Thursday, March 12, 2015

From "The Western Exclusion of Islam," The Malady of Wisdom (17th Installment), Abdelwahab Meddeb (Trans. Pierre Joris and Charlotte Mandell):
It is the exercise of injustice in impunity that feeds hatred and horrifying terrorism, which remains the weapon of the impoverished, the weak, those who have exhausted the resources of the law.
Tom Allen, "On Lisa Jeschke's Manning" (Hi Zero 31):
A consciousness formed from the same blood and fire as that which it would overcome will inevitably risk falling into the same modes of judgement and duration that hold the world as it is.   
And the larger passage this comes from:
Law needs a future. It must generate objects that correspond to it. These objects mark the limit of each new statute, and do so to the extent that the marking of this limit is inseparable from their existence. Such things must remain unchanged as they progress through time; boundary stones are useless if they erode. The legalistic repetition that this ensues, in and outside prison, is, for some, the very definition of myth and therefore of domination. This myth, and the violence that is sedimented within it, is ingrained in the subject's capacity for experience. This ontology poses a question for a poetry that seeks to undo domination. This question, as I feel it, concerns how a subject is to relate to an object of legal violence in a manner that does not repeat that which produced it. A consciousness formed from the same blood and fire as that which it would overcome will inevitably risk falling into the same modes of judgement and duration that hold the world as it is.   
Passage from same re pain:
Under hopelessly complex social conditions the knowledge of the irrefutable presence of pain is knowledge of the truth of these conditions. 
Same (Allen) re value and the name (qts fr Grundrisse):
For the Marx of The Grundrisse, this same relation between quality and the name was a feature of the ontology of money. As pure circulating value, cash is pure liquid and is free to form the external referent of any and every thing. It is the baptism-bowl of commodity society: "Money is in the first instance that expresses the relation of equality between all exchange values: in money they all have the same name." What is realized in the sale of the commodity is not the name of the object, is not anything that could potentially bring its essence into fulfillment, but rather it is the brute fact of its instrumentation under capitalism. Objects in exchange, as they express their existence in and through others, are realised only as exchanged: "What money circulates is not commodities but their titles of ownership; and what is realized in the opposite direction in this circulation, whether by purchase or sale, is again not the commodities, but their prices." The context through which commodities express their value and through which they contain their other is a false universal. The whole, here, betrays its own objects as it realises them. The circulated object is commensurate with the prisoner. Both move through and against the name that realises them in and through the structures of their domination. 
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