Unqualified Trauma

1. Disinterested Pleasure:

To be sure: Rapture has its value, as does disinterestedness. They need not oppose one another.

Images are much too tantalizing for me to regard them any more - especially those we find on television.

Good art will always be invested with a sensibility that detaches itself from sensuality (explicitly Kantian, I know).

Television, by the fact of its self-supporting structure, must work explicitly to exploit sensuousness. Neither television, the internet, nor advertising, as a result, can never really be trusted for anything but a guarantee that it will continue to perpetuate itself.

Displeasure is no reason to reject something, no reason at all. In fact, it is not even in the realm of possible reasons that one should reject something. Even more, one would possibly be safest in rejecting only that which pleased one, or rather, that which promises to please one but which really only has its own interests in mind. Promises, on the whole, are never selfless.

2. What is required of socialism:

Equality of distribution is not contradictory to the continued existence of fine taste.

"Objects" should be made available to all, and always.

Art, however, is always inscribed upon the object. This inscription, too, must be made in a fine hand, and does not always follow the objects that it might possibly be inscribed on.

Water should be available to everyone, without cost, and without pomp. As should televisions, canvas, paper, music players, etc... but do not mistake this necessary multiplicity and equality for the abandoning of discretion. Art begins where exploitation ends.

3. On speaking in public:

Rather than "speak only when something needs to be said" (which would fail and become meaningless if analyzed or attempted to be put into practice), one should always speak as if one were alone. The results are similar, but the latter is at least practicable. It is what we may wish to call authenticity. A talk with a close friend of ours reminds us that not all interactions need consist of such grand showings and engagements such as we often feel prompted to perform.

There are some who are fearful of speaking in public at all, there are others who will speak according to what the situation asks for and will speak when it is easiest to speak, (sometimes those of the former category are included here as well, because often they will be compelled to speak) and then there are those who can only say what is both difficult and meaningful. They think nothing of being brought to shame, but at the same time, have eyes to the situation as a whole.

I speak most eloquently and honestly when I am alone - the irony is that I rarely say anything.

4. Jean-Jacques:

One may wish to accuse an author, who (explicitly or implicitly) professes to be honest, of lying and thus enact a symptomatic reading of a text, but one should not believe that one is adding or expanding the text in some way. One is only committing a libel. The issue with textual libel is that it does not matter so much that one's accusations are true, as is the question of what has been gained by such a criticism. I have found that such accusations ("he is lying" "She is forgetting to mention a historically/culturally relevant fact") do no more than give the accuser a dim aura of perspecuity that one merely gapes at, and then promptly forgets.

Rousseau, and one never predicts such things, has made me feel honesty, and has made me comfortable in my eccentricities, what I thought were follies, and which I may now cultivate rather than erase.

5. (A question: What is the difference between comedy and absurdity? I had an aphorism about it, but I am dissatisfied - instead I leave it up to vous, readers)