Ben Menghini

"I do not mean by this that governmentalization would be opposed, in a kind of inverted contrary affirmation, to 'We do not want to be governed, and we do not want to be governed at all.' What I mean is that in the great anxiety surrounding the way to govern and in the inquiries into modes of governing, one detects a perpetual question, which would be: 'How not to be governed like that, by that, in the name of these principles, in view of such objectives and by the means of such methods, not like that, not for that, not by them?'"

"How to govern: I believe that that was one of the fundamental questions of the fifteenth or sixteenth century. A fundamental question to which the multiplication of all the arts of governing—pedagogical art, political art, economic art, if you will—and of all the institutions of government, in the broad sense that the word government had at this time, responded."

"Practicing how to vacate detachment and still Rightly unwelcomed in the words, I pronounce whatever comes my conviction I know that the horse wading in to soak Holds me in the dream water By letting me see it, I know that when I fill With breath enough to float And fold into those already here, Every inch of altitude surprises, Falling into the mirror the sky is"

"As a religious problem, the problem of suffering is, paradoxically, not how to avoid suffering to how to suffer, how to make of physical pain, personal loss, worldly defeat, or the helpless contemplation of other's agony something bearable, supportable—something, as we say, sufferable."

"What we call our data are really our own constructions of other people's constructions of what they and their compatriots are up to."

A man with a bandage is in the middle of something Everyone understands this. Everyone wants a battlefield. Red. And a little more Red. Accidents never happen when the room is empty. Everyone understands this. Everyone needs a place. People like to think war means something. What can you learn from your opponent? More than you think. Who will master this love? Love might be the wrong word. Let's admit, without apology, what we do to each other. We know who our enemies are. We know.

"The scene of address, what we might call the rhetorical condition for responsibility, means that while I am engaging in a reflexive activity, thinking about and reconstructing myself, I am also speaking to you and thus elaborating a relation to an other in language as I go. The ethical valence of the situation is thus not restricted to the question of whether or not my account of myself is adequate, but rather concerns whether, in giving the account, I establish a relationship to the one to whom my account is addressed and whether both parties to the interlocution are sustained and altered by the scene of address."

"Judgement can be a way to fail to own one's limitations and thus provides no felicitous basis for a reciprocal recognition of human beings as opaque to themselves, partially blind, constitutively limited."

"I leave this chapter with the idea that in learning what is the human rights discourse, or how to think differently of justice, the challenge is not to learn a new language, as if the very idea of a language was 'new,' or to simply correct earlier erroneous understandings of concepts like 'human' or 'rights.' We may, instead, learn from the analogy Wittgenstein makes with the child: 'The child already has a language, only not this one' (PI, §32)."

"At all these different junctures taken-for-granted beliefs and social practices can become objects of critical reflection. Rather than being presuppositions for disputes about other matters, taken-for-granted belief or social relations become at all these different sites the focus themselves of explicit contention. They become matters requiring the support of reasons, and matters susceptible of criticism."

"To know the limits of acknowledgment is to know even this fact in a limited way; as a result, it is to experience the very limits of knowing. This can, by the way, constitutes a disposition of humility and generosity alike: I will need to be forgiven for what I cannot have fully known, and I will be under a similar obligation to offer forgiveness to others, who are also constituted in partial opacity to themselves."

"Thus, it follows that one can give and take recognition only on the condition that one becomes disoriented from oneself by something which is not oneself, that one undergoes a de-centering and 'fails' to achieve self-identity."