“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Saturday, December 31, 2011

Thought for the Day

From Graham Harman:

How do you know when the attempt is being made to turn something into a master discourse? When the claim is made that there is nothing outside the master discourse. When the master discourse can supposedly account for everything and its opposite. When the master discourse claims that it has no real enemies, because it actually already agrees with what its enemy is saying. (Deleuze’s attempt to turn Leibniz into Spinoza in Le Pli was an alarming sign even during his lifetime.) Derrida was the former figure on whose behalf this attempt was made, and Deleuze seems to be the new one.



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