Baldwin

You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who ever had been alive. Only if we face these open wounds in ourselves can we understand them in other people.

James Baldwin

It has always been much easier (because it has always seemed much safer) to give a name to the evil without than to locate the terror within. And yet, the terror within is far truer and far more powerful than any of our labels: the labels change, the terror is constant. And this terror has something to do with that irreducible gap between the self one invents — the self one takes oneself as being, which is, however, and by definition, a provisional self — and the undiscoverable self which always has the power to blow the provisional self to bits.

Echoing Bruce Lee’s assertion that “to become different from what we are, we must have some awareness of what we are,” Baldwin turns his critical yet uncynical intellect toward our capacity for self-transformation — the most difficult and rewarding of our inner resources comprising our collective potentiality:

It is perfectly possible — indeed, it is far from uncommon — to go to bed one night, or wake up one morning, or simply walk through a door one has known all one’s life, and discover, between inhaling and exhaling, that the self one has sewn together with such effort is all dirty rags, is unusable, is gone: and out of what raw material will one build a self again? The lives of men — and, therefore, of nations — to an extent literally unimaginable, depend on how vividly this question lives in the mind. It is a question which can paralyze the mind, of course; but if the question does not live in the mind, then one is simply condemned to eternal youth, which is a synonym for corruption.

Baldwin/Popova

“I’m not interested in anybody’s guilt. Guilt is a luxury we can no longer afford. I know you didn’t do it, and I didn’t do it either, but I am responsible for it because I am a man and a citizen of this country and you are responsible for it, too, for the very same reason: as long as my children face the future they face, and come to the ruin that they come to, your children are very greatly in danger, too. They are endangered above all by the moral apathy which pretends it isn’t happening. This does something terrible to us.

Anyone who is trying to be conscious must begin to be conscious of that apathy and must begin to dismiss the vocabulary which we’ve used so long to cover it up, to lie about the way things are. We must make the great effort to realize that there is no such thing as a Negro problem – but simply a menaced boy. If we could do this, we could save this country, we could save the world.”

James Baldwin

Necropolitics

 

Pascal

"When I consider the brief span of my life absorbed into the eternity which comes before and after – as the remembrance of a guest that tarrieth but a day – the small space I occupy and which I see swallowed up in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I know nothing and which know nothing of me, I take fright and am amazed to see myself here rather than there: there is no reason for me to be here rather than there, now rather than then. Who put me here? By whose command and act were this time and place allotted to me?" [1]


"For, after all, what is man in nature? A nothing compared to the infinite, a whole compared to the nothing, a middle point between all and nothing, infinitely remote from an understanding of the extremes; the end of things and their principles are unattainably hidden from him in impenetrable secrecy." [2]


"When I see the blind and wretched state of man, when I survey the whole universe in its dumbness and man left to himself with no light, as though lost in this corner of the universe, without knowing who put him there, what he has come to do, what will become of him when he dies, incapable of knowing anything, I am moved to terror, like a man transported in his sleep to some terrifying desert island, who wakes up quite lost and with no means of escape." [3]


“The eternal silence of these infinite spaces fills me with dread.”

Blaise Pascal

Andrewism

 

https://quomodocumque.files.wordpress.com/2008/09/wallace-amherst_review-the_planet.pdf

‘Agemben’s analysis indicates that modern bio-political power maintains liberal order through the exclusion of bodies and minds that fail to confirm to the liberal vision...inclusion in the mainstream can only be achieved through a demonstration of the individual’s ability to function as a rational self-actualising liberal subject. In this kind of order, a benevolent response denotes exclusion from the mainstream. Moreover, as people with disabilities report, the struggle to avoid benevolence and achieve inclusion becomes the constant feature of the disability experience...For Agamben, homo sacer is a figure who is alive, and yet beyond law, inhabiting a place where all normal rights, expectations, connections, honour and meaning are suspended. Because homo sacer is a diminished life form...it becomes ‘an object of violence that exceeds the sphere both of law and of sacrifice.’

Penelope Weller

https://pacificpilgrim.files.wordpress.com/2016/07/simone-weil-the-love-of-god-and-affliction.pdf

There is a natural alliance between truth and affliction, because both of them appear as mute suppliants, condemned to stand speechless in our presence.

Simone Weil

Memory, it turns out, is one of the major factors mediating the dialogue between sensation and emotional experience. Our memories of past experience become encoded into triggers that act as switchers on the rail of psychoemotional response, directing the incoming train of present experience in the direction of one emotional destination or another.

Sternberg writes:

Mood is not homogeneous like cream soup. It is more like Swiss cheese, filled with holes. The triggers are highly specific, tripped by sudden trails of memory: a faint fragrance, a few bars of a tune, a vague silhouette that tapped into a sad memory buried deep, but not completely erased. These sensory inputs from the moment float through layers of time in the parts of the brain that control memory, and they pull out with them not only reminders of sense but also trails of the emotions that were first connected to the memory. These memories become connected to emotions, which are processed in other parts of the brain: the amygdala for fear, the nucleus accumbens for pleasure — those same parts that the anatomists had named for their shapes. And these emotional brain centers are linked by nerve pathways to the sensory parts of the brain and to the frontal lobe and hippocampus — the coordinating centers of thought and memory. The same sensory input can trigger a negative emotion or a positive one, depending on the memories associated with it. 

This is where stress comes in — much like memory mediates how we interpret and respond to various experiences, a complex set of biological and psychological factors determine how we respond to stress. Some types of stress can be stimulating and invigorating, mobilizing us into action and creative potency; others can be draining and incapacitating, leaving us frustrated and hopeless. This dichotomy of good vs. bad stress, Sternberg notes, is determined by the biology undergirding our feelings — by the dose and duration of the stress hormones secreted by the body in response to the stressful stimulus. She explains the neurobiological machinery behind this response: As soon as the stressful event occurs, it triggers the release of the cascade of hypothalamic, pituitary, and adrenal hormones — the brain’s stress response.

It also triggers the adrenal glands to release epinephrine, or adrenaline, and the sympathetic nerves to squirt out the adrenaline-like chemical norepinephrine all over the body: nerves that wire the heart, and gut, and skin. So, the heart is driven to beat faster, the fine hairs of your skin stand up, you sweat, you may feel nausea or the urge to defecate. But your attention is focused, your vision becomes crystal clear, a surge of power helps you run — these same chemicals released from nerves make blood flow to your muscles, preparing you to sprint. All this occurs quickly. If you were to measure the stress hormones in your blood or saliva, they would already be increased within three minutes of the event. In experimental psychology tests, playing a fast-paced video game will make salivary cortisol increase and norepinephrine spill over into venous blood almost as soon as the virtual battle begins. But if you prolong the stress, by being unable to control it or by making it too potent or long-lived, and these hormones and chemicals still continue to pump out from nerves and glands, then the same molecules that mobilized you for the short haul now debilitate you.

Popova 

Wendy Brown

The new form of power orchestrating the conduct of subjects—and the importance of governance in activating this power—is apparent in the grammar used to describe and enact it. The ugly words “flexibilization” and “responsibilization” have their roots in human capacities associated with modest autonomy. To be flexible or responsible is to have capacities for adaptation or accountability that, as Nietzsche and not only Kant remind us, are nominative signs of sovereignty: only a moral agent understood as willing its actions can bear responsibility for itself. But when the act of being responsible is linguistically converted into the administered condition of being responsibilized, it departs from the domain of agency and instead governs the subject through an external moral injunction—through demands emanating from an invisible elsewhere. The word “responsibilization” takes a step further this move from a substance-based adjective to a process-based transitive verb, shifting it from an individual capacity to a governance project. Responsibilization signals a regime in which the singular human capacity for responsibility is deployed to constitute and govern subjects and through which their conduct is organized and measured, remaking and reorienting them for a neoliberal order. Again, governance facilitates and imposes responsibilization, but the powers orchestrating this process are nowhere in discursive sight, a disappearing act that is both generic to neoliberalism and particular to responsibilization itself. Responsibilization is not an inherent entailment of devolution; there are decidedly more empowering and more democratic potentials for devolved decision making. Demands for local authority and decision making, it is well to remember, may emanate from both the Right and the Left, from anarchists or from religious fundamentalists. However, when conjoined, devolution and responsibilization produce an order in which the social effects of power—constructed and governed subjects—appear as morally burdened agents. Through this bundling of agency and blame, the individual is doubly responsibilized: it is expected to fend for itself (and blamed for its failure to thrive) and expected to act for the well-being of the economy (and blamed for its failure to thrive). Not only, then, are Greek workers, French pensioners, California and Michigan public employees, American Social Security recipients, British university students, European new immigrants, and public goods as a whole made to appear as thieving dependents operating in the old world of entitlement, rather than self-care, they are blamed for sinking states into debt, thwarting growth, and bringing the global economy to the brink of ruin. Perhaps most importantly, even when they are not blamed, even when they have comported properly with the norms of responsibilization, austerity measures taken in the name of macroeconomic health may legitimately devastate their livelihoods or lives. Thus, responsibilized individuals are required to provide for themselves in the context of powers and contingencies radically limiting their ability to do so. But devolution and responsibilization also make individuals expendable and unprotected. This turn in neoliberal political rationality signals more than the dismantling of welfare-state logic or even that of the liberal social contract: once more, it expresses its precise inversion.

Wendy Brown

"The refugees managed to protect themselves from swarms of killers for a couple of days, until April 21, at 3 am, when gendarmes started throwing grenades and shooting at them. Interahamwe and other militia together with their supporters carrying clubs, machetes, spears, and axes started to finish off those who were not killed by bullets.

More than 50,000 Tutsi were killed that morning.

Only a few, suspected to be around 34, survived.On the walls of the main building are photos, testimonies, and quotes. One of the most unforgettable quotes was that of Felicien Ntabengwa: "If you knew me, and if you really knew yourself, you would not have killed me."

 https://www.mobbingportal.com/LeymannV&V1990(2).pdf

"It’s how PTSD feels often — like you don’t fit inside your own body. Like you’ve been malnourished. Like you are retreating back into the ground, back into the tiny seed you first were. Rewinding and unwinding the ribbons of time''.

Kayli Kunkel