Rachel Edidin, editor of Dark Horse Comics staged a revolution to try and usurp the so-called “idiot nerd girl” meme. I find this delightful.
(via textualcomplex)
Rachel Edidin, editor of Dark Horse Comics staged a revolution to try and usurp the so-called “idiot nerd girl” meme. I find this delightful.
(via textualcomplex)
The call to infinite responsibility confirms the subjectivity in its apologetic position. The dimension of its interiority is brought from the level of the subjective to that of being. Judgment no longer alienates the subjectivity, for it does not make it enter into and dissolve in the order of an objective morality, but leaves it a dimension whereby it deepens in itself. To utter ‘I,’ to affirm the irreducible singularity in which the apology is pursued, means to possess a privileged place with regard to responsibilities for which no one can replace me and from which no one can release me. To be unable to shirk: this is the I…The accomplishing of the I qua I and morality constitute one sole and same process in being: morality comes to birth not in equality, but in the fact that infinite exigencies, that of serving the poor, the stranger, the widow, and the orphan, converge at one point of the universe.
The idea of infinity is produced in the opposition of conversation, in sociality. The relation with the face, with the other absolutely other which I can not contain, the other in this sense infinite, is nonetheless my Idea, a commerce. But the relation is maintained without violence, in peace with the absolute alterity. The ‘resistance’ of the other does not do violence to me, does not act negatively; it has a positive structure: ethical. The first revelation of the other, presupposed in all other relations with him, does not consist in grasping him in his negative resistance and in circumventing him by ruse. I do not struggle with a faceless god, but I respond to his expression, to his revelation.
The Other remains infinitely transcendent, infinitely foreign; his face in which his epiphany is produced and which appeals to me breaks with the world that can be common to us, whose virtualities are inscribed in our nature and developed by our existence.
Inasmuch as the access to beings concerns vision, it dominates those beings, exercises a power over them. A thing is given, offers itself to me. In gaining access to it I maintain myself within the same.
The face is present in its refusal to be contained. In this sense it cannot be comprehended, that is, encompassed. It is neither seen nor touched—for in visual or tactile sensation the identity of the I envelops the alterity of the object, which becomes precisely a content.
The Other is not other with a relative alterity as are, in comparison, even ultimate species, which mutually exclude one another but still have place within the community of a genus—excluding one another by their definition, but calling for one another by this exclusion, across the community of their genus. The alterity of the Other does not depend on any quality that would distinguish him from me, for a distinction of this nature would precisely imply between us that community of genus which already nullifies alterity.
Integration in an economic world does not commit the interiority from which works proceed. This inner life does not die away like a straw fire, but it does not recognize itself in the existence attributed to it within economy. This is attested in the consciousness the person has of the tyranny of the State. The State awakens the person to a freedom it immediately violates. The State which realizes its essence in works slips toward tyranny and thus attests my absence from those works, which across the economic necessities return to me as alien. From the work I am only deduced and am already ill-understood, betrayed rather than expressed.
In laboring possession reduces to the same what at first presented itself as other. Despite the infinite extension of needs it makes possible economic existence remains within the same (just as animal existence). Its movement is centripetal.
Neither the separated being nor the infinite being is produced as an antithetical term. The interiority that ensures separation…must produce a being absolutely closed over upon itself, not deriving its isolation dialectically from its opposition to the Other. And this closedness must not prevent egress from interiority, so that exteriority could speak to it, reveal itself to it, in an unforeseeable movement which the isolation of the separated being could not provoke by simple contrast. In the separated being the door to the outside must hence be at the same time open and closed.
Egoism, enjoyment, sensibility, and the whole dimension of interiority—the articulations of separation—are necessary for the idea of Infinity, the relation with the Other which opens forth from the separated and finite being. Metaphysical Desire, which can be produced only in a separated, that is, enjoying, egoist, and satisfied being, is then not derived from enjoyment. But if the separated, that is, sentient being is necessary for the production of infinity and exteriority in metaphysics, its constitution as thesis or as antithesis, within a dialectical play, would destroy this exteriority. The infinite does not raise up the finite by opposition…union forms the counterpart of distinction among two terms of any relation.
labor itself, by virtue of which I live freely, ensuring myself against life’s uncertainty, does not bring life its final signification. It also becomes that from which I live. I live from the whole content of life—even from the labor which ensures the future; I live from my labor as I live from air, light, and bread. The limit case in which need prevails over enjoyment, the proletarian condition condemning to accursed labor in which the indigence of corporeal existence finds neither refuge nor leisure at home with itself, is the absurd world of Geworfenheit.
