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Either Reformist or Terrorist: If You Are Terror I Am Your Grandfather

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Abhijit Naskar

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“Like all disappearing forms, art seeks to duplicate itself by means of simulation, but it will nevertheless soon be gone, leaving behind an immense museum of artificial art and abandoning the field completely to advertising. A dizzying eclecticism of form, a dizzying eclecticism of pleasure - such, already, was the agenda of the baroque. For the baroque, however, the vortex of artifice has a fleshly aspect. Like the practitioners of the baroque, we too are irrepressible creators of images, but secretly we are iconoclasts - not in the sense that we destroy images, but in the sense that we manufacture a profusion of images in which there is nothing to see. Most present-day images - be they video images, paintings, products of the plastic arts, or audiovisual or synthesized images - are literally images in which there is nothing to see. They leave no trace, cast no shadow, and have no consequences. The only feeling one gets from such images is that behind each one there is something that has disappeared. The fascination of a monochromatic picture is the marvellous absence of form - the erasure, though still in the form of art, of all aesthetic syntax. Similarly, the fascination of trans sexuality is the erasure - though in the form of spectacle - of sexual difference. These are images that conceal nothing, that reveal nothing - that have a kind of negative intensity. The only benefit of a Campbell's soup can by Andy Warhol (and it is an immense benefit) is that it releases us from the need to decide between beautiful and ugly, between real and unreal, between transcendence and immanence. Just as Byzantine icons made it possible to stop asking whether God existed - without, for all that, ceasing to believe in him.”

ArtAdvertisingIndifferenceBaroque
Book:The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena
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“The simulation of Western values is universal once one gets beyond the boundaries of our culture. Is it not true, though, that in our heart of hearts we ourselves, who are neither Alakaluf nor Aboriginal, neither Dogon nor Arab, fail signally to take our own values seriously? Do we not embrace them with the same affectation and inner unconcern - and are we not ourselves equally unimpressed by all our shows of force, all our technological and ideological pretensions? Nevertheless, it will be a long time before the utopian abstraction of our universal vision of differences is demolished in our own eyes, whereas all other cultures have already given their own response - namely, universal indifference.”

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Book:The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena
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“With indifference people are continuously breeding a society full of disparity – they are constantly aiding the creation of more inequality. We are constantly making way for a world where some parents give their kids x-box to soothe them, for their birthday, and many more parents are forced to use leftover cardboard boxes as cradle for their babies because they don't even have a roof over their head. This is our so called civilization - this is our so called modern humanity - shame on us - shame on us as a species - shame on us as civilized beings - shame on us as thinking and breathing individuals of conscience. No more - no more - we must break this disparity - and we must do it right now - and we are not going to do it by fighting over whose ideology is the best - we are going to do it only by taking actual responsibility of our society - by taking actual responsibility of the world - we are going to do it by acting as a living cure for those disparities, by using our own resources as means to erase those gaps however we can. Only with action born from our heart can we end disparity, not with talks of argument and inaction of complacency.”

Brainy QuotesHumanitarianIndifferenceSocial ResponsibilitySocial WorkComplacencyGeopoliticsHumanitarian CrisisHumanitarian AidHuman Rights Violations
Book:The Shape of A Human: Our America Their America
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“His stomach turned inside out, like a glove, and he vomited. It wasn't disagreeable at all. Almost like a liberation, in fact. A kind of suicide, in a way. These particles of matter that showered from his mouth, after he had thought them consumed and digested, did not disgust him. No, he was completely indifferent to them; and to everything else, for that matter. It was only when he vomited that he could be indifferent even to life itself.”

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Book:The Tenant
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