Home > Work > Resilient Life: The Art of Living Dangerously
1 " images precede the real, making and shaping it into what we come to name and know as the real, producing it, fabricating it, into the worlds we come to inhabit. "
― , Resilient Life: The Art of Living Dangerously
2 " Every intellectual project of a political kind should follow a number of basic principles1) Be deeply suspicious of anything that masks itself in universal regalia. Bring into question that which is not being questioned in the normal state of affairs. (2) Move beyond any self-righteous and self-absolving assessments of the operations of power. Look to deal with power at the level of its effects and the ways in which it positively manipulates subjects to wilfully abandon their own political freedoms. (3) Foreground the affirmative qualities of subjectivities. Not only is this integral in the fight against fascism in all its forms. It opens a challenge to the narcissism of those who would have us surrender to the mercies of the world. (4) Speak with confidence about the ability to transform the world, not for the better, but for the sake of it. Without an open commitment to the people to come, the struggle is already lost. (5) Use provocation as a political tool. Not to evidence extremist views. But to illustrate how normalizing power truly fears anything that appears remotely exceptional. The poetic most certainly included. (6) Trust in the irreducible qualities of human existence. The feelings we have, the atmospheres we breathe, the aesthetics we enfold, the fables we scribe, the playful personas we construct, they are all integral to the formation of a new image of thought. (7) Have faith in people. Just as they will resist what they find oppressive and intolerable, so they will also find their own dignified solutions to problems in spite of our best efforts. (8) Do not shy away from conflict. Without conflict there is no resistance to power. And without resistance to power there is no creation of alternative existences. (9) Reveal fully your political orientations. Do not abstract them from the work. Such a deception is of the order for those embarrassed by the mediocrity of their power. (10) Speak with the courage to truth that narrates a tale to affect a number of meaningful registers. No book should be read if it doesn't intellectually challenge and emotionally move us. "
3 " How do we desire to live out these end times of human existence so that our end might no longer be conditioned by the fear of that end? If it is an end, and if it is true that there is no turning back from this tipping point of extinction time, why are we choosing to live out that end by adapting to the conditions of our own demise, rather than with experimenting with other ways of living less attached to preserving our life as such, and more attuned to the inevitability of death and extinction as realities that can contribute to the intensity of our experience of worldly living for the finite time that we are left with as a species already fated to extinction in the end?These questions are profoundly philosophical. And rightly so! The assault we are witnessing on the political today is so intellectually catastrophic that the only solutions presented to us as viable propose changes so that everything ultimately remains the same. For what are we really conserving when we offer vulnerability to counter vulnerability and insecurity to counter insecurity? This is the real mastery of neoliberalism. For it has led us into a catastrophic quagmire that is fully in keeping with its need to reproduce conditions that are insecure by design; and yet it is managing to repackage itself as the most enlightened way to navigate the uncertain waters, albeit with a captainless crew, which ultimately accepts that the promised land will never be shored. "
4 " Just as there is no affirmation to be found in a technical pursuit of happiness, so is there nothing compelling to any political prose that does not excite our imagination to compel us to live our lives differently. "
