View all notes
[...] Like Dionysus in Greek mythology, Lenin could reborn. This is not an announcement of victory; it is a socialist wager, based on the recognition that all has to be rebuilt.
damn. good section ending (if we ignore the missing "be" before "reborn"). worth thinking about more - the cyclical nature of things? destroying, rebuilding?
[...] she had retreated into a prison of fear and suffering whereas her sons had chosen the struggle: 'they looked for life, and their reasons were stronger than mine.' They did not look for sacrifice or martyrdom and their political choice was rooted in a vital desire of freedom. 'What survives is desire; they cannot kill this desire. [...]' [...]
on Carmen Castillo's 2007 film, Santa Fe Street, about the death of her husband (an MIR revolutionary) in Chile
[...] Paul Celan distinguished between u-topia and utopia. U-topia, literally 'no-place,' is a nonexisting locus, whereas utopia meas a hope, an expectation, a vision of the future, something not existing yet. According to Ernst Bloch, utopia is a prefiguration, the realm of the 'not yet' (noch nicht). This is also the meaning of Celan's utopia, 'something open and free' to which poetry could give a form. Today, after the collapse of twentieth-century revolutions, utopia does not appear as a 'not yet', but rather as u-topia, a no-longer-existing place, a destroyed utopia that is the object of melancholy art. Realms of memory are places (topoi) created in order to remember hopes turned into no-places, something that no longer exists. The utopias of the twenty-first century still have to be invented.