Über Tiefen

Unser größtes Unglück: Dass wir die Tiefe des Unglücks im Herzen unseres Nächsten nicht ermessen können. Unser größtes Glück: Dass wir die Tiefe des Unglücks in unserem eigenen Herzen nicht ermessen können.

 

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Tiefkühltruhe

Der Refrain aus einem Lied von Trenet kam ihm immer wieder in den Sinn, seit er es am Nachmittag auf der Autobahn im Radio gehört hatte, und er sagte sich, das “Foto, das alte Foto aus meiner Jugend”, von dem dort die Rede war, werde schon bald für die junge Generation keine Bedeutung mehr haben. Die Farben der Gegenwart für immer: Die Kamera als Tiefkühltruhe.

— Marc Augé, Nicht-Orte

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Das aufgeräumte Zimmer

Das aufgeräumte Zimmer, die Dinge an ihrem Platz oder so scheint es: Dabei haben die Dinge keinen Platz, kommen nur wie zufällig nebeneinander zu Liegen und schaffen ihre eigene Ruhe um sich herum, die ihnen den Anschein gibt, als wäre dies hier ihr angestammter Platz.

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Toxic Nightmare Form

The ecological value of the term Nature is dangerously overrated, because Nature isn’t just a term – it’s something that happened to human-built space, demarcating human systems from Earth systems. Nature as such is a twelve-thousand-years old human product, geological as well as discursive. Its wavy elegance was eventually revealed as inherently contingent and violent, as when in a seizure one’s brain waves become smooth. Wash-rinse-repeat the agrilogistics and suddenly we reach a tipping point.

The Anthropocene doesn’t destroy Nature. The Anthropocene is Nature in its toxic nightmare form. Nature is the latent form of the Anthropocene waiting to emerge as a catastrophe.

–Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology

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Tissue of Signs

Frankfurt, November 2023

We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’ of the Author- God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centers of culture.

a writing that can know no halt: life never does more than imitate the book, and the book itself is only a tissue of signs, an imitation that is lost, infinitely deferred.

— Roland Bartes, Death of the Author

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Incorruptible

Any object, intensly regarded, may be a gate of access to the incorruptible eons of the gods.

— James Joyce, Ulysses, p. 545

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Certitude

He could not persuade himself that, if he wrote round about his subject with facility or treated it from any standpoint of impression, good would come of it. On the other hand he was persuaded that no-one served the generation into which he had been born so well as he who offered it, whether in his art or in his life, the gift of certitude.

-James Joyce, Stephen Hero

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