Love and truth touch by pushing away: they force the retreat of those whom they reach, for their very onset reveals, in the touch itself, that they are out of reach. It is in being unattainable that they touch us, even seize us. What they draw near is their distance: they make us sense it, and this sensing is their very sense. It is the sense of touch that commands not to touch. It is time, indeed, to specify the following: Noli me tangere does not simply say “Do not touch me”; more literally, it says “Do not wish to touch me.”
-Jean-Luc Nancy, Noli me tangere: On the Raising of the Body
"Silence alone is my prayer, oh Lord, and I can say no more; I am so happy feeling that I silence myself to feel even more; it was in silence that a spider’s subtle and fragile web formed inside me: this sweet ignorance of life which allows me to live."
Clarice Lispector, Near to the Wild Heart (via human-activities)
Reblogged from human-activities with 23 notes / lit Clarice Lispector
Portrait of a young man. Jean Dominique Ingres. French. 1780-1867.
oil on canvas. http://hadrian6.tumblr.com
Reblogged from marlinspikeafterdark with 123 notes
"I want to make myself simple, that is, to be like a diagram, and my being will have to gain the qualities of crystal, which exists only by virtue of the objects that can be seen through it. Rags, poverty, even a careless or untidy way of dressing, enables pathos to enter easily, more easily, into daily life. To be buttoned. Faultlessly. Apparently inaccessible. If I desire saintliness, let it come wholly from within! A torrent flowing into me from head to heart and circulating. A very simple ribbon. I would hate a crease, a silk pocket handkerchief, a badly pressed crease, a down-at-heel shoe to allow me the slightest self-pity, the simple casualness with respect to strictness, to make disobedience easier. Where I was heavy with so many furs! Where the snow isolated each of us—we who lived, nevertheless, in the same thick darkness of a tank—in the middle of a vast plain of silence."
Jean Genet, Funeral Rites (via human-activities)
Reblogged from human-activities with 30 notes
"The Metropolis strives to reach a mythical point where the world is completely fabricated by man, so that it absolutely coincides with his desires"
Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York
(via comna)
Listening is not reading. But the comparison between the two can shed light on the surprise of which I speak. Reading a text, reading it in an “expert” way, we rewrite it, we draw quotations from it that are sometimes quite far apart from each other in the “body” of the text, we contrast and compare them, we make meanings and sometimes contradictions or paradoxes emerge from them that the linear structure of the text did not immediately make visible. One could even say that reading does not truly become criticism until it breaks with the temporal linearity of the stream. Until we render it discrete by a certain analysis. What does this critical condition become in listening?—That, in brief, is the question that stays with us after we read Adorno.
-Peter Szendy, Listen
Page from a Chinese Cultural Revolution-era children’s book.
Reblogged from kimjongnom with 118 notes
