misc

• Any kind of polemics fail from the outset to assume the attitude of thinking…thinking is thinking only when it pursues whatever speaks for a subject. [Heidegger]
• Michel Foucault: I like discussions, and when I am asked questions, I try to answer them. It’s true that I don’t like to get involved in polemics. If I open a book and see that the author is accusing an adversary of “infantile leftism” I shut it again right away. That’s not my way of doing things; I don’t belong to the world of people who do things that way. I insist on this difference as something essential: a whole morality is at stake, the one that concerns the search for truth and the relation to the other.
• "Before words, before expressions, always the phenomena first, and then the concepts!" [-Heidegger ,History Concept of Time]
• 'words were originally magic and to this day words have retained much of their ancient magical power...words provoke affects and are in general the means of mutual influence among men...Thus we shall not deprecate the use of words among men." [Freud]
• '...we assume it is in their power not to be ignorant, since they have the power of taking care.' [Aristotle, NE, BKIII, Ch. 5]
• '...the thing is to find a truth which is true for me, to find the idea for which I can live and die.' [Kierkegaard]
• 'I can think the possibility of the unthinkable by dint of the unreason of the real' [Meillassoux]

• El hombre, dicen, es un animal racional. No sé por qué no se haya dicho que es un animal afectivo o sentimental. Y acaso lo que de los demás animales le diferencia sea más el sentimiento que no la razón. Más veces he visto razonar a un gato que no reír o llorar. [-Unamuno]
• Y toda esa trágica batalla del hombre por salvarse, ese inmortal anhelo de inmortalidad que le hizo al hombre Kant dar aquel salto inmortal de que os decía, todo eso no es más que una batalla por la conciencia. [-Unamuno]
• "Deep down I have probably never drawn great enjoyment from fiction, from reading novels, for example, beyond the pleasure takin in analyzing the play of writing, or else certain naive moments of identification."..."telling or inventing stories is something that deep down does not interest me particularly." [Derrida, This Strange Institution Called Literature]
• 'There are validity claims and they should be taken seriously. But...the difficulty is precisely that before we can debate these claims, we must be able to hear them and that before these claims can claim anything, they need quite literally to be understood...Validity does not come apart from meaning.' [Viskar]
• 'good entertaining ends without detaining' [Odysseus]
• 'Men's lives are short. The hard man and his cruelties will be cursed behind his back, and mocked in death. But one whose heart and ways are kind-of him strangers will bear report to the wide world' [Odysseus]
• "and death is less bitter than to live on and never have the beauty that we came here laying siege to so many days' {suitors, Odyssey, Bk XXI]
• Rage-Goddess, sing the rage...
• "for this alone is lacking even to God, to make undone things that have been done" [Aristotle, NE, BkVI]