American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist (1933–2004)
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Consumption was understood as a manner of appearing, and that appearance became a staple of nineteenth-century manners. It became rude to eat heartily. It was glamorous to look sickly. “Chopin was tubercular at a time when good health was not chic,” Camille Saint-Saëns wrote in 1913. “It was fashionable to be pale and drained; Princess Belgiojoso strolled along the boulevards … pale as death in person.” Saint-Saëns was right to connect an artist, Chopin, with the most celebrated femme fatale of the period, who did a great deal to popularize the tubercular look. The TB-influenced idea of the body was a new model for aristocratic looks — at a moment when aristocracy stops being a matter of power, and starts being mainly a matter of image. (“One can never be too rich. One can never be too thin,” the Duchess of Windsor once said.) Indeed, the romanticizing of TB is the first widespread example of that distinctively modern activity, promoting the self as an image. The tubercular look had to be considered attractive once it came to be considered a mark of distinction, of breeding. “I cough continually!” Marie Bashkirtsev wrote in the once widely read Journal, which was published, after her death at twenty-four, in 1887. “But for a wonder, far from making me look ugly, this gives me an air of languor that is very becoming.” What was once the fashion for aristocratic femmes fatales and aspiring young artists became, eventually, the province of fashion as such. Twentieth-century women’s fashions (with their cult of thinness) are the last stronghold of the metaphors associated with the romanticizing of TB in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Not surprisingly, the Serbs are presenting themselves as the victims. (Clinton equals Hitler, etc.) But it is grotesque to equate the casualties inflicted by the NATO bombing with the mayhem inflicted on hundreds of thousands of people in the last eight years by the Serb programs of ethnic cleansing. Not all violence is equally reprehensible; not all wars are equally unjust. No forceful response to the violence of a state against peoples who are nominally its own citizens? (Which is what most "wars" are today. Not wars between states.) The principal instances of mass violence in the world today are those committed by governments within their own legally recognized borders. Can we really say there is no response to this? Is it acceptable that such slaughters be dismissed as civil wars, also known as "age-old ethnic hatreds." (After all, anti-Semitism was an old tradition in Europe; indeed, a good deal older than ancient Balkan hatreds. Would this have justified letting Hitler kill all the Jews on German territory?) Is it true that war never solved anything? (Ask a black American if he or she thinks our Civil War didn't solve anything.) War is not simply a mistake, a failure to communicate. There is radical evil in the world, which is why there are just wars.
Painters and sculptors under the Nazis often depicted the nude, but they were forbidden to show any bodily imperfections. Their nudes look like pictures in physique magazines: pinups which are both sanctimoniously asexual and (in a technical sense) pornographic, for they have the perfection of a fantasy.
One can feel obliged to look at phototgraphs that record great cruelties and crimes. One should feel obliged to think about what it means to look at them, about the capacity actually to assimilate what they show. Not all reactions to these pictures are under the supervision of reason and conscience.
If Diddy already knows what he does that's foolish and stupid, why can't he become wise? Act wisely. For, oh, Diddy has perceived his follies countless times. Is heartily ashamed of them, strenuously repudiates them. It's only that he doesn't understand. Not really. A hopeless, bumbling tourist in the somber labyrinth of his own consciousness.
در زمانهای زندگی میکنیم که تراژدی یک فرم هنری نیست، بلکه شکلی از تاریخ است. نمایشنامهنویسان دیگر تراژدی نمینویسند. اما آثار هنریای داریم (که هماره به این نام خوانده نمیشوند) که تراژدیهای تاریخی بزرگ زمانهی ما را بازتاب میدهند یا در صدد حل آن برمیآیند
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از آنجا که رخداد تراژیک اعلای دوران ما کشتار شش میلیون یهودی اروپایی است، یکی از جالبترین و تاثیرگذارترین آثار هنری ده سال گذشته محاکمهی آدولف آیشمان در سال 1961 بود
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همانطور که هانا آرنت و دیگران اشاره کردهاند، اگر بخواهیم دقیقا بر مبنای ملاحظات حقوقی سخن بگوییم، مبنای حقوقی محاکمهی آیشمان، مربوطیت تمامی شواهد ارایه شده و مشروعیت برخی از روندهای به کار رفته، میتوانند محل سوال باشند. اما حقیقت آن است که محاکمهی آیشمان نه تنها با معیارهای حقوقی محض سازگاری نداشت، بلکه نمیتوانست چنین باشد. او در نقشی دوگانه ظاهر میشد: به عنوان خاص و عام، به عنوان مردی سرشار از گناهی مشخص و مهیب، و به عنوان یک رمز یا نشانه که کل تاریخ ضدسامیگری را که با این شهادت غیرقابلتصور به نقطهی اوج خود رسید نمایندگی میکرد
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به این ترتیب این محاکمه موقعیتی برای تلاش در جهت فهمپذیر کردن امر فهمناپذیر به شمار میآمد. به این منظور، در حالی که آیشمان خونسرد با عینک روی چشمانش درون قفس شیشهای ضدگلولهاش نشسته بود- با لبان فروبسته، و با این همه شبیه یکی از مخلوقات در حال فریاد و با این حال مسکوت نقاشیهای فرانسیس بیکن- نوعی سوگواری دستهجمعی عظیم در صحن دادگاه به اجرا درآمد. انبوهی از واقعیتها در مورد امحا یهودیان روی هم تلنبار شد؛ فریاد عظیم رنجی تاریخی ثبت و پیاده شد. کارکرد این محاکمه همانند کارکرد نمایشهای تراژیک بود: فراتر و برتر از حکم و مجازات؛ نوعی پالایش یا کاتارسیس
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Feeling of discontinuity as a person. My various selves — how do they all come together? And anxiety at moments of transition from one “role” to another. Will I make it fifteen minutes from now? Be able to step into, inhabit the person I’m supposed to be? This is felt as an infinitely hazardous leap, no matter how often it’s successfully executed.