by
Jason Hickel
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Some NGOs have called for debt 'relief' or even 'forgiveness', but these words send exactly the wrong message. By implying that debtors have committed some kind of sin, and by casting creditors as saviours, they reinforce the power imbalance that lies at the heart of the problem. The debt-as-in framing has been used to justify 'forgiving' debt while requiring harsh austerity measures that replicate the structural adjustment programmes that contributed to the debt crisis in the first place, effectively saying 'we will forgive your sins, but you will have to pay the price'. In other words, until now, debt forgiveness has largely just perpetuated the problem. If we want to be serious about dealing with debt, we need to challenge not only the debt itself but also the moral framing that supports it.
he cites Graeber on debt earlier in the book (you could even say that this book, as well as basically any other that mentions debt since 2011, is indebted to Graeber)
[...] there is a strong case to be made that the most essential technologies--like public health medicines--should be exempt from the patent system altogether. [...]
the standard pro-free-market response to this: this is bad bcus firms will stop investing in R&D etc etc
but this is just reification of the highest order, in all its absurdity. surely the fact that firms would penalise countries who do this very sensible thing means that these firms are being driven by the wrong factors? and thus perhaps we should reorganise our economic system to prevent it? pro-free-market ideology feels like a matter of limiting the imagination to the most dire point, when it would be so easy to just go a little beyond
[...] As Joseph Stiglitz put it, 'What we measure informs what we do. And if we're measuring the wrong thing, we're going to do the wrong thing.'
on GDP and how it is a pretty awful measurement. Hickel goes into the history of it a bit earlier: apparently Kuznets wanted a more social-first approach that would exclude areas like advertising, commuting and policing from the stats but alas Keynes' more "rational" approach won. funny cus i'd always had this image of Keynes as the more progressive of the two but I guess not
doesn't call it by name but that's essentially what he's referring to
So the problem isn't just the type of energy we're using, it's what we're doing with it. What would we do with 100 per cent clean energy? Exactly what we're doing with fossil fuels: raze more forests, build more meat farms, expand industrial agriculture, produce more cement and heap up more landfills with waste from the additional stuff we would produce and consume, all of which will pump deadly amounts of greenhouse gas into the air. We will do these things because our economic system demands endless economic growth. Switching to clean energy will do nothing to slow this down.
[...] To me, poetry and thought are a system of communicating vessels. The source of both is my life. I write about what I have lived and am living. To live is also to think, and sometimes to cross that border beyond which feeling and thinking become one: poetry. Meanwhile, the pages on which I had scrawled my notes in India turned yellow, and a number of them were lost in moves to new quarters and in my travels. I abandoned the idea of writing the book.
PERCEPTIBLE REALITY HAS ALWAYS BEEN A SOURCE of surprises to me. Of proofs as well. In a long-ago article, written in 1940, I referred to poetry as “the testimony of the senses”. True testimony: its images are palpable, visible and audible. To be sure, poetry is made up of words linked together, which give off reflections, glints, iridescences. But what it shows us, are they realities or illusions? Rimbaud said: “Et j’ai quelquefois vu / ce que l’homme a cru voir” (And I sometimes saw / what man believed he saw). Fusion of seeing and believing. In the joining of these two words lies the secret of poetry and its testimony: what the poem shows us we do not see with our carnal eyes but with the eyes of the spirit. Poetry lets us touch the impalpable and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia. Poetic testimony reveals to us another world inside this world, the other world that is this world. The senses, without losing their powers, become servants of the imagination and let us hear the inaudible and see the invisible. But isn’t this what happens in dreams and in the erotic encounter? When we dream and when we couple, we embrace phantoms. Each of the two who constitute the couple possesses a body, a face and a name, but their real reality, precisely at the most intense moment of the embrace, disperses in a cascade of sensation which disperses in turn. There is a question that all lovers ask each other, and in it the erotic mystery is epitomized: Who are you? A question without an answer … The senses are and are not of this world. By means of them, poetry traces a bridge between seeing and believing. By that bridge, imagination is embodied and bodies turn into images.
<3
The relationship between eroticism and poetry is such that it can be said, without affectation, that the former is a poetry of the body and the latter an eroticism of language. They are in complementary opposition. Language – sound that carries meanings, a material trace that denotes non-material things – is able to give a name to what is most fleeting and evanescent: sensation. Nor is eroticism mere animal sexuality; it is ceremony, representation. It is sexuality transfigured, a metaphor. The agent that provokes both the erotic act and the poetic act is imagination. Imagination turns sex into ceremony and rite, language into rhythm and metaphor. The poetic image is an embrace of opposite realities, and rhyme is a copulation of sounds; poetry eroticizes language and the world, because its operation is erotic to begin with. Likewise eroticism is a metaphor of animal sexuality. What does this metaphor say? Like all metaphors, it points to something that is beyond the reality that gave rise to it, something new and different from the terms that it comprises. If Góngora says “blood-red snowfall”, he invents or discovers a reality that, though containing both, is neither blood nor snow. The same happens with eroticism; it says, or, rather, it is, something different from mere sexuality.
In the figure of the libertine there is no union between religion and eroticism; on the contrary, there is a sharp and clear division. The libertine sees pleasure as an aim that excludes any other. He is almost always passionately opposed to values and beliefs, whether religious or ethical, that subordinate the body to a transcendent purpose. At one of its extremes, libertinism borders on criticism and becomes a philosophy; at the other, it borders on blasphemy, sacrilege, profanation, things that are the reverse of religious devotion. Sade boasted of professing an intransigent philosophical atheism, but in his books passages of irreligious religious fervour abound, and in his life he had to face a number of accusations of sacrilege and impiety, such as those brought against him at his trial in 1772 in Marseilles. André Breton once told me that Sade’s atheism was a belief: it could also be said that libertinism is a religion in reverse. The libertine denies the supernatural world with such vehemence that his attacks are a homage and, at times, a consecration. The real difference between the ascetic and the libertine is that the eroticism of the former is a solitary sublimation, one without intermediaries, while the eroticism of the latter is an act that, if it is to be carried out, requires the presence of an accomplice or a victim. The libertine always needs the Other, and this is his damnation: he depends on his object and is the slave of his victim.
The amatory feeling is an exception within that larger exception that eroticism is to sexuality. But it is an exception that appears in all societies and all periods. There is no people or civilization that does not possess poems, songs, legends or tales in which the anecdote or the plot – the myth, in the original meaning of the word – is the encounter of two persons, their mutual attraction, and the labours and hardships they must overcome to be united. Their encounter requires, in turn, two contradictory conditions: the attraction that the lovers experience must be involuntary, born of a secret and all-powerful magnetism; at the same time, it must be a choice. In love, predestination and choice, objective and subjective, fate and freedom intersect. The realm of love is a space magnetized by encounter.
This description of the five elements that make up our image of love, however superficial it may be, does seem to demonstrate love’s contradictory, paradoxical, mysterious nature. I discussed five, but they can be reduced to three: exclusivity, which is love for only one person; attraction, which is one’s fate freely accepted; the person, who is a soul and a body. But these elements cannot be separated; they exist in constant struggle and reconciliation with themselves and with others. Contrary, as though they were the planets of the strange solar system of the passions, they revolve around a single sun. This sun, too, is twofold: the couple. There is continual transmutation of each element: freedom chooses servitude, fate becomes choice, the soul is body and the body is soul. We love a mortal being as though he or she were immortal. Lope said it better: “To call what is eternal temporal.” Yes, we are mortal, we are the children of time, and no one is spared death. We know not only that we will die but that the person we love will die. We are the playthings of time and accident; sickness and old age disfigure the body and cause the soul to lose its way. But love is one of the answers that humankind has invented in order to look death in the face. Through love we steal from the time that kills us a few hours which we turn now into paradise and now into hell. In both ways time expands and ceases to be a measure. Beyond happiness or unhappiness, though it is both things, love is intensity: it does not give us eternity but life, that second in which the doors of time and space open just a crack: here is there and now is always. In love, everything is two and everything strives to be one.