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Cécile Daladier

www.ceciledaladier.com

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Melancholia could thus be seen as a defence against the state of being a pure object open to every attack of an unloving and hostile world…if we defined paranoia rather loosely as the state of being at the mercy of the Other with no available mediation, then melancholia can be seen, in some cases, as a defence against paranoia.

Darian Leader (via circulationwithinmyskull)

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I found this letter that I had started to write yesterday evening and I reread it with interest. Dammit, what a lot of drivel I managed to write! In the end it’s impossible to understand anything in it. But better that way: the less one understands the more posterity will appreciate my profundity of thought. In fact, let me say: POSTERITY IS STUPID Think how annoyed they’ll be when they read that!

—Italo Calvino, Letter to Eugenio Scalfari, March 7, 1942, Letters: 1941-1985. (via)

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Accumulation 2008 72 x 40 inches

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Emily Dickinson, We Talked With Each Other About Each Other, c. 1879, Amherst Manuscript #514. Pencil on Envelope, 1 sheet, 5 1/10 x 7 9/10 inches (13 x 20 cm). 

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A Germany that existed that drove Jews and political opponents to their death, since it believed that only in this way could it become a full reality. And what of it? Greek civilization was built on slavery and an Athenian army had run wild on the Island of Melos as had the SS in Ukraine. Countless people had been sacrificed as far back as the light of history reaches, and mankind's eternal progress was only a naive belief of the nineteenth century anyhow. "Left, two, three, four" was a ritual just like any other. Against the horrors there wasn't much to say. The Via Appia had been lined with cruciified slaves and over in Birkenau the stench of cremated human bodies was spreading...That is the way history was and that is the way it is." (11) The Mind's Limits, Jean Améry

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Michaël Borremans

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I have come from Miletos to Latmos on a white chariot drawn by four snow-white mules, all their trappings silver. I sailed from Alexandria in a purple trireme to perform sacred rites— sacrifices and libations—in honor of Endymion. And here is the statue. I now gaze in ecstasy at Endymion’s famous beauty. My slaves empty baskets of jasmine and auspicious tributes revive the pleasure of ancient days. -CP Cavafy, "Before the Statue of Endymion"

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A small catalogue of peonies, carnations, and ranunculus. The weather had been overcast for half the year, and while I could remember what the sun in the sky looked like, I had forgotten what objects looked like in the light. I stared through the glass into the stems tied together by a blue rubber band. As I decided to smoke the last of my Djarum cherry cigarettes, bought from an antiquarian tobacconists in Westminster that weekend, I thought on the unnatural bent of the stems, tortured under the weight of the heavy buds. It occurred to me that although bouquets and arrangements in a florist's are always elegant and solicitatious, the cultivation of flowers, especially so-called exotic ones, has always been to my mind slightly grotesque. Fetid, unknown vapours mingle in a glass room misted with condensation: The greenhouse is a place of supernatural growth, a sanctuary for obsessives, eccentrics, and even worse—it reminded me of prehistoric megafauna that would have thrived in the Pleicestocene jungles where dinosaurs roamed, a whole civilization, a whole world without humans: that is paradise. When the humans are outnumbered.   

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do you think men will sit together in groups of themselves talking only to themselves? do you think that when women talk men will interrupt women? do you think men will explain to women what the women already know? do you think men will act as if the women said nothing at all? do you think that women will sit quietly and say nothing unless asked directly? do you think women will dismiss argument and abstraction out of self-protection or exasperation at the way they are excluded, ignored, and punished? do you think there will be women who insult themselves or pretend to be stupid? do you think there will be women who will just sit there and watch? do you think that women who do not sit there and watch will be understood to be crazy or shrill or angry or foolish or unserious? do you think that there will be women who will be brilliant, original, and vital, whose brilliance and originality will be understood to be mad? do you think men who are not briliant, original, and vital, will be understood to be so? do you think that women who do not sit quietly but have effectively watched the men and taken notes and made extensive preparations to behave in ways to please them will please them and then be used to excoriate the other women? do you think you think there are women who will worry under these social conditions that to be respected is a nightmare like being mocked? do you think that women will know the boundaries which circumscribe their behavior and know full well the social consequences of exceeding these boundaries? do you think women will not be divided about how to be in the boundaries? do you think there will be a fumbling struggle for solidarity? do you think there are women who will worry about their clothes, their bodies, how to obscure these bodies, how to neutralize? do you think there are men who have never once worried about how to present themselves neutrally? do you think there will be many aggressions, minor and major, of ommissions and attentions, of arrangements of bodies, of voices which speak or are silent, of ideas not said or said, of judgments made or not made, of occlusions and dominent visions, of sexual aggressions, minor and major?

*: ? 

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What is a quote? A quote (cognate with quota) is a cut, a section, a slice of someone else’s orange. You suck the slice, toss the rind, skate away. Part of what you enjoy in a documentary technique is the sense of banditry. To loot someone else’s life or sentences and make off with a point of view, which is called ‘objective’; because you can make anything into an object by treating it this way, is exciting and dangerous.

Anne Carson, ”Foam (Essay with Rhapsody): On the Sublime in Longinus and Antonioni”

“Quotations in my writing,” said Walter Benjamin on page 570 of volume 1 of his Collected Works, “are like robbers by the roadside who make an armed attack and relieve the idle passerby of his convictions.”

(via invisiblestories)

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18.

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"I returned the Van Gogh to its rack and picked up the volume standing next to it. It was a book on Botticelli. I turned the pages. "The Birth of Venus"-never one of my favorites. "Mars and Venus," that loveliness so passionately denounced by poor Ruskin at the height of his long-drawn sexual tragedy. The marvelously rich and intricate "Calumny of Apelles." And then a somewhat less familiar and not very good picture, "Judith." My attention was arrested and I gazed in fascination, not at the pale neurotic heroine or her attendant, not at the victim's hairy head or the vernal landscape in the background, but at the purplish silk of Judith's pleated bodice and long wind-blown skirts." - Aldous Huxley

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