Porque não me ufano

A filosofia neoliberal, adotada por um estado autoritário, investe fartamente na "segurança nacional", mas procura desonerar o poder público de encargos sistemáticos em matéria de educação com qualidade.

Observe que o estado brasileiro deixou de reconhecer as carências da nação subdesenvolvida e não busca supri-las. O ensino público ruim é apenas a ponta do iceberg.

Na agenda política, p. ex., não está em pauta repensar, de modo coerente, o problema crônico da má distribuição da renda nacional.

Soviet poster | 1960

We've searched the entire universe,

but haven't found god anywhere!

Educação tóxica

São tempos de super excitação nervosa promovida pelas redes sociais.

Tempo de pobreza

A carta que o miliciano escreveu e que assombrou todos os dispositivos digitais do terceiro mundo atesta: o subdesenvolvido não dispõe espontaneamente de vocabulário e de oração. Vê que o criminoso masca cada letra do alfabeto como um homem doente. Sente-se o desespero na palavra escrita. Parece sofrer de alguma perturbação nervosa. O texto pobre denuncia: o logos oprimiu o capitão e o estilo desprovido de beleza representa a capacidade intelectual da elite nacional. Eis o resultado mais notável do analfabetismo secundário.

A figura do gato como capa para considerações mais profundas

É sabido que, de todos os tempos, muitos artistas e escritores têm tido gatos por companhia ou modelo. Uma cumplicidade misteriosa parece estabelecer-se entre as duas mentes que se afirmam igualmente pela independência e pelo individualismo. Para o solitário escritor, homiziado da sociedade dos que só vêem para fora, a silenciosa testemunha, não interferente mas tacitamente aprovadora, é o apoio psicológico que garante a própria existência do real.

Um gato é aquele ser impassível que, sem cerimónias, pode instalar-se – a afirmar direitos e intimidades – exactamente sobre o caderno onde o dono está a escrever; mas é também aquele que é capaz de, distraidamente, se passear por cima de montes de papéis espalhados sobre uma secretária sem que o mais pequeno desvio se note depois da sua passagem. Assim era o gato Murr com os livros e papéis do seu mestre e amigo Abraham; assim era o “practical cat” Rum Tum Tugger, pois “he’ll leap on your lap in the middle of your sewing”. O gato é também aquele ser que nos olha com intensidade mas sem expressão, de forma que nas suas pupilas, mais ou menos dilatadas, apenas podemos descobrir um inteligente espelho de nós próprios e do mundo por trás de nós, ao mesmo tempo que no seu brilho encontramos a lampadazinha de que fala Adams, que devassa os caminhos para os tesouros insuspeitados existentes no nosso íntimo.

Maria Cândida Zamith Silva

Universidade do Porto

Right of death and power over life

 

Western man was gradually learning what it meant to be a living species in a living world, to have a body, conditions of existence, probabilities of life, an individual and collective welfare, forces that could be modified, and a space in which they could be distributed in an optimal manner. For the first time in history, no doubt, biological existence was reflected in political existence; the fact of living was no longer an inaccessible substrate that only emerged from time to time, amid the randomness of death and its fatality; part of it passed into knowledge's field of control and power's sphere of intervention. Power would no longer be dealing simply with legal subjects over whom the ultimate dominion was death, but with living beings, and the mastery it would be able to exercise over them would have to be applied at the level of life itself; it was the taking charge of life, more than the threat of death, that gave power its access even to the body. If one can apply the term bio-history to the pressures through which the movements of life and the proc esses of history interfere with one another, one would have to speak of bio-power to designate what brought life and its mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculations and made knowledge-power an agent of transformation of human life. It is not that life has been totally integrated into techniques that govern and administer it; it constantly escapes them. Outside the Western world, famine exists, on a greater scale than ever; and the biological risks confronting the species are perhaps greater, and certainly more serious, than before the birth of microbiology. But what might be called a society's "threshold of modernity" has been reached when the life of the species is wagered on its own political strategies. For millennia, man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal with the additional capacity for a political existence; modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being in question.

Michel Foucault

1926 - 1984

Sergei M. Eisenstein - Geometria do êxtase

Os princípios de seu cinema conceitual ou intelectual, Eisenstein os foi buscar no modelo da escrita pictórica das línguas orientais nos anos 20, ele escreve vários artigos relacionando a língua e a cultura japonesas com o cinema, dos quais o mais célebre — O Princípio Cinematográfico e o Ideograma. Um cineasta fundamental, que até hoje persigo. Na verdade, mais um intelectual do que um cineasta. A obra escrita dele é gigantesca e versa não só sobre cinema, mas sobre a cultura inteira. Também fez teatro, também fez ópera, também fez desenhos, escreveu sobre filosofia, escreveu sobre a história da arte. Além disso, Eisenstein antecipou toda a cultura do computador. Ele criou a teoria da montagem vertical. E o que é, no fundo, a montagem vertical? É a montagem não-linear que se faz no computador. A montagem dentro do próprio quadro. Ele tinha um projeto de um filme impossível de ser feito, ou melhor, só possível no meio digital. Chamava-se Casa de vidro, uma história em que cada plano do filme estaria acontecendo num cômodo, sendo todos os planos vistos ao mesmo tempo. Ver o filme era percorrer os labirintos da casa como num videogame. Mais ainda, Eisenstein foi o primeiro a escrever sobre televisão, num texto intitulado “A oitava arte”, em que ele ficava imaginando o que seria uma história construída ao vivo, com os espectadores a vendo simultaneamente.

Arlindo Machado

1949 - 2020

5 folhetins sobre Eisenstein

Eisenstein não caiu do céu, nem saiu do mar...

Ele é o termo lógico do trabalho realizado pela Frente Esquerda da Arte. Não se pode criticar Eisenstein por se encontrar no meio, e até mesmo no fim desse movimento, e não em seu início. Para que Eisenstein pudesse surgir, foi preciso, antes, Kulechov e sua atitude consciente a respeito do material cinematográfico. Foi preciso Dziga Vertov, os construtivistas.

Viktor Chklovski

1893 - 1984

The real story of coke

Coca-cola is probably the single best known brand name in the world. It is a soft drink, now 99 percent sugar water that began as a 19th century mixture of cocaine and cola and was pushed as a patent medicine. How did its makers rise to become the sixth greatest US multinational?

The history of Coke is a history of US capitalism.

The company’s first boss was Asa Candler, a Methodist fundamentalist, who told Coca-Cola salesmen to see themselves as mission aries selling “the American Dream”. The company was based in Atlanta, a state renowned for allowing child labour. Candler became mayor of Atlanta in 1908 and de fended his right to em ploy children:

“The younger a boy begins work”, he said, “the more beautiful does his life become”.

Coca-Cola has con tinued to profit since from treating its workers appallingly.

In 1969 the company’s Florida citrus groves were found to be crowding 6,000 migrant workers of all ages into insanitary barracks. It paid them a minimal wage.

When Coke workers in Guatemala tried to organise in 1975, the death squads moved in.

Death

Union leaders were tortured to death. One local activist revealed, “Coca-Cola is now commonly known as the ‘glint of death’”.

But the company has always been able to ride out bad publicity.

Its bosses have main tained the closest relations with governments. They have helped choose “friendly” presidents and thrown considerable resources into the campaigns of White House candidates.

The close drinking friends of past and present Coca-Cola bosses include presidents Roosevelt, Kennedy, Johnson, Carter and Clinton.

This tie up between company and state ensured Coca-Cola expanded along with US imperialism during and after the Second World War.

Coca-Cola salesmen became “technical ob servers” in the US army, with uniforms and military ranks.

The “Coca-Cola colo nels” supplied drinks to the troops and surveyed “liberated” countries as prospective new mar kets.

But the company was not exclusively tied to the US.

On the contrary, the Coca-Cola empire in Nazi Germany dis played the swastika alongside Coke adverts. The head of the German subsidiary proclaimed, the “deepest admiration” for Hitler.

Wherever German troops overran territory, the German arm of Coca-Cola followed and set up plants using concentration camp labour.

The makers of Coke have been more than happy to live with fascist regimes and military dictatorships.

In fact, they have helped dictators come to power if it seemed a way to ensure continuing profits.

In Guatemala in 1954, the company which ran the Coca-Cola bottling Plants — United Fruit — joined in the military overthrow of a democratic regime.

After the revolution in Nicaragua in 1979, Coca-Cola backed the owner of its main bot tling plant who became a general in the vicious right wing Contra army.

The company had lost control of its plants in the revolution and it wanted them back.

Coke continues to be marketed on the back of a myth of peace and international harmony — the Myth of American imperialism itself.

The true story of Coca-Cola could not be more different.

Socialist Worker | 1995

By Fran Cetti

Pathology

Mass culture and neurosis.

Meaning

No superstition is gonna turn things around.

Avant-Garde and kitsch

Capitalism in decline finds that whatever of quality it is still capable of producing becomes almost invariably a threat to its own existence. Advances in culture, no less than advances in science and industry, corrode the very society under whose aegis they are made possible. Here, as in every other question today, it becomes necessary to quote Marx word for word. Today we look to socialism simply for the preservation of whatever living culture we have right now.

Clèmente Greenberg

1909 - 1994

Signs of inculturation

Acquisition of thorough knowledge and any ambition to deserve the respect of other by honest means they are not of a national character.

Statistic

The reading of the classics - every educated person admits this - is, wherever it is carried on, a monstrous procedure: before young people who are in no way whatever ripe for it.

Dialética da escola-prisão

Que tipo de homens e mulheres os pirralhos serão ao receber esta péssima educação estatal?

A razão na escola fez da Europa a Europa. O Brasil toma o caminho do retrocesso e marcha para se tornar um apêndice da idade média, isto é, de perder o que resta de senso científico. Mas convenhamos, algum dia chegou a ter senso crítico difundido pelo seu tecido social?

A Europa frequentou a escola do pensar coerente e crítico enquanto o gigante subdesenvolvido não sabe distinguir mito de realidade.

O ensino ruim é o amuleto, o crucifixo de que necessitam os incultos com poder e muita grana para perpetuar a miséria - de que outro modo se ergue uma teocracia com a manipulação das massas? 

A estratégia da classe dominante é frear qualquer pensamento que auxilie na construção da igualdade. Construir uma boa sociedade para todos - ou disseminar a qualidade de vida - não está na pauta da elite. 

É preciso desprezar a beleza, ou seja, que o conhecimento dialético seja alvejado. Infelizmente, nós não veremos nunca uma humanidade altamente desenvolvida e nem mesmo uma sociedade de gente letrada. Nesse contexto, o Brasil jamais será próspero economicamente e em tempo nenhum será um polo produtor de excelência artística e de pesquisa. 

Reason in school

The school has no more important task than to teach rigorous thinking, cautious judgement and consistent reasoning: therefore it had to avoid all those things that are of no use for these operations, for example religion. For it can be sure that, if the bow of thought has been stretched too light, human unclarity, habit and need will aftewards relax it again. But so long as it exerts influence it ought to extort that which distinguishes and is the essence of man: "reason and science, the supremest powers of man" - as Goethe at least judges.

Friedrich Nietzsche

1844 - 1900

Statistical

A mob will be no less a mob if it is well fed, well clothed, well housed and well instructed.

Human, All Too Human

Nowadays, to be sure, we adhere to the gospel of the tortoise. To think historically today is almost to believe that at all times history has been made according to the principle: "as little as possible in the longest possible time!" Alas, Greek history moves so fast! Life has never since been lived so prodigally.

Friedrich Nietzsche

1844 - 1900

Heavy Metal is the law

Voivod | 2021

Os canadenses do Voivod foram pioneiros na sondagem atmosférica cyberpunk em suas composições. Para os leitores de sci-fi, o conjunto é um prato cheio. A distopia e a inteligência artificial estavam sendo explorados pelos thrashers. O álbum Nothinface é simplesmente clínico: Neuro-link dementing / Limbo-Inc. / Amnesia. Vocal lírico e um instrumental progressivo beirando o jazz. Em Planet Eaters, o colapso socioambiental: new condos on the moon. Fantástico!

Heavy Metal is the law

Money 

Breeds organized crime and corruption 

Who says that crime doesn't pay?

A Bay Area possui uma das melhores cenas do heavy metal. Em 1991, Heathen lançava o seu segundo e furioso álbum Victims of Deception com letras críticas que abordam corrupção, alienação e manipulação política, tomem como exemplo Opiate of the Masses. Thrash Metal com vocal melódico, riffs consistentes e uma fundamentada cozinha. Variações, peso e melodia que somente músicos altamente qualificados e técnicos poderiam produzir. Uma banda muito pouco lembrada. Clássico!

Youthful charm of science

The search for truth still possesses the charm of standing everywhere in stark constrast to grey and tedious error; but this charm is in continual decline. Now, to be sure, we are still living in truth's youthful era and are accustomed to pursue truth as though she were a beautiful girl.

Friedrich Nietzsche

1844 - 1900

Pleasure in knowledge

Why is knowledge, the element of the scholar and philsopher, associated with pleasure? Firstly and above all, because one here bcomes conscious of one's strength; for the same reason, that is to say, that gymnastic exercises are pleasurable even when there are no spectators. Secondly, because in the course of acquiring knowledge one goes beyound former conceptions and their advocates and is victor over them. Thirdly, because through a new piece of knowledge, however small, we become superior to all and fell ourselves as the only ones who in this matter know aright. These three causes of pleasure are the most important, though there are many other subsidiary causes, according to the nature of the man who acquires knowledge.

Friedrich Nietzsche

1844 - 1900

Heavy Metal is the law

Death Angel | 1987

O furioso, powerfull e progressivo álbum The Ultra-Violence contava com Andy Galeon na bateria com apenas 14 anos. A técnica e a força do garoto impressionam. A potencia sonora e a qualidade profissional dos instrumentistas do heavy metal já despontavam na adolescência. Clássico absoluto do Thrash Metal da Bay Area. Garotada do primeiro mundo arrebentando na velocidade, na solidez dos riffs e na complexidade dos solos de guitarra com uma surpreendente cozinha muito bem estruturada.

Future of science

Science bestows upon him who labours and experiments in it much satisfaction.If this demand of higher culture is not met, then the future course of human evolution can be foretold almost with certainty: interest in truth will cease the less pleasure it gives: because they are associated with pleasure, illusion, error and fantasy will regains step by step the ground they formerly herd: the ruination of science, a sinking back into barbarism, will be the immediate consequence; mankind will have to begin again at the weaving of its tapestry, after having, like Penelope, unwoven it at night. Bu who can guarantee to us that it will always find the strength for it?

Friedrich Nietzsche

1844 - 1900

Manners

Once society has grown more certain of its objectives and principles, so that they act constructively (whereas now the manners we hav acquired, constructed as they were by circumstances that have ceased to existe, are being acquired and inherited ever more feebly), manners and deportment in social intercourse will necessarily be as natural and simple as these objectives and principles are. An improvement in the division of time and work, gymnastic exercise transformed into an accompaniment to leisure, a power of reflection augmented and grown more rigorous that, bestowns prudence and flexibilty even upon the body, will bring all this with it.

Friedrich Nietzsche

1844 - 1900

A formação social da mente

Ao enfatizar as origem sociais da linguagem e do pensamento, Vygotsky seguia a linha dos influentes sociólogos franceses, mas, até onde sabemos, ele foi o primeiro psicólogo moderno a sugerir os mecanismos pelos quais a cultura torna-se parte da natureza de cada pessoa.

Ao insistir em que as funções psicológicas são um produto da atividade cerebral, tornou-se um dos primeiros defensores da associação da psicologia cognitiva experimental com a neurologia e a fisiologia. Finalmente, ao propor que tudo isso deveria ser entendido à luz da teoria marxista da história da sociedade humana, lançou as bases para uma ciência comportamental unificada.

Vygotsky, desde o início de sua carreira, via o pensamento marxista como uma fonte científica valiosa. "Uma aplicação do materialismo histórico e dialético relevante para a psicologia", seria um resumo preciso da teoria sociocultural de Vygotsky dos processos psicológicos superiores.

A teoria marxista da sociedade (conhecida como materialismo histórico) também teve um papel fundamental no pensamento de Vygotsky. De acordo com Marx, mudanças históricas na sociedade e na vida material produzem mudanças na "natureza humana" (consciência e comportamento).

Para Vygotsky, na melhor tradição de Marx e Engels, o mecanismo de mudança individual ao longo do desenvolvimento tem sua raiz na sociedade e na cultura.

O Capital está escrito de acordo com o seguinte método: Marx analisa uma única "célula" viva da sociedade capitalista - por exemplo, a natureza do valor. Dentro dessa célula ele descobre a estrutura de todo o sistema e de todas as suas instituições econômicas.

A participação de Vygotsky em debates sobre a formulação de uma psicologia marxista envolveu-o em disputas acirradas no fim dos anos 20 e começo dos 30. Nessas discussões, ideologia, psicologia e linhas de ação estavam intrincadamente ligadas, uma vez que diferentes grupos lutavam pelo direito de representar a psicologia.

Nos anos que imediatamente antecederam sua morte, Vygotsky lecionou e escreveu extensamente sobre problemas da educação, usando frequentemente o termo "pedologia", que pode ser grosseiramente traduzido por "psicologia educacional".

As ideias de Vygotsky de forma nenhuma morreram com ele. Mesmo antes de sua morte, ele e seus colaboradores estabeleceram um laboratório em Kharkov, chefiado inicialmente por A.N.

Michael Cole e Sylvia Scribner

Estrutura

Estar dentro da história significa perceber os sinais da alienação e da influência da corrupção no aparelho governamental.

Londres e Paris no século XIX: o espetáculo da pobreza

Como se articula a admissão da pobreza no campo político? Como os homens que fizeram a Revolução Francesa transformaram o espetáculo da multidão de miseráveis num pressuposto da ação política e da legitimidade de qualquer governo? O que tinha permitido no calor da Revolução essa solidariedade inquebrantável entre alguns dos seus agentes e o homem pobre? Que espírito da tradição política francesa impregnava e movia esses revolucionários a tal ponto que o seu dever político plenamente racional se expressa na solidariedade em relação ao próximo? A compaixão, experiência exclusivamente pessoal, totalmente privada, é lançada como móvel da política.

É bem verdade que a indiferença em relação à pobreza havia desaparecido no século XVIII, e com Rousseau, a repugnância inata ante o sofrimento alheio fora arrancada dos recônditos da intimidade pessoal. Esse sentimento novo, a compaixão, é a chave para se compreender a mudança na própria concepção de povo no decorrer da Revolução Francesa: não mais só os cidadãos, mas eles somados aos pobres. A teoria política de Rousseau já havia transformado a compaixão num dever político plenamente racional, e os revolucionários foram capazes de transformar esse dever numa solidariedade fundada na comunhão de interesses com os oprimidos e explorados.

Maria Stella M. Bresciani

Circular orbit fo humanity

With the decline of roman culture and its principal cause, the spread of christianity, a general uglification of man prevailed within the roman empire, so an eventual decline of the general culture of the earth could also introduce a muche greater uglification and in the end animalization of man to the point of apelikeness.

Friedrich Nietzsche

1844 - 1900

Renaissance and reformation

The Italian Renaissance contained within it all the positive forces to which we owe modern culture: liberation of thought, disrespect for authorities, victory of education over the arrogance of ancestry, enthusiasm for science and the scientific past of mankind, unfettering of the individual, a passion for truthfulness and an aversion to appearance and mere effect (which passion blazed forth in a whole host of artistic characters who, in an access of moral rectitude, demanded of themselves perfection in their work and nothing but perfection); indeed, the Renaissance possessed positive forces which have up to now never reappeared in our modern culture with such power as they had then. All its blemishes and vices notwithstanding, it was the golden age of this millennium. In contrast to it there stands the German Reformation: an energetic protest by retarded spirits who had by no means had enough of the world-outlook of the Middle Ages and greeted the signs of its dissolution, the extraordinary transformation of the religious life into something shallow and merely external, not with rejoicing, as would have been appropriate, but with profound ill-humour. With their stiff-necked northern forcefulness they reversed the direction in which men were going, with a violence appropriate to a state of siege they compelled the Counter-reformation, that is to say a catholic christianity of self-defence, and, just as they delayed the complete awakening and hegemony of the sciences for two or three hundred years, so they perhaps rendered the complete growing-together of the spirit of antiquity and the modern spirit impossible for ever. The great task of the Renaissance could not be brought to completion, the protestation of German nature grown retarded (for in the Middle Ages it had had sufficient sense to cross over the Alps again and again for the sake of its salvation) prevented it. It was an extraordinary chance political constellation that preserved Luther and lent force to that protestation: for the Emperor protected him so as to employ his innovation as an instrument of pressure against the Pope, while the Pope likewise secretely befriended him so as to employ the Protestant princes of the Holy Roman Empire as a coun terweight to the Emperor. Without this curious combination of motives Luther would have been burned like Huss - and the Enlightenment perhaps have dawned somewhat sooner than it did and with a fairer lustre than we can now even imagine.

Friedrich Nietzsche

1844 - 1900

Reasons judged a posteriori on the basis of consequences

All states and orderings within society - classes, marriage, education, law - all these derive their force and endurane solely from the faith the fettered spirits have in them: that is to say in the absence of reasons, or at least in the warding off of the demand for reasons. The fettered spirits are unwilling to admit this: they recognize in its intellectual notions, noticed nothing of this pudendum, demanded faith and nothing but faith and passionately repulsed the desire for reasons; it pointed to the sucess enjoyed by faith: you will soon see the advantage to be derived from faith, it intimated, it shall make you blessed. The state in fact does the same thing, and every father raises his son in the same fashion: only regard this as true, he says, and you will see how much good it will do you. What this means, however, is that the personal utility of an opinion is supposed to demonstrate its truth, the advantageouness of a theory is supposed to guarantee its intellectual soundness ans well-foundedness. It is as though a defendant said to the court: my counsel is telling the whole truth, for just see what follows from what he says: I shall be acquitted. - Because the fetered spirits harbour their principles on account of their utility, they suppose that the views of the free spirit are like wise held for utilitarian ends and that the regards as true only that which profits him. Since, however, this seems to be the opposite of that which is profitable to their country or class, they assume that the principles of the free spirit are dangerous to them; they say, or sense: he must not be right, for he is harmfull to us.

Friedrich Nietzsche

1844 - 1900

History of modern art

The Red House & the birth of modern architecture

Roughly speaking, the Marxists desire to create a comfortable and beautiful life for as many as possible.

In 1859, William Morris decided to construct a house for his new wife, Jane Burden. This building is a physical manifesto for the Arts and Crafts Movement.

The voice of history

In general history seems to furnish the following instruction regarding the production of genius: mistred and torment men - thus it cries to the passions of envy, hatred and contest - drive them to the limit, one against the other, nation against nation, and do it for centuries on end; then perhaps, a spark as it were thrown off by the fearful energy thus ignited, the light og genius will suddenly flare up; the will, made wild like a horse under the rider's spur, wile then break out and leap over into another domain. - He who became aware of how genius is produced, and desired to proceed in the manner in which nature usually does in this matter, would have to be exactly as evil and ruthless as nature is. - But perhaps we have misheard.

Friedrich Nietzsche

1844 - 1900

In the proximity of madness

The sum of sensations, items of knowledge, experiences, the whole burden of culture, that is to say, has become so great that an over - excitation of the nervous and thinking powers is now a universal danger; indeed, the cultivated classes of Europe have in fact become altogether neurotic, and almost every one of its great families has come close to lunacy in anu rate one of its branches. It is true that health is nowadays sought by all available means; but what is chiefly needed is an abatement of that tension of faling, that crushing cultural burden which, even if it has to be purchased at a heavy cost, nonetheless gives ground for high hopes of a new Renaissance. We have christianity, the philosophers, poets, musicians to thank for an abundance of profound sensations: if these are not to stifle us we must conjure up the spirit of science, which on the whole makes one somewhat colder and more sceptical and in special cools down the fiery stream of belief in ultimate definitive truths; it is principally through christianity that this stream has grow so turbulent.

Friedrich Nietzsche

1844 - 1900

Miraculous education

Necromantia | Last Song For Valdezie | 1993

Interest in education will become genuinely intense only from the moment when belief in a god and his loving care is abandoned: just as the art of medicine could begin to flourish onl when belief in miraculous cures ceased. To the present day, however, all the world continues to believe in miraculous education: for the greatest disorder, confusion of objectives, unfavourable circumstances have succeded in producing the most fruitful and capable men, and how could there not be something uncanny in that? - Soon these cases too will be examined more closely and tested more carefully: no miracles will be discovered. Under the same circumstances countless men continually perish, the single individual who has been saved usually grows stronger as a consequence because, by virtue of an inborn, indestructible strength, he has undured these ill circumstances and in doing so exercised and augmented this strength: that is the explanation of the miracle. An education that no longer believes in miracles will have to pay attention to three things: firstly, how much energy is inherited? secondly, how can new energy be ignited? thirdly, how can the individual be adapted to the enormously diversified demands of culture without being distracted by them and his individuality dispersed - in short, how can the individual be se in place within the counterpoint of private and public culture, how can the play the main theme and at the same time the subordinate theme as well?

Friedrich Nietzsche

1844 - 1900

A Carcass

My love, do you recall the object which we saw,
That fair, sweet, summer morn!
At a turn in the path a foul carcass
On a gravel strewn bed,

Its legs raised in the air, like a lustful woman,
Burning and dripping with poisons,
Displayed in a shameless, nonchalant way
Its belly, swollen with gases.

The sun shone down upon that putrescence,
As if to roast it to a turn,

And to give back a hundredfold to great Nature
The elements she had combined;

And the sky was watching that superb cadaver
Blossom like a flower.
So frightful was the stench that you believed
You'd faint away upon the grass.

The blow-flies were buzzing round that putrid belly,
From which came forth black battalions
Of maggots, which oozed out like a heavy liquid
All along those living tatters.

All this was descending and rising like a wave,
Or poured out with a crackling sound;
One would have said the body, swollen with a vague breath,
Lived by multiplication.

And this world gave forth singular music,
Like running water or the wind,
Or the grain that winnowers with a rhythmic motion
Shake in their winnowing baskets.

The forms disappeared and were no more than a dream,
A sketch that slowly falls
Upon the forgotten canvas, that the artist
Completes from memory alone.

Crouched behind the boulders, an anxious dog
Watched us with angry eye,
Waiting for the moment to take back from the carcass
The morsel he had left.

— And yet you will be like this corruption,
Like this horrible infection,
Star of my eyes, sunlight of my being,
You, my angel and my passion!

Yes! thus will you be, queen of the Graces,
After the last sacraments,
When you go beneath grass and luxuriant flowers,
To molder among the bones of the dead.

Then, O my beauty! say to the worms who will
Devour you with kisses,
That I have kept the form and the divine essence
Of my decomposed love!

Charles Baudelaire

1821 - 1867

Translated by William Aggeler

Letter

Gabriel Fauré – Pavane, Op. 50

The Young Cracow Philharmonic

I not only love, not only admire, not only adore your music, I have been and am still falling in love with it. I could write a book more than 300 pages long about it.

Marcel Proust to Gabriel Fauré | 1897

Woman and child

 

Friendship and marriage - The best friend will probably acquire the best wife, because a good marriage is founded on the talent for friendship.

A male sickness - For the male sickness of self-contempt the surest cure is to be loved by a clever woman.

The desire to become loved - Engaged people who have been brought together by convenience often strive to become loved, so as to do away with the reproach of acting out of cold, calculating utility. Those who have adopted christianity for the sake advantage likewise strive to become genuinely devout; it makes the religious pantomime easier for them.

Proteus nature - Women in love come to be just as they are in the image that the men by whom they are loved have of them.

Friedrich Nietzsche

1844 - 1900

Too close

Marx & Engels | Belle and Sebastian

Melancholic woman let’s move to POA. 

Hey gothic girl, time flies by. We got the same taste.

I see people come and go, living low, in penury.

It is time building a real home.

We're looking for a love that was never in our hearts. 

Are you ready?

Porque não me ufano

A sociedade capitalista, cidadela da irracionalidade e desigualdade econômica, sente-se ameaçada pela violência que ela mesma produz.

Não há reivindicações éticas de igualdade em lugar algum da periferia. Muito menos no seio da classe dominante.

A perspectiva do futuro - a construção de uma boa sociedade - depende do grau em que todos possam ser transformados em seres racionais e camaradas. Principalmente a mutação da má consciência do homem rico que engendra medo, preconceitos teológicos e perpetua uma caricatura da imagem do homem pobre.

A perspectiva do futuro depende também do grau em que os pobres não sejam mais tratados como crianças.

Como se pertence a uma nação permanecendo pobre e com pouca instrução. Afinal, a pobreza é assim a tão rentável para a classe dominante?

Reflections on the overthrow of Communism

Communism, ladies and gentlemen, in Eastern Europe brought land reform and human services a dramatic bettering of the living conditions of hundreds of millions of people on a scale never before or never since witnessed in human history and that's something to appreciate. Communism transformed desperately poor countries into societies in which everyone had adequate food, shelter, medical care and education and some of us who come from poor families who carry around the hidden injuries of classes are very impressed by these achievements and are not willing to dismiss them as economistic to say that socialism doesn't work is to overlook the fact that it did work and it worked for hundreds of millions of people.

Michael Parenti

1933 - 2026

The un-Hellenic in Christianity

The Greeks did not see the Homeric gods as set above them as masters, or themselves set beneath the gods as servants, as the jews did. They saw as it were only the reflection of the most successful exemplars of their own caste, that is to say an ideal, not an antithesis of their own nature. They felt inter-related with them, there existed a mutual interest, a kind of symmetry. Christianity, on the other hand, crushed and shattered man completely and buried him as though in mud: into a feeling of total depravity it then suddenly shone a beam fo divine mercy, so that, surprised and stupefied by this act of grace, man gave vent to a cry of rapture and for a moment believed he bore all heaven within him. It is upon this pathological excess of feeling, upon the profound corruption of head and heart that was required for it, that all the psychological sensations of christianity operate: it desires to destroy, shalter, stupefy, intoxicate, the one thng it does not desire is measure: and that is why it is in the profundest sense barbaric, ignoble, un-Hellenic.

Friedrich Nietzsche

1844 - 1900

The real world

The paths of scholarship are smoothed in different fashions in different centuries.

Uccellacci e uccellini

The raven: I come from far away. My country is called ideology, I live in the capital, the city of the future, on Karl Marx Street, number seventy times seven.

Pier Paolo Pasolini | 1966

Capitalis system to enslave everyone

When he describes capitalist society, Marx is constantly making the point that everything in it is under "illusions of the epoch", is dominated by "fetishism", and hence is unfree-except, of course, for the "fully conscious" revolutionary group. "As in religion, man is governed by the products of his own brain, so in capitalist production, he is governed by the products of his own hand". The freedom Marx has given with one hand he seems to be taking back with the other; everywhere he looks, everyone seems to be in chains. Yet if men are "free", how is it possible for them to have got into such a state of "unfreedom" in the first place? Or, alternately, if men are encased in a fly-bottle, how will it be possible for then to see things in any way but through a glass, darkly? If their whole outlook on life is "fetishistic", how will be possibel even to recognize that they are enslaved, let alone make the effort to set themselves free? The paradox here is the familiar paradox of self-deception. Who, exactly, is supposed to be doing the "deceiving"? If the subject himself, in what sense is it meaningful to say that he is actually "deceived"? If it is meaningful, how, once having suceeded, can he undo the job, and "undeceive" himself? These are perennial problems for a therapist, not to mention a philosopher; they are also central to Marx's analysis of capitalism as an "infantile disease", he might have said, of man, who with its passing was "comming into his own".

Amerikkka

Na era Trump, até os americanos estão desprotegidos contra capturas, detenções, prisões arbitrárias e assassinatos.

Porque não me ufano

Afastado de qualquer atividade do pensamento, os homens e as mulheres perderam exatamente aquilo que os diferencia dos seres irracionais. No fim do percurso, encontramos somente pessoas reduzidas a meros seres instintivos, sua parcela de humanidade está sendo sistematicamente pulverizada.

Erscheinung

O que falta para a vida das pessoas ser economicamente segura? O que falta para que a distribuição da riqueza seja justa? Em que sentido pode-se dizer que as pessoas são livres em uma ordem social desigual e imperfeita?

Holy Horrors

Murder in the street

Hipátia (360 - 415), uma brilhante matemática e astrônoma que dirigia a biblioteca de Alexandria, foi brutalmente assassinada pela horda de cristãos de São Cirilo.

A lenta flecha da beleza

A mais nobre espécie de beleza é aquela que não arrebata de vez, que não se vale de assaltos tempestuosos e embriagantes (uma beleza assim desperta facilmente o nojo), mas que lentamente se infiltra, que levamos conosco quase sem perceber e deparamos novamente num sonho, e que afinal, após ter longamente ocupado um lugar modesto em nosso coração, se apodera completamente de nós, enchendo-nos os olhos de lágrimas e o coração de ânsias. O que ansiamos ao ver a beleza? Ser belos: imaginamos que haveria muita felicidade ligada a isso. - Mas isto é um erro.

Friedrich Nietzsche

1844 - 1900

Necessário

É necessário ter: um corpo leve por natureza e uma consciência aliviada pela arte e pelo saber.

A que preço se compra as vantagens da vida social?

A atividade política exige uma vida plenamente racional e honesta, mas os representantes do povo brasileiro pouco uso do pensamento andam fazendo. Se a atividade política não for racional, correta e verdadeira, ela se torna uma diligência de bandidos. Até hoje, por exemplo, nenhum poder conseguiu elaborar uma estratégia eficaz para eliminar os bolsões de miséria e analfabetismo que estão incrustados no social.

New York Times Book Review | 1974

Karl Marx is the greatest theorist of work. He had distinctive insight into the troubled and contradictory life of "the proletariat, the modern working class". Marx saw work as an arena where, potentially, a worker could not only "create an objective world by his practical activity", but also "freely develop his physical and mental energy". On the other hand, in real work in the bourgeois society he lived in, the worker "mortifies his body and ruins his mind... he does not affirm himself, but denies himself... he feels himself only outside his work, and in his work he feels outside himself". Marx thought that even as work insulted and injured the workers, it made them smart enough to see what was going on, angry enough and disciplined enough to organize and revolt against a social system that turned work int a travesty of what it could be. This revolutionary vision was not only thrilling and terrifying, but plausible.

Marshall Berman

1940 - 2013

Entre amigos

Chamar alguém de “camarada” significa dizer: aqui não precisamos competir.

To the Finland Station

A study in the writing and acting of History

O herói trágico da história de Wilson, em Rumo à estação Finlândia, o último grande romance do século XIX, aquele que ocupa o centro do palco e que se ergue sobre todos os outros, mesmo muito tempo depois de sua morte, é Karl Marx. Pois Marx captou o sonho mais vigorosa e plenamente do que ninguém; lutou incansavelmente com as mais profundas contradições desse sonho em todos os seus trabalhos e viveu, como mostra Wilson, algumas das ambiguidades mais sombrias desse sonho no decorrer de sua própria existência. Pois Marx percebeu, com mais clareza do que qualquer outro pensador burguês, o potencial revolucionário inerente à sociedade burguesa: sua infinita produtividade; sua capacidade de romper a crosta do preconceito arraigado, da estupidez e da inércia; a amplitude de seu raio de visão, a abarcar o mundo inteiro, a avaliar todo tipo de relação humana e forma de vida; sua vontade de crescer e desenvolver-se; seu olhar aberto para o futuro. Ao mesmo tempo, Marx viu - e explicou de maneira definitiva em O Capital - o horror humano que todo esse progresso traz em sua esteira: a burguesia só consegue liberar energia humana destruindo seres humanos, usando-os como matéria-prima, como recursos a serem explorados, atirando-os no monturo da escória quando estão gastos, triturando-os quando atrapalham seu avanço.

A vida de Marx, na interpretação de Wilson, encarna as forças conflitantes que estão no cerne dessa sociedade que ele compreendeu tão bem. Descortinamos Marx em Londres, mergulhado numa pobreza desesperadora, vendo impotente seus filhos adoecerem e morrerem, corroendo-se de ódio contra incontáveis inimigos, capitalistas e socialistas, visíveis e invisíveis, incapaz de trabalhar cooperativamente com quem quer que fosse, explorando cruelmente aqueles a quem mais amava para poder criar sua grande obra e ajudar a por um fim na exploração para sempre, soterrado de culpa pela forma como vivia, mas incapaz de deter a engrenagem interna ou o demônio interior que o impelia insaciavelmente adiante. A caracterização que Wilson faz de Marx é brilhante e provavelmente insuperável, quase shakespeariana em sua grandeza trágica e angústia. Forçado a ferir para criar, Marx, o inimigo supremo da burguesia, destaca-se como um dos autênticos heróis da era burguesa.

Marshall Berman 

1940 - 2013

Cobra Norato

Here’s the school for trees
They’re studying geometry

A lonely frog calls rain

Little river goes to school
He’s learning geography

Toads spell out the laws of the jungle

I hear cat soul mew in the woods
When Tincuã cuckoos it’s a bad omen...

Millennium

 

A leading expert on antidemocratic, right-wing extremist and Nazi organizations.