the discovering. The psychologist, especially if he has had any clinical experience, will quite naturally and spontaneously approach any subject matter in a personal way by studying people, rather than the abstractions they produce, scientists as well as science.
  The misguided effort to make believe that this is not so, the persistent attempt to make science completely autonomous and self-regulating and to regard it as a disinterested game, having intrinsic, arbitrary chesslike rules, the psychologist must consider unrealistic, false, and even anti-empirical.
  ... Scientists are motivated, like all other members of the human species, by species-wide needs for food, etc.; by needs for safety, protection, and care; by needs for gregariousness and for affection-and-love relations; by needs for respect, standing, and status, with consequent self-respect; and by a need for self-actualization or self-fulfillment of the idiosyncratic and species-wide potentialities of the individual person. These are the needs that are best known to psychologists for the simple reason that their frustration produces psychopathology.
  Less studied but knowable through common observation are the cognitive needs for sheer knowledge (curiosity) and for understanding (the philosophical, theological, value-system-building explanation needed).
  Finally, least well known are the impulses to beauty, symmetry, and possibly to simplicity, completion, and order, which we may call aesthetic needs, and the needs to express, to act out, and to motor completion that may be related to these aesthetic needs.
  To date it seems as if all other needs or desires or drives are either means to the basic ends listed above, or are neurotic, or else are products of certain kinds of learning processes.
  Obviously the cognitive needs are of most concern to the philosopher of science. It is man's persistent curiosity that is most responsible for science in its natural-history stage, and it is his equally persistent desire to understand, explain, and systematize that generates science in its more theoretical and abstract levels. However, it is this latter theoretical urge that is more specifically a sine qua non for science, for sheer curiosity is seen often enough in animals.
  But the other motives are certainly also involved in science at all its stages. It is too often overlooked that the original theorizers of science often thought of science primarily as a means to help the human race. Bacon, for instance, expected much amelioration of disease and poverty from science. It has been shown that even for Greek science where pure unmanual contemplation of the Platonic sort was a strong tradition, the practical and humanistic trend was also fairly strong. The feeling of identification and belongingness with people in general, and even more strongly the feeling of love for human beings may often be the primary motivation in many men of science. Some people go into science, as they might into social work or medicine, in order to help people.
  And then finally we must recognize that any other human need may serve as a primary motivation for going into science, for working at it, or for staying in it. It may serve as a living, a source of prestige, a means of self-expression, or as a satisfaction for any one of many neurotic needs.
  In most persons, a single primary all-important motive is less often found than a combination in varying amounts of all motivations working simultaneously. It is safest to assume that in any single scientist his work is motivated not only by love, but also by simple curiosity, not only by prestige, but also by the need to earn money, etc.

Abraham Maslow, Motivation and Personality (2nd ed., 1970: 1-3)

by definition without rule

Although Chaos can be studied in terms of antecedents in classical literature and philosophy, its appearance in [Paradise Lost] owes its problematic character to Milton's theology. Chaos is infinite, and filled by a ubiquitous God who has nonetheless withdrawn his creative will from chaotic matter (7.168-73). None of the categorical binaries established during the creation of Genesis inhere in Chaos. It is neither this nor that, "neither sea, nor shore, nor air, nor fire,/ But all these in their pregnant cause mixed/ Confus'dly" (2.912-14); therefore Satan, as he traverses this indeterminate space, confusedly mixes locomotions, "And swims or sinks, or wades, or creeps, or flies" (2.950). The "embryon atoms" (2.900) of Chaos are "the womb of Nature" (2.911), the pure potential that the Son first circumscribes with golden compasses when creating our universe (7.225-31) and will doubtless use again in creating new worlds (2.915-16). Chaos cannot be good until God has infused it with creative order. It is at least morally neutral, at best thoroughly praiseworthy, as a part of the process by which God makes and sustains all things.
  But alongside the language of atomism, Milton gives us a mythic Chaos, personified as the ruler of his realm, or rather its "Anarch" (2.988), since Chaos is by definition without rule. This Chaos, speaking for his consort, Night, and for a shadowy pack of Hesiodic creatures and personifications (2.963-67), expresses his resentment over recent losses (the creations of Hell and our universe) and supports Satan's mission on the assumption that "Havoc and spoil and ruin are my gain" (2.1009). We thus arrive at a paradox. Theologically, Chaos is neutral or better. Mythically, in terms of the epic narrative, Chaos is the ally of Satan.

Kerrigan, Rumrich, & Fallon, intro. to Paradise Lost (2007: xiv-xv).

the element of sacredness

Apart from the precarious and random luck that makes possession of the loved one possible, humanity has from the earliest times endeavored to reach this liberating continuity by means not dependent on chance. The problem arises when man is faced with death which seems to pitch the discontinuous creature headlong into continuity. This way of seeing the matter is not the first that springs to mind, yet death, in that it destroys the discontinuous being, leaves intact the general continuity of existence outside ourselves. I am not forgetting that the need to make sure of the survival of the individual as such is basic to our desire for immortality but I am not concerned to discuss this just now. What I want to emphasise is that death does not affect the continuity of existence, since in existence itself all separate existences originate; continuity of existence is independent of death and is even proved by death. This I think is the way to interpret religious sacrifices, with which I suggest that erotic activity can be compared. Erotic activity, by dissolving the separate beings that participate in it, reveals their fundamental continuity, like the waves of a stormy sea. In sacrifice, the victim dies and the spectators share in what his death reveals. This is what religious historians call the element of sacredness. This sacredness is the revelation of a continuity through the death of a discontinuous being to those who watch it as a solemn rite. A violent death disrupts the creature's discontinuity; what remains, what the tense onlookers experience in the succeeding silence, is the continuity of all existence with which the victim is now one. Only a spectacular killing, carried out as the solemn and collective nature as religion dictates, has the power to reveal what normally escapes notice. We should incidentally be unable to imagine what goes on in the secret depths of the minds of the bystanders if we could not call on our own personal religious experiences, if only childhood ones. Everything leads us to the conclusion that in essence the sacramental quality of primitive sacrifices is analagous to the comparable element in contemporary religions.

Georges Bataille, Erotism (1986: 21-22)

an impotent, quivering yearning

Physical eroticism has in any case a heavy, sinister quality. It holds on to the separateness of the individual in a rather selfish and cynical fashion. Emotional eroticism is less constrained. Although it may appear detached from material sensuality it often derives from it, being merely an aspect made stable by the reciprocal affection of the lovers. It can be divorced from physical eroticism entirely, for the enormous diversity of human kind is bound to contain exceptions of this sort. The fusion of lovers' bodies persists on the spiritual plane because of the passion they feel, or else this passion is the prelude to physical fusion. For the man in love, however, the fervour of love may be felt more violently than physical desire is. We ought never to forget that in spite of the bliss love promises its first effect is one of turmoil and distress. Passion fulfilled itself provokes such violent agitation that the happiness involved, before being a happiness to be enjoyed, is so great as to be more like its opposite, suffering. Its essence is to substitute for their persistent discontinuity a miraculous continuity between two beings. Yet this continuity is chiefly to be felt in the anguish of desire, when it is still inaccessible, still an impotent, quivering yearning. A tranquil feeling of secure happiness can only mean the calm which follows the long storm of suffering, for it is more likely that lovers will not meet in such timeless fusion than they will; the chances are most often against their contemplating in speechless wonder the continuity that unites them.

Georges Bataille, Erotism (1986: 19-20)

This is Politics

Do all primitive societies have government? Here again we immediately come up against another of the unfortunate interpretations of the word "primitive." Some writers, particularly in the nineteenth century, have thought that many of the institutions which are fundamental to western society developed fairly late in the history of mankind, so that we might expect not to find them among peoples who had not advanced along the path of civilization as far as ourselves. Government and law are among these, and if politics is defined as that which pertains to government, those who hold this view would consider that primitive societies pursue no activities which deserve the name politics.
  But there is another way of looking at politics, according to which it indubitably does exist in primitive societies. One definition of politics is the struggle for power; and even if one is not willing to agree that power is the only thing that men struggle for, one must admit that in every society there are conflicts which must somehow be reconciled if the society is not split into separate independent parts. Conflict and competition begin within the family, however little we care to admit it; in fact, this is recognized in such phrases as 'fraternal enmity'. But every society has an ideal of family unity such that disputes between kinsmen are expected to be settled without any outside intervention. Some anthropologists would hold that the sphere of politics begins where that of kinship ends. In the case of primitive societies it is not always easy to say where this line comes, for in such societies people trace the links of kinship much further than they do in the western world. But what one can say is that between people who are in close daily contact throughout their lives, sentiments are expected to develop (and often do) which limit the expression of conflict, whereas outside these narrow circles one cannot rely on sentiment alone to reconcile conflicting interests. In these wider fields of social relationships there are always and everywhere persons with conflicting and competing interests, seeking to have disputes settled in their favour and to influence community decisions ('policy') in accordance with their interests. This is politics.
  The seventeenth-century philosopher Hobbes contrasted the state of nature, in which every man's hand was against his neighbour, with civil society, in which authority had been surrendered to a sovereign ruler (not necessarily a single man). This was a logical rather than a historical argument; it followed from Hobbes' assumptions about human nature that if there were no supreme authority there could only be a war if each against all. But he did refer to "savage people in many places of America" whose condition he thought approached this. We shall see that in a number of primitive societies fighting is recognized as a legitimate means of obtaining redress for an injury, though in those cases it is not, as Hobbes imagined, a means of dominating others. The question whether societies of this kind can or cannot be said to have government or law is an interesting one, and contemporary anthropologists have answered it in many ways.
  Many modern writers have assumed that government must be carried on through the type of organization which we call the state - a body of persons authorized to make and enforce rules binding on everyone who comes under their jurisdiction, to settle disputes arising between them, to organize their defence against enemies, and to impose taxes or other economic contributions upon them, not to mention the multifarious new functions which the state has undertaken in the present century. Some primitive societies have this kind of organization, but others do not, and the question then arises whether they can be said to have government.

Lucy Mair, Primitive Government (1964: 9-11)

the childhood stage

People very commonly confuse the technical superiority of a nation with the moral and intellectual superiority of the population who make it up. Europeans are apt to talk about devices such as the internal combustion engine, or even the atomic reactor, as if they had all had a share in inventing them, whereas in fact most of us simply take advantage of inventions which we could not possibly have made and do not begin to understand. From this it is an easy step to seeing the peoples where these inventions were made as in some way more adult than those whose technical outfit does not include them. And this popular attitude gains support from the Jungian theory of psychology, which at the same time describes as 'primitive' the irrational elements in all human minds and holds that people who get through life with a primitive technical outfit have minds in which the irrational elements predominate.
  Let me make it clear, then, that if I write of primitive societies I am not implying anything about the characteristics of the persons who compose them - least of all that such persons have remained in the childhood stage if a human race whose maturity is represented by the "western" nations. It is ways of doing things which can be described as primitive or otherwise. The development of more complicated and efficient ways of doing things is a matter of discoveries and inventions which simply cannot be credited to the superiority of certain total populations over others. But the possession of a complex technology is what enables the modern state to control, and to a large extent organize, the lives of populations of many millions.

Lucy Mair, Primitive Government (1964: 8)

odd man

Strangeness and oddity will sooner harm than justify any claim to attention, especially when everyone is striving to unite particulars and find at least some general sense in the general senselessness. Whereas an odd man is most often a particular and isolated case. Is that not so?

- Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

the modern age

In "the modern age" the idea of freedom and a new beginning coincide ... yet if this truism is frequently forgotten, it is because liberation has always loomed large and the foundation of freedom has always been uncertain.

Heel of a shoe.

"How well-made that is! What a skillful workman! What a brave soldier!" That is where our inclinations come from, and our choice of careers. "What a lot that man drinks! How little that man drinks!" That is what makes people temperate or drunkards, soldiers, cowards, etc.

Pascal, Pensées 117 (1987: 38)

a really positive role

What I would like to get free from, is the idea that political power—in all its forms and at whatever level we grasp it—has to be analyzed within the Hegelian horizon of a sort of beautiful totality that through an effect of power is misrecognized or broken up by abstraction or division. It seems to me that it is both a methodological and a historical error to consider power as an essentially negative mechanism of repression whose principal function is to protect, preserve, or reproduce the relations of production. It also seems to me wrong to consider power as something situated in a superstructural level relative to the play of forces. Finally, it is wrong to consider power as essentially linked to the effects of ignorance. It seems to me that this kind of traditional and "omni-circulating" conception of power, found in historical writing and in present day political and polemical texts, is actually constructed on the basis of a number of outdated historical models. It is a composite notion that is inadequate for the real world in which we have been living for a considerable length of time, that is, since at least the end of the eighteenth century.
  From where is this conception of power borrowed that sees power impinging massively from the outside, as it were, with a continuous violence that some (always the same) exercise over others (who are also always the same)? It comes from the model of, or if you like, from the historical reality of, slave society. The idea that power has the essential function of prohibiting, preventing, and isolating, rather than allowing the circulation, change, and multiple combination of elements, seems to me a conception of power that also refers to an outdated historical model, in this case the model of caste society. By making power a mechanism whose function is not to produce but to deduct, to impose obligatory transfers of wealth and, consequently, to deprive some of the fruit of their work; in short, the idea that the essential function of power is to seal off the process of production and to make a certain social class profit from it, in an absolutely identical renewal of the relations of power, does not seem to me to refer at all to the real functioning of power at the present time, but to how we may suppose or reconstruct it as functioning in feudal society. Finally, in referring to a power that, with its administrative machinery of control, is superimposed on forms, forces, and relations of production established at the level of an already given economy, by describing power in this way, it seems to me that we are still using an outdated historical model that in this case is the model of the administrative monarchy.
  In other words, it seems to me that by making the major characteristics we attribute to political power into an instance of repression, a superstructural level, and an instance whose essential function is to reproduce and preserve the relations of production, we do no more than constitute, on the basis of historically outdated and different models, a sort of daguerreotype of power that is really based on what we think we can see in power in a slave society, a caste society, a feudal society, and in a society like the administrative monarchy. It hardly matters whether this is a failure to recognize the reality of these societies; it is in any case a failure to grasp what is specific and new in what took place during the eighteenth century and the Classical Age, that is to say, the installation of a power that, with regard to productive forces, relations of production, and the preexisting social systems, does not play a role of control and reproduction but rather a really positive role. What the eighteenth century established through the "discipline of normalization," or the system of "discipline-normalization," seems to me to be a power that is not in fact repressive but productive, repression figuring only as a lateral or secondary effect with regard to its central, creative, and productive mechanisms.

Michel Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures at the College de France 1974-1975 (2003: 50-52)

the message of true love

"Love's highest need is to renounce its own power." This is what Lacan calls 'symbolic castration': if one is to remain faithful to one's love, one should not elevate it into the direct focus of one's love, one should renounce its centrality. Perhaps, a detour through the best (or worst) of Hollywood's melodrama can help us clarify this point. The basic lesson of King Vidor's Rhapsody is that, in order to gain the beloved woman's love, the man has to prove that he is able to survive without her, that he prefers his mission or profession to her. There are two immediate choices: (i) my professional career is what matters most to me, the woman is just an amusement, a distracting affair; (ii) the woman is everything to me, I am ready to humiliate myself, to forsake all my public and professional dignity for her. They are both false, they lead to the man being rejected by the woman. The message of true love is thus: even if you are everything to me, I can survive without you, I am ready to forsake you for my mission or profession. The proper way for the woman to test the man's love is thus to 'betray' him at the crucial moment of his career (the first public concert in the film, the key exam, the business negotiation which will decide his career)—only if he can survive the ordeal, and successfully accomplish his task although deeply traumatized by her desertion, will he deserve her and will she return to him. The underlying paradox is that love, precisely as the Absolute, should not be posited as a direct goal—it should retain the status of a by-product, of something we receive as an undeserved grace.

Slavoj Žižek, Why is Wagner Worth Saving? (intro. to Adorno, In Search of Wagner, xxii)

the destruction of objects

Children in particular (and here I am supposing it would also be necessary to include grown-ups in certain cases) willfully plunge their fingers into coloring materials, into containers of paint, for example, so as to leave traces of their passage while dragging their fingers across walls or doors. Such marks only "seem to be able to be explained as mechanical assertions of their author's personality." And in that capacity, Luquet associates them with one of the rare means that children have of asserting their personality, the destruction of objects, the exploits of "butter-fingered children"...

Georges Bataille, Primitive Art (The Cradle of Humanity, 2005: 36)