anicca

I cannot rid myself of the feeling that I’m not in the right place.

It is by speed and slowness that one slips in among things, that one connects with something else. One never commences; one never has a tabula rasa; one slips in, enters in the middle; one takes up or lays down rhythms.

Terror unendingly renews with advancing age. Without end, it returns us to the beginning. The beginning that I glimpse on the edge of the grave is the pig in me which neither death nor insult can kill. Terror on the edge of the grave is divine and I sink into the terror whose child I am.

Lack is created, planned, and organized in and through social production….Desire does not lack anything; it does not lack its object. It is, rather, the subject that is missing in desire, or desire that lacks a fixed subject

When I speak…I belong, whether or not I know it, to a network of powers of which I make use, struggling against the force that asserts itself against me. All speech is violence, a violence all the more formidable for being secret and the secret center of violence; a violence that is already exerted upon what the word names and that it can name only by withdrawing presence from it—a sign, as we have seen, that death speaks (the death that is power) when I speak.

In the end, glorification of splendid underdogs is nothing other than glorification of the splendid system that makes them so.

And there was this – I know I’m taking a long time to answer your question – there was this way in which I all of a sudden realized that the point of being post-modern or being avant-garde or whatever wasn’t to follow in a certain kind of tradition: that all that stuff is BS imposed by critics and camp followers afterwards; that what the really great artists do, and it sounds very trite to say it out loud, but what the really great artists do is they’re entirely themselves. They’re entirely themselves. They’ve got their own vision, their own way of fracturing reality. And that if it’s authentic and true, you will feel it in your nerve endings. And this is what “Blue Velvet” did for me. I’m not suggesting it would do it for any other viewer, but I all of a sudd– Lynch very much helped snap me out of a kind of adolescent delusion that I was in about what sort of avant-garde art could be. And it’s very odd because film and books are very different media. But I remember, I remember going with two poets and one other student fiction writer to go see this and then all of us going to the coffee shop afterwards and just, you know, slapping ourselves in the forehead. And it was this truly epiphanic experience.

If there is one question I dread, to which I have never been able to invent a satisfactory reply, it is the question what am I doing.

‘How strange,’ Juliana said. 'I never would have thought the truth would make you angry.’ Truth, she thought. As terrible as death. But harder to find.

Nietzsche is the great exemplar of complicating thought, exploiting knowledge in the interest of interrogations (and this is not in order to clarify and focus, but to subtilize and dissociate them). Complicating thought strengthens the impetus of an active or energetic confusion – delirium – against the reactive forces whose obsessive tendency is to resolve or conclude.