Surrealpolitik

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There were 9 results from your search for keyword(s): 'Community'.

  1. Despite battles with landlords, harassment by tourists, and mounting police terror, the Beats and their allies -- old-time hoboes, jazz musicians, oyster pirates, prostitutes, drug-addicts, winos, homosexuals, bums and other outcasts -- maintained a vital community based on mutual aid, and in which being different was an asset rather than a liability.

    Source: Dancin' in the Streets, p. 9
  2. Gift-giving has the virtue of a surpassing of the subject who gives, but in exchange for the object given, the subject appropriates the surpassing: He regards his virtue, that which he had the capacity for, as an asset, as a power that he now possesses. he enriches himself with a contempt for riches, and what he proves to be miserly of is in fact his generosity.

    But he would not be able by himself to acquire a power constituted by a relinquishment of power: IF he destroyed the object in solitude, in silence, no sort of power would result from the act; there would not be anything for the subject but a separation fro power without any compensation. But if he destroys the object in from of another person or if he gives it away, the one who gives has actually acquired, in the other's eyes, the power of giving or destroying...He is rich for having ostentatiously consumed what is wealth only if it is consumed.

    Source: The Accursed Share, p. 69
  3. Gigantic dredges were on the march, mechanical shovels amiably-pitilessly-innocently-inexorably devoured the forest, swallowing the earth, spitting it out again at a great distance, exhumed the dead (reverently, ever so reverently), tearing down churches and villages and castles, and Käthe got "the shudders" when she drove through Neu-Iffenhoven with its new houses and churches. To shudder was good.

    Source: The Safety Net, p. 71
  4. Indeed, in the history of Surrealism between 1919 (from the composition of Les Champs magnétiques in the shadow of the Great War and the counter with the tragedy of war trauma as captured in the proto-Surrealist récit 'Sujet' (1918), in the shadow of the death of Jacques Vaché to whom Les Champs magnétiques is dedicated) and the outbreak of World War II, at each occasion of significant self-definition in relation to the political realm, there would be a crisis and concomitant sense of failure in the movement as it would reconcile its interiority and thereby its space of difference and thus some would leave (Philippe Soupault and Artaud) or be 'expelled' (André Masson and Michel Leiris). The eventual split between Breton and Louis Aragon in 1931-32 after the debacle of the Congress of Kharkov can, certainly, be represented as the choice between a Stalinist Communism or moral independence, but it could equally be understood as a rupture in the integrity of the group thereby foregrounding an important aspect of the importance of the group in Surrealist experience, namely, the narcissistic dimension of group cohesion.

    From chapter: Failure and Community: Preliminary Questions on the Political in the Culture of Surrealism, M. Stone-Richards
    Source: Surrealism, Politics and Culture, p. 301-302
  5. Literary texts explore the limits of language and playfully engage with the border to forbidden territories beyond the empire of the Symbolic Order.

    From chapter: Anna-Margaretha Horatschek, 'Logicized' Taboo: Abjection in George Eliot's Daniel Deronda
    Source: Taboo and Transgression in British Literature from the Renaissance to the Present, p. 194
  6. One might even say that potlatch is the specific manifestation, the meaningful form of luxury. Beyond the archaic forms, luxury has actually retained the functional value of potlatch, creative of rank. Luxury still determines the rank of the one who displays it, and there is no exalted rank that does not require a display. But the petty calculations of those who enjoy luxury are surpassed in every way. In wealth, what shines through the defects extends the brilliance of the sun and provokes passion. It is not what is imagined by those who have reduced it to their poverty; it is the return of life's immensity to the truth of exuberance. This truth destroys those who have taken it for what it is not; the least that one can say is that the present forms of wealth make a shambles and a human mockery of those who think they own it. In this respect, present-day society is huge counterfeit, where this truth of wealth has underhandedly slipped into extreme poverty. The true luxury and the real potlatch of our times falls to the poverty-stricken, that is, to the individual who lies down and scoffs. A genuine luxury requires the complete contempt for riches, the somber indifference of the individual who refuses work and makes his life on the one hand an infinitely ruined splendor, and on the other, a silent insult to the laborious lie of the rich. Beyond a military exploitation, a religious mystification and a capitalist misappropriation, henceforth no one can rediscover the meaning of wealth, the explosiveness that it heralds, unless it is in the splendor of rags and the somber challenge of indifference. One might say, finally, that the lie destines life's exuberance to revolt.

    Source: The Accursed Share, p. 76-77
  7. PP: What distinction do you draw between the universal and the global?

    JB: In the global, all differences fade and de-intensify, giving way to a pure and simple circulation of exchanges. All liberties fade before the mere liberation of exchange. Globalization and universality don't go together; they might be said, rather, to be mutually exclusive. Globalization is the globalization of technologies, the market, tourism, information. Universality is the universality of values, human rights, freedoms, culture, democracy. Globalization seems irreversible; the universal might be said, rather, to be on its way out...

    At the end of this process, there's no longer any difference between the global and the universal. The universal itself is globalized: democracy, human rights, circulate precisely like any global product, like oil or capital.

    Source: Paroxysm, p. 11
  8. This law of physical reciprocity which we call charity the Indians observe naturally, and without a trace of pity. Those who have nothing because they lost their harvest, because their corn has burned, because their father left them nothing, or for whatever reason which they have no need to explain, arrive at dawn at the houses of those who have something. Immediately the mistress of the house brings them whatever she has. No one looks at anyone, neither the one who gives nor the one who receives. After he has eaten, the beggar leaves without thanking or looking at anyone.

    Source: The Peyote Dance, p. 5
  9. [During the Restoration] Whereas the family remained the quintessential unit of the private sphere and its boundaries could only be violated by official bodies in very special cases, public sites of discourse became the domains of "policing" by the Societies for the Reformation of Manners, which were broadly middle-class voluntary associations trying to promote civilized refinement, to change collective identities and to purge the public space of transgressive behavior.

    From chapter: Uwe Boker, Taboo and Transgression: A Socio-Historical and Socio-Cultural Perspective
    Source: Taboo and Transgression in British Literature from the Renaissance to the Present, p. 31-32