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There were 22 results from your search for keyword(s): 'Universality'.
- "See is just a movie in your eyes," said Garth. "It's not out in the world."
"A movie?"
"It's not out there, it's not dark matter or anything else. It's just in your eyes. A movie. And the only difference is that everyone else has the same movie playing. Cynthia, Philip, Alice, their movies agree. So they can see. You and I are watching the wrong movie, so we're blind."
Evan and I were silent.
Source: As She Climbed Across the Table, p. 134 - 'Job was a very rich man. He lost all his goods, and all his sons and daughters, and took it all very philosophically. He said, "The Lord gave, the Lord taketh away, blessed be the name of the Lord." Then he gets covered with boils; and it's only then that his nerve gives way, he's touched personally. He starts his complaint against God at that point only. No question of why his sons should have lost their lives, no enquiries of God about the cause of their fate. It's his skin disease that sets him off.'
Source: The Only Problem, p. 366 - 'What are the connections between technological innovations and Western imperialism?' asks Headrick in his latest book. His answer is 'the desire to conquer and control other peoples; a technological advantage is itself a motive for imperialism' (Headrick, 2010:5). 'The Great American Mission', to borrow a phrase from the title of a book about America's global modernization effort -- 9/11 and its aftermath -- has given the US a pretext to shape the world to suit its own geo-strategic agenda (Ekbladh, 2009).
From chapter: Introduction
Source: Media & Terrorism: Global Perspectives, p. 4 - I must make one point clear: my explanation here is the ballistic study of a gunshot. The stand taken by André Breton was the shot itself...In the first period of surrealism his writing always connected the pent-up agitation of fury with the expression of its object. All his writing has engaged with the infinite destiny of mankind -- something which people in France tend to find amusing, but which also represents, at the same time, the exhilarating mark of authenticity.
Source: The Absence of Myth, p. 59 - I think there are truth-procedures everywhere, and that they are always universal; that a Chinese novel, Arabic algebra, Iranian music...that all this is, in the end, universal by right. Simply, the conditions of their concrete universalization have followed a complicated history. On the other hand, I would admit that there is an element of the cultural site, which I would see in a system of interconnection, in which there is always something contingent, and also an aspect of sedimentation, of conservation, which is irreducibly particular...I conceive of a culture, in something other than empirical fashion. I'm perfectly aware that there are cultural universes, linguistic universes. But I'd like to be able to cross through this empirical reality in a slightly different way.
Source: Ethics, p. 141 - In the end surrealism cannot be considered purely as a style. It is a state of mind whose intensity and aggressive force must go to the point of modifying the course of its expression (it is not surrealism if expression is limited to the habitual platitude of language). It is also a state of mind which reaches towards unification; in which, through this union, an existence beyond the self is experienced as a spiritual authority in whose name it is possible to speak...And the spiritual authority (by spiritual I merely mean: beyond the individual) that surrealism embodies is surely not limited to the few people closely connected with André Breton.
Source: The Absence of Myth, p. 55 - In this confused civilization, where resources are exhausted through complex activity, where every tree hides the forest, where exhaustion endlessly substitutes the multitude of petty, fraudulent results (the luxuries others do not have) for the possibilities of life, the artist has, in the solitude of his room, a power of ultimate decision. He can reveal and magnify this irreducible part that is within us, connected to our most tenacious aspirations: he has the power to offer the life the perspective of radiance...[F]or a writer to speak in the name of the positive destiny of mankind, about which he cares with his whole heart, with a sense of rage, as the fanatic speaks of the glory of God -- this is what seems so striking [in surrealism].
Source: The Absence of Myth, p. 59 - PP: ...I can't see why the reconstruction of the Enlightenment ideal would be such an impossible task? After Adorno, there is Habermas...
JB: Every culture worthy of the name meets its ruin in the universal. Every culture which universalizes itself loses its singularity and dies away. This is how it is with those we've destroyed by their enforced assimilation, but it's also how it is with ours in its pretension to universality. The differences is that the others died of their singularity, which is a noble death, whereas we're dying from the loss of all singularity, from the extermination of all our values, which is a senseless death. We believe that the fate of every value is to be elevated to universality, without gauging the mortal danger that promotion represents: far from being an elevation, it is a reduction or, alternatively, an elevation to the degree zero of value...This is how it is with human rights, democracy, etc.: their expansion corresponds to their weakest definition, their maximum entropy.
Source: Paroxysm, p. 13 - Rather than uncritically reproduce propaganda rhetoric from politicians, we suggest that journalists carry out their own investigations of the legal basis for warfare in cases like Kosovo, Iraq, Afghanistan and other conflicts. The first step could be to listen to what the juridical experts say about the legal issues...Humanitarian rhetoric applied in selective or biased interpretations of international law...needs to be scrutinized by public media.
From chapter: Wikileaks and War Laws by Stig A. Nohrstedt and Rune Ottosen
Source: Media & Terrorism: Global Perspectives, p. 216-217 - So it is that in order to reach it, one must first allow oneself to be possessed and led far away by temerity, madness and the unravelling implicit in human destiny. This would be a futile exercise if one did not begin by saying that the limits of my will are also, necessarily, the whole of human potentiality; the limits of my will are, of course, never to have limits.
Source: The Absence of Myth, p. 63 - The eating of one species by another is the simplest form of luxury.
Source: The Accursed Share, p. 33 - The global reach and influence of American media are well documented...The US vision and version of terrorism is therefore extended to reach a global audience. In Russia, the government has tried to link its Chechen problem with international terrorism, with the former Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov claiming that 'the war in Chechnya is against international terrorism -- not Chechens, but international bandits and terrorists' (cited in Gilligan, 2009: 6). The suppression of Muslim minorities in China's northwestern Xinjiang region was also framed as China's war on terrorism (Wayne, 2009). In India -- one of the countries worst affected by terrorism-related violence -- large sections of the media and intelligentsia have bought into the US 'war on terror' discourse.
From chapter: Introduction
Source: Media & Terrorism: Global Perspectives, p. 5 - The man who works is a man who separates himself from the universe, the man who works is a man already shut up in his house, who binds himself to his bosses, his tables, his workbenches and his tools. The man who works is a man who destroys the profound reality...that surrealism has over the real. And there can be no doubt that the concerns of surrealism, in common with primitive rituals, has been to rediscover, outside that technical activity which weighs so heavily on today's human masses, the irreducible element by which man has no equal more perfect than a star.
Source: The Absence of Myth, p. 76 - The morality to which André Breton is drawn is rather poorly defined, but it is -- if such a thing is possible -- a morality of the instant. What is essential about it is the demand imposed on whoever expresses a will to choose between the instant -- the value of the present moment and the free activity of the mind -- and a concern for results which immediately abolish the value and even, in a sense, the existence of the instant. The accent is placed not on the fact of choosing but on the content of the choice proposed. It is only the incommensurable value of the instant that counts, not the fact that all would be in suspension. More precisely, what is at stake...prevails to a large extent over the fact that the decision belongs to me and gives me authority. Liberty is no longer the liberty to choose, but the choice renders a liberty, a free activity, possible, requiring that once decision is fixed upon it I do not allow a new choice to intervene, for a choice between the diverse possibilities of the activity unleashed would be made with a view to some ulterior result (this is the significance of automatism). The surrealist decision is thus a decision to decide no longer (that is, the free activity of the mind would be betrayed if I subordinated it to some result decided beforehand).
The profound difference between surrealism and the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre hangs on this character of the existence of liberty. If I do not seek to dominate it, liberty will exist: it is poetry; words, no longer striving to serve some useful purpose, set themselves free and so unleash the image of free existence, which is never bestowed except in the instant...If we were genuinely to break the servitude by which the existence of the instant is submitted to useful activity, the essence would suddenly be revealed in us with an unbearable clarity...The seizure of the instant cannot differ from ecstasy (reciprocally one must define ecstasy as the seizure of the instant -- nothing else -- operating despite the concerns of the mystics).
Source: The Absence of Myth, p. 66 - The Rushdie affair put a whole complex of Western assumptions about the politics of postmodern art, about the nature of reading and of satire, up against traditional Muslim assumptions about, among other matters, the nature of representation and the obligation to revealed truth, and found them, if not wanting, at least not universal.
Source: Plotting Terror, p. 36 - This way of inquiring into sociopolitical legitimacy combines with the new scientific attitude: the name of the hero is the people, the sign of legitimacy is the people's consensus, and their mode of creating norms is deliberation...It is clear that what is meant here by "the people" is entirely different from what is implied by traditional narrative knowledge, which, as we have seen, requires no instituting deliberation, no cumulative progression, no pretension to universality; these are the operators of scientific knowledge. It is therefore not at all surprising that the representatives of the new process of legitimation by "the people" should be at the same time actively involved in destroying the traditional knowledge of peoples, perceived from that point forward as minorities or potential separatist movements destined to spread obscurantism.
Source: The Postmodern Condition, p. 30 - While Breton often locates this disruptive force in the mind's encounter with the feminine, Carrington places the disruptive force in mind and body alike, creating the space for a feminine experience that shifts Surrealist aesthetics away from mere male psychic liberation, while avoiding the trap of a universalized femininity. In so doing, Carrington makes history a central concern for surreal experience.
Source: Disruptive Testimonies: The Stakes of Surrealist Experience in Breton and Carrington, p. 102 - With the predominance of information technology and global networks of power, war has become both 'postmodern' and 'discursive', [Chris Hables Gray] argues: 'its unity is rhetorical'. What characterizes it are 'the metaphors and symbols that structure it, not...any direct continuity of weapons, tactics, or strategy between its various manifestations...'...Any survey of statements made by politicians in the aftermath of 11 September would certainly suggest that rhetoric and the figurative did play a major part in the event and the responses to it...The attacks on the buildings were declared to be not just an attack on the US as a whole, as bin Laden suggested; for US Secretary of State Colin Powell, 'It wasn't an assault on America. It was an assault on civilization, it was an assault on democracy', and on 'the twenty first century' itself.
Source: Terrorism and Modern Literature, p. 4 - [I]t's a formidably complex problem, which can sometimes expose us, I admit, to the risk of being the unconscious agents of capital itself. I remember the days when the French progressive movement -- and Deleuze was very engaged in this -- supported the creation of free [i.e. private-sector] radio stations. At the time, French radio was still entirely state-run. The creation of free radio stations was to be the conquest of a fragmented, multiform territoriality. And Deleuze was partly right. But for the most part, what took place, overwhelmingly, was the conquest of radio by capital. This is always the danger. We can't avoid it. Because on this point we are rivals to capital, rather than merely reacting against it. It is a struggle of universalism against universalism, not of particularism against universalism.
Source: Ethics, p. 114 - [Neumann] Voltaire's statement that freedom means dependence on nothing save law refers only to general laws. If the sovereign is permitted to decree individual measures, to arrest this man or that one, to confiscate this or that piece of property, then the independence of the judge is extinguished. The judge who has to execute such individual measures becomes a mere policeman...Equality before the law is, to be sure, "formal," that is, negative. But Hegel, who clearly perceived the purely formal-negative nature of liberty, already warned of the consequences of discarding it.
Source: The Rule of Law Under Siege, p. 118 - [S]urrealism...brings about a free poetic release without subordinating it to anything and without assigning a superior end to it. It is true that this is an attitude that is as difficult to bear as it is decisive and virilely sovereign. Yes, it really is the decisive conquest. Poetic liberty is not new. Myths and the rituals connected to them -- for instance 'Hopi ceremonies of an exceptional variety, which necessitate the intervention of the greatest number of supernatural beings that could be invested with a face and distinct attributes by the imagination' -- make this fact clear enough: that human 'thought' is everywhere and always ready to break loose. But it was once necessary to give a superior end to this release, a usually rather gross pretext. For the Hopi it is a question of 'attracting every protection over cultivation...the most important of which is maize'. To the extent that more refined religions maintain an element of poetic invention, the pretext is given in a transcendent morality, associated with salvation as a superior end. In modes of thought in which the poetic and the rational remain confounded, the mind cannot elevate itself to the conception of poetic liberty; it subordinates the existence of each instant to some ulterior goal. It has no escape from this servitude.
It is the prerogative of surrealism to free the activity of the mind from such servitude. As it consigned this activity to the shadows, rationalism stressed the binding of deeds and all thought to the end pursued. In the same way, rationalism liberated poetic activity form this binding, leaving it suspended. But the difficulty which remained was to affirm the value of what was finally released within the shadow.
In this way, what has proved to be simultaneously attained and liberated is nothing other than the instant. This is true in that man has never before been able to give value to the instant.
Source: The Absence of Myth, p. 65 - [Universality is] a system of values which regards itself as attuned to all cultures and their difference but which, paradoxically, does not conceive itself as relative, and aspires, in all ingenuousness, to be the ideal transcendence of all the others.
Source: Paroxysm, p. 11
