#diptych

Top, screen capture from Le Mépris, directed by Jean-Luc Godard, 1963. Bottom, screen capture from Sei Donne per l'Assassino, directed by Mario Bava, 1964.

Inside Casale di Santa Maria Nova, Rome.

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I kept having dreams all night. I thought they were touching me with their fingers. But dreams don't have fingers, they have fists, so it must have been scorpions.

Top, screen capture from Honeycomb, directed by Carlos Saura, 1969. Via. Bottom, screen capture of a page from the website https://www.ncaigc.com/, via the article In China, people are renting out their faces to AI, posted July 27, 2026. Via.

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The “I” that considers is very different from the “I” that has fears. To have fears, to have, specifically, the fears on which Keats dwells, is to be immersed in acute sensation. The fear that one will cease to be is unlike the state of chronic fearfulness we call timidity. This fear halts and overtakes, it carries intimations of change or closure or collapse, it threatens to cancel the future. It is primal, unwilled, democratic, urgent; in its presence, all other function is suspended.

Louise Glück, from Proofs and Theories, 1994. Via.

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It would be absurd to go to war against power in general. On the contrary, certain types of politics of power, certain types of arrangements of power, certain uses of language, notably national languages, are normalized in the context of an historical situation, which implies the seizure of power by a certain linguistic caste, the destruction of dialects, the rejection of special languages of all kinds -- professional as well as infantile or feminine--I think that is what happens. It would be absurd to oppose desire and power. Desire is power; power is desire. What is at issue is what type of politics is pursued with regard to different linguistic arrangements that exist. Because -- and this seems essential to me -- capitalist and bureaucratic socialist power infiltrate and intervene in all modes of individual semiotization; today, it proceeds more through semiotic subjugation than through direct subjugation by the police, or by explicit use of physical pressure. Capitalist power injects a microfascism into all the attitudes of the individuals, into their relation to perception, to the body, to children, to sexual partners, etc. If a struggle can be led against the capitalist system, it can only be done, in my opinion, by combining a struggle -- with visible, external objects -- against the power of the bourgeoisie, against its institutions and systems of exploitation, with a thorough understanding of all the semiotic infiltrations on which capital is based. Consequently, each time one detects an area of struggle against bureaucracy in the organizations, against reformist politics, etc., one must also see just how much we ourselves are contaminated by, are carriers of, this microfascism.

Felix Guattari, in Desire is Power, Power is Desire from Soft Subversions: Texts and Interviews 1977-1985, 2009. Via.

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Don’t forget the real business of the War is buying and selling. The murdering and violence are self-policing, and can be entrusted to non-professionals. The mass nature of wartime death is useful in many ways. It serves as spectacle, as diversion from the real movements of the War. It provides raw material to be recorded into History, so that children may be taught History as sequences of violence, battle after battle, and be more prepared for the adult world. Best of all, mass death’s a stimulus to just ordinary folks, little fellows, to try ‘n’ grab a piece of that Pie while they’re still here to gobble it up. The true war is a celebration of markets.”