“Real critique, rare thing that it is, usually pays dreck, in no small part because it threatens systems of valuation.”
“The crisis of criticism, in other words, won’t show itself in the quality of the written. It’s in what no longer gets written, in what never gets written in the first place.”
“Austerity measures may be imposed generally, but cuts never fall on some uniform body of the nation, the populace. They go deepest into those already expected to bear the brunt of quotidian social violence.”
“Crisis isn’t something one stoically endures. It is the point of departure for the work of critique, an injunction to read differently. To write through crisis means grappling with how it throws us into disarray, scrambling and reorganizing our daily priorities, but it also clarifies the situation we’ve been in for years, bringing into relief a fundamental cartography of quotidian circuits — like prison <—> university — that can fly under the radar in easier times.”
“in his work, the categories of intimacy and the blurry bonds of friendship, as well as society in full and its possible dissolution, are never given. They are always produced”
“Consider, for instance, the progression of Aristotle’s argument that claims to consider the state from the ground up (because “a composite has to be analyzed until we reach things that in composite, since these are the smallest parts of the whole”). It begins with two binaries that function as those first principles, the state’s barest elements. Each consists of “those who cannot exist without each other [and] necessarily form a couple”: “female and male” (who “do so for the sake of procreation”) and “natural ruler and what is ruled,” or master and slave: “For if something is capable of rational foresight, it is a natural ruler and master, whereas whatever can use its body to labor is ruled and is a natural slave.” Immediately after, however, the threat of category error rears its head, as the question is posed as to the “natural distinction […] between what is female and what is servile.” The answer given is that nature “produces nothing skimpily, but instead makes a single thing for a single task.” So follows its allocation of “natural poiesis” (reproduction) and household management (economics) for women, praxis for slaves (as ktêmata, or property that lets one carry out action), and theory for male citizens.”
“the barricade has never been a neutral thing to be deployed. It is used in moments of rupture and in sequences designed to circumvent and deny them.”
“It’s fitting that “barbarians” first appear in Politics in this context, as those who don’t draw adequate divisions between women and slaves, because “they do not have anything that naturally rules[…] their community consists of a male and a female slave,” and hence, Grecian domination over them is, of course, not just excusable but morally necessary.”