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the death of the west, revealed to N when she traveled from the caribbean island to marseille. waiting for the luggage at the luggage carousel. at that moment.

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This is Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s lesser-known 1988 painting work ‘Forbidden Colors’ and part of the statement he released to accompany its first outing at the New Museum that same year.

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when I spoke to a palestinian thinker years ago I remember he said that it’s not about religion. it’s about the west and the east. these large political/economic/historical/ideological categories of “west” and “east”. and I’ll never forget what he said after that. he said: the problem is that the west has no content. it only knows domination. and domination doesn’t have content, it is just violence. I have kept thinking about this in the past week.

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I used to be paid to play saxophone, now I am more paid to talk to people. both involve me being still and thinking and trying to express my nuanced thoughts in a kind of conversation. they only differ in their intensities.

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I’m going to close with the notion of “utopian interruptions.” What I’m talking about is always tied to failure. It’s no accident that the figures that I invoke – Beckett has an aesthetic for failure, doesn’t he? So does Chekhov. So does Kafka. That wonderful letter that Benjamin writes to Gershom Scholem, July 1938: “You’ll never understand the purity and the beauty of Kafka if you don’t view him as a failure.” Of course, if it wasn’t for Max Brod, we wouldn’t even have the text. Kafka believed he was a failure through and through. Or, as Beckett says in his last piece of prose fiction Worstwood Ho, “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” Try again. Fail again. Fail better. Like Sheldon Wolin’s fugitive democracy, prophetic religion is a fugitive affair – an empathetic and imaginative power that confronts hegemonic powers always operating. Prophetic religion is a profoundly tragicomic affair. The dominant forms of religion are well-adjusted to greed and fear and bigotry. Hence well-adjusted to the indifference of the status quo toward poor and working people. Prophetic religion is an individual and collective performative praxis of maladjustment to greed, fear, and bigotry. For prophetic religion the condition of truth is to allow suffering to speak. Yet it is always tied to some failure – always. There are moments, like the 1960s in capitalist civilization or the 1980s in communist civilization that prophetic awakening takes place. It doesn’t last too long, because the powers-that-be are not just mighty, but they’re very clever and they dilute and incorporate in very seductive ways – or sometimes they just kill you!

Cornel West, Prophetic Religion and the Future of Capitalist Civilization (via jacobwren)

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“The affirmation of the desire for freedom is so inhabited by the forgetting of its conditions of possibility, that every narrative articulation of freedom is haunted by its burial, by the violence of forgetting.”

-Lisa Lowe “The intimacies of four continents”

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Detritus in the streets, my legs so heavy; I see by instinct. I’m lying in the park, hidden in the uncut grass, imagining a city grid. A map of summer colors and geometry. A circumference that’s doing something, the inner life of a line. All day I pretend I understand.

Renee Gladman, The Activist (via jacobwren)

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Reading shows the wrongness of the habitual reification of ‘the social’ and ‘the personal’ in a binary system of values. It submits this binary to a ruinous foundering. And so, an erotics.

-Lisa Robertson

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“poetry is a rival government always in opposition to its crueler replicas.”

William Carlos Williams

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I keep imagining a dance that feels like music but where there is no music.

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that which cannot be repeated

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from DG:

It’s a frontline of colonialization: killing to live, converting the living into capital.

the inadvertent refusal of a toxic legacy is a life-giving form of delinquency.

...in the seriousness and madness of the necessary.

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are we ready for exodus

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travis laplante - heart protector

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cultivating, practicing & sharing anxiety

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Sillman: So how do we approach contradictions that seem shameful, or awkward, or disreputable or uncomfortable?

Bordowitz: I believe that we produce new emotions. Emotions are collectively produced, not produced by ourselves alone. We don’t own them. Art can play a great role in the production of a new language of emotion. 

https://www.amysillman.com/uploads_amy/pdfs/d60a92a24b.pdf