In accordance with the strange customs of her people, she had been raised to believe in herself. Of course, in accordance with those same customs, her parents had long ago lost all faith. All of the histories of her people, and, before that, all the stories of the tribe, were histories of failure, stories of defeat, through which the only moral to be drawn could be that you will survive, despite everything. It is no wonder, then, that the word for belief in her native tongue was the same as the word for spite. In most contexts, it made no difference what she meant.

Some people like me. Some people don't. They are both right, and both wrong, about different things.

The universe uses our concepts to think.
Emotions are how it feels.

He would now set about to do deliberately
what he had once done only desperately.

Things make facts possible.
People make acts necessary.

We know things only through the facts they make possible.
We master people only through the acts they make necessary.

In some facts, some possibilities are immediately apparent. Intuitively, we call these things objects.
In some acts, some necessities come immediately to the surface. Institutionally, we call these people subjects.

Science is to our intuitions as politics to our institutions. But

there are scientific institutions and political intuitions.

Inuitions, we might say, are essentially scientific but emergently political, while institutions are essentially political and science merely emerges from them.

The institutionalization of science threatens to politicize it. There's a danger there.

But the presence of intuition in politics opens it to science. That's the saving power.

Intuition and institution are the media of immediacy—that "through which" objects are known and subjects mastered "immediately", to use the Kantian idiom. Technology and propaganda are, of course, the corresponding "media".

(This, of course, refers to Heidegger's reading of Hölderlin.)

You're affronted because machines now speak for you?
After everything they've already done for you?

The people we master as subjects eventually become the emotions through which we feel them.

The things we can know about an object are contingent on the concepts we have to think them.

Some books should be given tenure.
Then let them say what they want.

"Meanwhile, SPRING, which has been approaching for several pages, is at last here." (William Carlos Williams, 1923).

We are forever chasing the origin through the tradition.

Twenty years ago, I wanted to be a public intellectual because I thought some people would think I'm right and others that I'm wrong but everyone would learn something from the debate. Today, I'm glad I failed because being a public intellectual means letting some people think you're good and others that you're bad and accepting that no one has to learn anything at all from that.

"What is behind
your facade?"

"Just me,
holding it up."

In English, the root of boredom
is drudgery.

In Danish, it is sadness.

Intuition is that through which
objects are known immediately.

Institution is that through which
subjects are mastered immediately.

Intuition and institution are
the media of immediacy.

Imagination is the immediacy
of their mediation.

If you want your privacy, you have to keep it
like a secret.

Authenticity is not a moral center. You cannot be your own authority.

Creativity is not a causal process. The work does not become its own creation.

* * *

This one was fun to make. The first strophe about authenticity is somewhat classical, even conservative, and the rather Bergsonian romanticism of the second emerged gradually with some very deliberate pangrammatical craftiness, to yield a subtly radical result.

First, the "moral center" was transposed into a "causal process"; then "your" "being" became a "becoming" (of some as yet unspecified "it" in my notes). After a while "creativity" presented itself as the pangrammatical supplement of "authenticity" (an impersonal becoming to balance that personal sort of being).

It took a walk to identify "the work" as "your" dangerous supplement. (I considered "an art does not become its own work" but I wanted creativity/creation to match authenticity/authority.) At this point I realized that things had gotten outright anti-Oedipal. "It is at work everywhere," as I recall. "Eating, shitting, fucking. What a mistake to ever call it the Id." Not Ego-Id, then, but your-work. Your. Fucking. Work.

Do it.

Courage shines.
It brightens the room.

Cowardice hangs in the air.
It stinks.

Wisdom is the stillness
of the mind
in which things
are what they are.

Love is the commotion
of the heart
through which we
become ourselves.