Whoever does not worship God worships an idol, and whoever does not worship an idol worships God. God is the trauma of idolatry.
Read morePowerful Words: Freedom of Speech
It is not the voices of the oppressors that are silenced, but the voices of the oppressed. It is they who need to be freed to speak.
Read morePowerful Speech: Disempowering Language
Free speech does not coerce, nor serve the power that does. Rather, free speech frees from coercion: It empowers. The power of speech as such is the power to free, not the power to coerce. It is the power of the open hand, not of the closed fist: of invitation, not compulsion.
Read morePowerful Words: A Cop's Repentance
Like all too many laws, that one was selectively enforced. Basically, it was there to be used by those vested with authority for law-enforcement to bust people they wanted to bust, but could find no other legal grounds for busting.
Read morePowerful Words: A Confession
I was a cop once. It was only once, and only for a few weeks. Nevertheless, I must confess that once I was a fully-fledged officer of the law—with a blue uniform, a black duck-billed hat, a shiny badge pinned on my chest, a walky-talky hung at my side (this was long before the rise to ubiquity of cell-phones), a bully-stick in a holder on a leather belt studded with bullets, and a holster with a loaded handgun in it. I even bought myself a pair of mirrored sunglasses to complete the outfit.
Read moreWaiting for Politics to Begin Again (6)
Original and originary politics can only be a politics of “permanent revolution.” If the revolution is not “permanent,” it is no revolution at all. It’s just another flush of political waste
Read moreWaiting for Politics to Begin Again (5)
In The Need for Roots, written in London for the Free French in 1943, Simone Weil argues in detail for just what the title indicates, namely, that there is a fundamental human need to send down roots—what we might call a root human need for rooting.
Read moreWaiting for Politics to Begin Again (4)
Individuals or nations who are sure of who they are, rooted deeply in their own native identities, are secure in their own boundaries. That security does not close them off from others. Rather, it first makes possible a true and genuine interchange with others, who are respected in their very difference, for who they are.
Read moreWaiting for Politics to Begin Again (3)
It is only by sharply closing itself off from whomever it has ejected and projected as its defining “other,” that the political community can en-close itself within its own borders, and thereby first clearly delimit “itself” as a distinct, not only potentially separable but also actually separated, community.
Read moreWaiting for Politics to Begin Again (2)
Politics as Hitler and the Nazis practiced it by no means came to an end with the end of the Nazis, nor did it start with them. It was practiced in nation-states well before the rise of Hitler, and it continues to be all too operative in nation-states down to the present day. Indeed, in one form or another it is actually constitutive of what passes for politics under the dominance of the nation-state in general.
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