"When there was a conflict between independence and obedience, I have often chosen the latter for the fear of losing the love of the people close to me. With the help of distance and time, I see now that the security I chose was a false security. If there is such a thing as security in a relationship, I am guessing that it would result from the capacity to sustain love and respect in the presence of dissent."
from Against Empire: Feminisms, Racism and the West:
p38: "There is too much complexity in ‘Asia’ for one term to hold it…Arab, Indian, Malay, Thai, Chinese, Japanese."
"Critiques are bounded by some of the same narrowed contours as the systems of power they seek to dismantle."
p39: "The tools of thinking are always in part tied to the repressive regimes they wish to challenge. I therefore continue to look for what I do not already know."
p41: "Deleuze… privileges difference over uniformity… and the nomad’s wanderings over the sedentary life."
p43: "Writing is an act of resistance."
"Deleuze privileges investigation more than knowing…"
"Claude Levi-Strauss says: "One cannot fully enjoy the other, identify with him, and yet at the same time remain different."
from White Fire: Social Autism in our Times (dr. 2006)
…to begin to investigate the need for superiority is nearly to have stepped down and into the rest of humanity.
From an interview by Katja Nicodemus in Die Zeit (March 16, 2006):
Today people still have the nerve to shoot a film like Cold Mountain (2003), a film that’s set in the 19th century in the southern states, where we see Nicole Kidman in a bonnet and not a single black person. And nobody gets excited. Insane.Also: The Prestige (2006).
Against Empire: Feminism, Racism and the West
pg 5: Israel, initially founded on the idea of freedom for Jews, is also an apartheid state practicing racism against Palestinians.
pg 6: I move beyond the liberal/Western notion of diversity which accepts out of necessity, rather than choice, that people will differ. This means seeking out cultural differences in order to deepen understanding by sharing and decentering the self with a newly fulfilling complexity.
pg 21: Jihad, at its best, and in its meaning for most Muslims the world over, is the struggle to find justice, equality, and freedom for the internal and external self.
pg 28: [My father] used to say that the only way we change is if we think we have to.
pg 30: Seeing anew means subverting the distorting of before with a willingness to be deeply uncomfortable with the self.
pg 34: China was the most advanced economy of the medieval world.
Against Empire, pg 3:
Bourgeois culture is seductive and captivating and it is oppressive and isolating.
Against Empire, pg 2:
Thinking and seeing before the moment — its history — and after — its future possibilities — demands complex knowing.
Screenings for my fiction film theory class, chronologically:
Due within the next 48 hours: 20 pgs of autobiography, 40 pgs of screenplay, performance of acting scene, 4 pgs of character analysis, proposal for theatre analysis project.
Sleep within the next 48 hours: none.
A choice excerpt from a recent reading assignment in my acting class:
"The labyrinth, too, loses its gargantuan proportions and the macrodimensions take on another, more real, perspective, or rather a complete lack of perspective, as the reality-holography which is the universe flattens and softens into a (more…)