rhodochrosite: (Default)
[personal profile] rhodochrosite
GADAMER: Yes, I am very skeptical of every kind of pessimism. I find in all pessimism a certain lack of sincerity.
DUTT: Why?
GADAMER: Because no one can live without hope.
...
GADAMER: My favourite image in this respect is Field Marshall Kutuzov in Tolstoy's War and Peace. Before the battle with Napoleon to defend Moscow, he slept through the final counsel of war with the generals and awoke to say, "Yes, certainly do it as you have said," and then he climbed on his horse and rode around the camp to all the night-fires and spoke with individual people. Of course, the question is, who was the real victor in this battle? Behind all this stands a theory that we all, as I believe, must accept: We are integral, only integral. None of us knows what effect they really have as our actions are integrated into a larger context. That does not mean that we ought not to think about these matters nor that in our thinking we should not debate with the critique of ideology, or with utopias.
- Hans-Georg Gadamer, The Hermeneutic Relevance of Aristotle


I am using the word "person" in a particular way. Per-sona, in Latin, means literally a shining-through. A person is what shines through a mask even though the concept of the "mask" is the usual association made with the word "persona." It is that which shines through. For a person to be able to shine through, she must first be able to imagine herself as whole even if she knows that she can never truly succeed in becoming whole or in conceptually differentiating between the "mask" and the "self."
...
A person is not something "there" on this understanding, but a possibility, an aspiration which, because it is that, can never be fulfilled once and for all. The person is, in other words, implicated in an endless process of working through personae.
- Drusilla Cornell, Living Together: Psychic Space and the Demand for Sexual Equality


But, as Bataille continually reminds us, eroticism demands nothing less than risking one's self. In erotic passion, the boundaries of selfhood yield to the touch of the other.
...
The only solution to this danger is to understand myth as artificial mythology so that the structure of second nature reinstated by myth will appear as our mythology. Nothing more, nothing less. There can always be other mythologies.
...
This memory is recollective imagination. We re-collect the mythical figures of the past, but as we do so we reimagine them. It is the potential variability of myth that allows us to work within myth to reimagine our world and, by so doing, to begin to dream of a new one.
- Drusilla Cornell, Transformations: Recollective Imagination and Sexual Difference


No surface holds. No figure, line, or point remains. No ground subsists. But no abyss, either. Depth, for us, is not a chasm. Without a solid crust, there is no precipice. Our depth is the thickness of our body, our all touching itself. Where top and bottom, inside and outside, in front and behind, above and below are not separated, remote, out of touch. Our all intermingled. Without breaks or gaps.
- Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One


In science, each of us knows that what he has accomplished will be antiquated in ten, twenty, fifty years. That is the fate to which science is subjected; it is the very meaning of scientific work, to which it is devoted in a quite specific sense, as compared with other spheres of culture for which in general the same holds.... We cannot work without hoping that others will advance further than we have. In principle, this progress goes on ad infinitum. And with this we come to inquire into the meaning of science. For, after all, it is not self-evident that something subordinate to such a law is sensible and meaningful in itself. Why does one engage in doing something that in reality never comes, and never can come, to an end?
- Max Weber, Science as a Vocation

Date: 2022-10-09 03:54 am (UTC)
hwarium: (Default)
From: [personal profile] hwarium
my heart is touched and I realise I am a fool for choosing legal experimentalism over legal/social theory

even if i believed in fate

it would only be about meeting you
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