NOTES 3.1.16

"If, as Sombart contended, the reality and expectation of rising economic conditions – and the sense that this was a nation that rewarded work – was the key to socialism’s absence, then the reality and expectation of declining economic conditions, and the sense that this is a nation that rewards only the rich, is the key to socialism’s – or more precisely, socialists’ – surprising presence. That’s why, in 2016, there are socialists – by the millions – in America." - Guardian Feb292016

"That’s how I experience life, as an ocean of quotidian existence in which meaning is diffuse and difficult to grasp, and then comes death with its unprecedented concentration of meaning, or else love or birth."

"Building a fiction room requires either great strength or great ignorance. To understand what I mean by a fiction room, one need only read Tolstoy’s War and Peace. I have read it twice and have been sucked inside on both occasions, as happens only with the greatest of novels – one invests greater and more numerous emotions in them than in real life itself, occasionally becoming aware that one is yearning for the rooms the novel opens, even for the characters it portrays. The many scene shifts, from the manors to the cities, from the ballrooms to the battlefields, and the changing viewpoints, characters developing on the basis of their various experiences and therefore continually facing each other in new ways, winding in and out of each other’s lives, without ever standing alone, yet also without knowing this to be so..."

"How that feeling of authenticity, or world-nearness, arises, I don’t know, but it is certainly rare..."

 "Only rarely did I think about anyone ever reading what I wrote. Mostly, I was trying to get words down on paper as fast as I could before I started to get critical, before I started to think about how stupid I was and how stupid the novel was, trying to exist within myself the way I was when I wasn’t writing. It was the only way to bring it about, to write without an audience, without readers, in a room on my own."

"It is a soul-devouring task, the division between me and my literary self being so slight. One thing I know is that I will never do anything like it again. My plan now is to write something completely different. I may even visit the villages of Russia and see what the last 160 years have done to reality there since Turgenev tramped around with his rifle."

- KOK, Guardian 26FEB2016

 "What made French existentialism so new and unique was that it tried to marry what was fundamentally a form of nihilism with the French tradition of ethical thought. "

-At the existentialist Café REVIEW, Guardian 28FEB2016

the rebel’s logic is “to serve justice so as not to add to the injustice of the human condition [and] to insist on plain language so as not to increase a world of lies.”

Saluting the Flag, Magritte, 1935

"Levinas’s antihistamine for our allergic reactions involves three things: an appeal to the “infinity” in human beings, a detailed description of face-to-face encounters and an account of a basic hospitality that constitutes humanity...Infinity is Levinas’s technical term for the idea that other people are always more than our categories can capture....

By calling attention to this infinity in human beings, Levinas was trying to show us that our identifications and differentiations always fail as adequate descriptions of others. And he aims to interrupt our totalizing and xenophobic tendencies by indicating the irreducible humanity of other human beings...Concretely, the irreducible humanity of other human beings is found in the face. Faces confront us directly and immediately and they refuse typologies....However, Levinas’s general account of vulnerability shows us how hospitality in the face of another’s need constitutes individual human beings and bespeaks a humanity that precedes and is more fundamental than the establishment of all national boundaries.

Hospitality, according to Levinas, involves curtailing our enjoyment of the world when confronted with another’s wants. It is exemplified by the act of welcoming another into our home and sharing our possessions. Welcoming and sharing with others determines who and what we are as specific human beings. Levinas expresses this idea in a discussion of subjectivity in which the self is described as a host and hostage to others. We are hosts to others because welcoming them into our world is a precondition for a relation of identification and differentiation between us. And we are hostages because our personal identity is determined by how we respond to the demands others place upon us."