MARENQO

Roger Scruton - On Islam and the West

2010-09-02T05:16:00.000+02:00

Anti-Oedipus

2010-08-14T15:45:00.002+02:00

But which is the revolutionary path? Is there one? – To withdraw from the world market, as Samir Amin advises Third World Countries to do, in a curious revival of the fascist "economic solution"? Or might it be to go in the opposite direction? To go further still, that is, in the movement of the market, of decoding and deterritorialization? For perhaps the flows are not yet deterritorialized enough, not decoded enough, from the viewpoint of a theory and practice of a highly schizophrenic character. Not to withdraw from the process, but to go further, to "accelerate the process," as Nietzsche put it: in this matter, the truth is that we haven't seen anything yet

(Deleuze in Anti-Oedipus)

Refused -- Worms Of The Senses/Faculties Of The Skull

2010-03-21T20:20:00.001+01:00

I'm with you in Rockland
where the faculties of the skull no longer admit
the worms of the senses
I'm with you in Rockland
where you drink the tea of the breasts of the
spinsters of Utica
I'm with you in Rockland
where you pun on the bodies of your nurses the
harpies of the Bronx
I'm with you in Rockland

Jewish Sephardic wedding song from Morocco

2010-03-07T22:01:00.001+01:00

Many beginnings, only one end

2010-02-05T02:24:00.001+01:00

Noir Desir

2010-02-01T13:22:00.002+01:00

One of the best bands of the 1990s will see its return later this year.

Anarchy in the UK

2010-01-25T17:10:00.000+01:00

Les colchiques

2010-01-19T02:32:00.001+01:00

Et ma vie pour tes yeux lentement s'empoisonne

Cause 'n Consequence

2010-01-19T01:50:00.008+01:00

You talk too loud
You think too straight
You act too confident
You judge too soon

Poetry evaporates
Beauty distances
Reality reasons
Gods die

(Pope Pulci of Zhu Xie the 7th)

Ihr bringt mir alle die Dinge um...

2010-01-11T18:36:00.004+01:00

Poverty of Words

I am so afraid of people's words.

They describe so distinctly everything:
And this they call dog and that they call house,
here the start and there the end.
I worry about their mockery with words,
they know everything, what will be, what was;
no mountain is still miraculous;
and their house and yard lead right up to God.
I want to warn and object: Let the things be!
I enjoy listening to the sound they are making.
But you always touch: and they hush and stand still.
That's how you kill.

(Rilke)

The man of the new century

2010-01-10T02:22:00.002+01:00

Amusing predictions by american fashion designers from the 1930s of what the well-dressed man and woman would be wearing in the year 2000.

Lion versus Man in the 1920s

2010-01-10T02:09:00.001+01:00

La sortie des usines Lumière

2010-01-10T00:02:00.001+01:00

The 'plot' is outlined by the title: the film consists of a single shot of workers leaving the Lumiere factory, and the film would be of virtually no interest (except to students of late 19th century clothing) were it not for the fact that it was the first film ever to be projected to a paying audience, and is consequently one of the most important films in the history of the cinema (IMDB).

Children

2010-01-09T17:47:00.002+01:00

The hapless child (performed by Michael Mantler) is inspired by the books of Edward Gorey.

The Labyrinth

2010-01-08T16:22:00.005+01:00

(Piranesi's painting (could have been Escher's nightmare))

"... It is hardly surprising, therefore, that there may be no way out of the Labyrinth. Dennis Hollier in his book on George Bataille, points out that from Bacon to Leibniz the Labyrinth was linked with the desire to get out, and science was seen as the means to find an exit. Rejecting such an interpretation, Bataille suggested that its only effect was to transform the Labyrinth into a banal prison. The traditional meaning of the metaphor was reversed: one never knows whether one is inside or outside or not, since one cannot grasp it in one look. Just as language gives us words that encircle us but that we use in order to break their surround, the Labyrinth of experience was full of openings that did not tell whether they opened towards its outside or its inside.

(Tschumi)

Rain

2010-01-08T00:21:00.000+01:00

We Ain't Got No Money, Honey, But We Got Rain

(Bukowski)

Definitions

2010-01-07T23:57:00.002+01:00

“Optimist: Person who travels on nothing from nowhere to happiness”

(Mark Twain)

Disclaimer

2009-12-31T15:16:00.005+01:00

Disclaimer from the book Evasion.

Wiki says:
"Evasion is a book that spun off from a zine of the same name. It was published by CrimethInc. in 2003. The book comprises 108 pages of slightly revised text from the original zine (95% of which is retained) along with 162 pages of new material.[1] The author is not named in the book, but is referred to elsewhere as "Mac", "the Evasion Kid", or "Mac Evasion." He later wrote a column in the zine heartattaCk and has been identified as "Nigel Davis" in one bibliography.[2]

Evasion catalogs the travels and exploits of a straight-edge vegan young man who decided to not get a job or go to school after high school, despite his parents' wishes. Deciding that his life, freedom, and time were too valuable to be wasted working in a job he would despise, to build profits for a company, he stepped outside of the confines of a traditional role in society."

Complete book online, here or with pictures here.

On Bullshit (by H.G. Frankfurt)

2009-12-30T23:11:00.005+01:00

"One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share. But we tend to take the situation for granted. Most people are rather conﬁdent of their ability to recognize bullshit and to avoid being taken in by it. So the phenomenon has not aroused much deliberate concern, or attracted much sustained inquiry. In consequence, we have no clear understanding of what bullshit is, why there is so much of it, or what functions it serves. And we lack a conscientiously developed appreciation of what it means to us. In other words, we have no theory..." (Frankfurt introduction to On Bullshit)

St. Augustine

2009-12-28T19:17:00.003+01:00

"Suppose, then, we were wanderers, and could not live happily away from our homeland, and that we felt wretched in our wandering, and wishing to put an end to our misery, determined to return home. We find, however, that we need transport, either by land or sea, in order to reach our homeland, the object of our enjoyment. But the beauty of the country through which we pass, and the very pleasure of the motion, charm our hearts, and turning these things which we ought to use into objects of enjoyment, we become unwilling to hasten the end of our journey; and becoming engrossed in a factitious delight, our thoughts are diverted from that home whose delights would make us truly happy. Such is a picture of our condition in this life of mortality".

Green, R. P . H., ed, Augustine: De Doctrina Christiana, Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1995, pp.15–6;

My Spring

2009-11-29T03:23:00.000+01:00

Her name was Spring, but she visited me when my summer was in the light. Her fresh breeze danced like those in May and her warmth softly tickled the Daisies' eyes. Small birds started chirping enthusiastically when she carefully made her entrance. The leaves of my favorite tree greeted her gently with a soft shade of their green. She smiled and kissed me on my cheeks. Oh spring, you make the earth like a child which knows poems.

annoise me not

2009-11-29T02:27:00.004+01:00

Silence takes a while to absorb, our ears are not familiar with the monotone flow of all that is does suddenly not. I close my eyes and concentrate to shut down my ears which persistently attempt to hear something in the silence. I now feel at ease, my always so schizophrenically disorganised thoughts dissolve and I stop thinking, worrying about things in time and place. I fly, I float, I sleep, and then I disappear. Alone I am not, because I am not or am I? Silence, I am.

2009-03-15T16:31:00.009+01:00

If one European city deserves the title of post-modern urbanity it must be Rotterdam. The city harbors monuments from all different epochs which each embed a political (or anti-political) meaning.

Rotterdam has historically been forced to live in the shadow of the country's capital and is because of that insecure in its spatial being. The city is in constant struggle to overcome its self-imposed position of underdog and attemptively tries to undo itself. As such it is a city of hope, arrogance and constant motion.

The below pictures are symbolic representations of the city's lived history and its futuristic destiny. The different styles and spatial meanings totalise into a eclectic urban space full of different forms and colours. I think that in eastetic terms, there are not many cities in Europe which are as interesting as this one.

17th Century

19201920s/ 30s
WWII
1910/ 1920s (?) retroPost WWII1970s/ 1980s1970s1990s/ nowNowTomorrowTomorrowTomorrow
Pictures from: http://www.flickr.com/photos/heavenuphere/, http://www.flickr.com/photos/els/, http://www.flickr.com/photos/robweststrate/, http://www.flickr.com/photos/by_irma/, http://www.harbourislandrotterdam.nl/ amoung many other sources. Please let me know if you think your name should be mentioned here or if you want your images removed from this site.

Blah blah

2009-01-18T07:39:00.003+01:00

The recent ending of the (temporary) "occupation" of the Gaza strip allows for a much needed critical retrospective analysis of the reactions that the conflict has brought about in many Western countries. The reasons of the often intense reactions in the West are manifold.

First, there is of course the religious significance of Israel for all three Western religions. The paradoxical situation that a shared monolithic truth can be so destructive in nature was most visible in the anti-Semitic reactions that the aggressive violence thousands of miles brought about. Burma instead is already long forgotten; the left’s fascination for Tibet is and will always be but a fashion outlet and the Kurdish situation is neglected in most intellectual debates. Israel is however, due to its religious and historical proximity and significance, always been a matter of debate. Strangely enough however, such debates are often a-historical, biased and extremely popularised in their orientation.

Second and related to the first, the dispersal of all three religions into the Western world, by which I refer to the US and Europe specifically, together with the recent (re)intensification of the presence of Islamic cultural elements in Europe and the US, has resulted in an multiplication of interests and thus of potential conflict. It is only logical, given the West's (especially the EU’s) failed immigration policies and the growing influence of religious orthodoxies, that a traditional form of culturalism rather than a sort of nationalism grounded in modern norms and values leads to an extreme struggle over the monopolisation of truths. This is not to argue for a multiculturalism which by definition is virtually impossible in a world in which religion has once again taken a leading role in the making and breaking of identities, but in fact, as I will argue later on, to propose to break with liberalism and its hopeless idealized relativism and to confront the often unbreachable differences that exist between the modern world and the traditional segments within its society.

Third and continuing from point two, the West, and especially Europe in this context, seems to suffer from a rather high level of political connectedness which finds its roots in a liberal form of human rights. The cultural relativism proclaimed and celebrated in many of the European Union's and nationally sovereign institutions often neglects the potential cultural incompatibilities between different ideologies, cultures and laws that derive from the earlier described growing migrational exchanges. The fact that much of Europe's (critical) socialist left supports a Hamas led government on the argument of its democratically position, is in Marxist terms "vulgar" and "fetish" indeed. This should become clearer when one takes in consideration that it is in fact religious opium that forms the backbone of this democratically elected government which thus by definition must be considered anti-revolutionary and de facto anti-democratic. The fact that Europe's intellectuals close their eyes for this inherent contradiction and favour instead an emancipatory liberal stance, not so different from their ongoing promotion of a blunt global campaign for "human rights", is characteristic of the intellectually poverty of the continent. Europe's left intellectuals find themselves incapable of resolving their problems at home and rather than confronting the real issue, instead worsen the status quo through an adaptation of political correctedness and cultural relativism. Their ongoing support (rather than critical engagement) for a corrupt political party, which finds its ideology reflected in centuries old religious texts grounded in hate which it uses for the legitimation of its violence, is not only utterly repulsive but symbolic of Europe's intellectual void.

Instead of spreading a religion of tolerance, which in its nucleus is not emancipatory but forgetful of its social responsibility towards critical thought, the intellectual left is weakening itself from the inside out. It is no wonder then, that the right regains the upper hand in many of the European countries. The protests in favour of Hamas, in which Israel was both violently and uncritically condemned for its admittedly brutal acts of war, are characteristic of the problems embedded in Europe’s left. What is needed is a critical mode of reflectance in which both Europe must re-establish its norms and values and in which the reasons for Israel’s counter attack must be scrutinized and understood. A reborn critical voice, which seriously engages with its self-made reified image of revolution (from Che to Hamas) and which is capable of countering the spreading of a false cultural relatvism not only has a future in Europe but is much needed to counterbalance the false liberalism which increasingly penetrates the vision of Europe's socialist left.

Au suivant

2008-12-05T09:58:00.004+01:00

Beautiful Dutch Wende in Brellian language