Seek to Understand; Live to Spread Truth

“The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying “This is mine”, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: Beware of listening to this imposter; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau - Discourse on Inequality (1754)

(Source: sjyoung)

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‘Write!’ she demands, ‘Writing is for you, you are for you, your body is yours, take it.’ This is not a philosophical deconstruction of phallocentrism and the repression of women (though it can serve that function), this is a song screamed into the wind of society, set to resonate in the ears of women, and to inspire; this is not a text meant for the reasoned, logical debate of academia, this is a text written in love, love of freedom, of the self, of the countless multitudes echoing around the imagination.

Cixous deliberately makes her writing a piece of art, a literary text full of wild imagery and emotional warships; she despises the theoretical deconstruction of everything to rationality and a so called polarity of ‘truth’, and so she makes of her text - indeed, of herself as she is embodied in the words, and those words inscribe themselves across her body in a continual exchange – a thing that could not be read as other than an aesthetic text: ‘A feminine text cannot fail to be more than subversive. It is volcanic; as it is written it brings about an upheaval of the old property crust, carrier of masculine investments; there’s no other way. There’s no room for her if she’s not a he. If she’s a her-she, it’s in order to smash everything, to shatter the framework of institutions, to blow up the law, to break up the “truth” with laughter.’” Old Essay Found On My Laptop (on autonomy in Hélène Cixous’ Laugh of the Medusa.)

(Source: experimentallycanthropy)

“Race is a socially constructed term, built on perceivable differences which are culturally elaborated … The characteristics that distinguish a white woman from a black woman may be visible to the naked eye, but they become significant only in a system in which difference is used to justify dominance. Otherwise, the visible distinction would not matter any more than does the colour of hair or eyes.” Gerda Lerner (via existentialtea)