“If you want to do something good for society,…to avoid all totalitarian threats…, we should all go to this experience of accepting that at some day everything will finish. …This pushes you to strengthen ethical activity.” https://t.co/rSSkWWN9r7 On #Melancholia & #vonTrier

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1142466786132144128 https://ift.tt/2XMvxw4

The task is not to build a coalition between the radical Left and the fascist Right, but to cut off the working-class oxygen supply to the alt-right by addressing their voters. The way to achieve this is…to do exactly what Sanders and Corbyn were doing

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1074377384898502656 https://ift.tt/2Y6VN3D

communism is…the name…of the difficult task of breaking out of the confines of the market-and- state frame…: It’s just the simple thing that’s hard, so hard to do, as Brecht put it in his ‘In Praise of Communism’. …The problem/deadlock is its own solution

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1072247333633568769 https://ift.tt/2l7TifA

Robespierre…expressed in a touching way the simple faith in the eternal Idea of freedom which persists through all defeats, without which, as was clear to him, a revolution ‘is just a noisy crime that destroys another crime’ https://t.co/B9VgClTUWm

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1071489338620428289 https://ift.tt/2JxqruM

There can be a socialist anti-Semitism, there cannot be a communist one. …Communism is to be opposed to socialism, which, in place of the egalitarian collective, offers a solidary organic community. …Nazism was national socialism, not national communism

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1071076367666561025 https://ift.tt/32oWLHE

Where I find Arendt problematic is in her notion that this was pure bureaucratic evil: that individuals behaved as anonymous bureaucrats - caught in a machine, doing their duty and so on. The implied link between Kantian…unconditional duty & the Nazi executors is..false.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1070342783938945025 https://ift.tt/2XRfvQZ

Banality of evil…means the people who performed these horrible acts…were..ordinary. …You will not arrive at the dimension of Nazi evil by doing…psychological analysis… It was anonymous objectivized evil. …That’s the positive aspect of Arendt’s thesis.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1070327432681414657 https://ift.tt/2S2YzRY

Nazism is the ultimate perversion of the logic of supreme good. Nazism is not about the ultimate idiosyncratic assertion of autonomy. Nazism means that everything, even the worst crimes, should be undertaken for the good of the nation.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1070071496616353792 https://ift.tt/2S3BNJZ

Instead of confronting the deadlock, you pass to the act. Suicide is…this false passage a l’ acte. The symbolic deadlock becomes so unbearable that simply by killing yourself you resolve it. …Suicide bombings and so on, all these phenomena can be explained precisely by this

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1069149932110602242 https://ift.tt/2L9aWLC

from the perspective of someone with a number of friends who lived in…anti-authoritarian communes —..this apparent abolishment of authority generated an even more stifling authority: a kind of fake egalitarian community where prohibitions were even more radical and intrusive.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1069000187119616003 https://ift.tt/2LGHFHU

In order to have a happy love relationship, you must have a third common cause. You don’t see eye to eye — rather, you both look to the common cause, and this is how you can be happy in your interpersonal relationship. This was [overlooked by] the hippie movement

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1068637297170702336 https://ift.tt/2XSkxMQ

once Sisyphus reaches his goal, he experiences the fact that the real aim of his activity is the way itself, the alternation of ascent and descent.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1068580427303141377 https://ift.tt/30cpu0w

demanding from the people to renounce ordinary pleasures, provides an enjoyment of its own; [on authoritarianism]

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1068274656715534336 https://ift.tt/2LIp0eT

‘The animal wrests the whip from its master and whips itself in order to become master, not knowing that it is only a fantasy produced by a new knot in the master’s whiplash.’ Is this remark by Kafka not the..definition of what went wrong in..communist states of the 20th century?

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1067916128872267783 https://ift.tt/2RP1b5N

Working through is working through the resistance [against the analysis], turning it from the obstacle into the very resort of analysis

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1067828041194373121 https://ift.tt/2NqpPeG