Lara S > Recent Status Updates

Cancer will be partly de-mythicised and it may then be possible to compare something to a cancer without implying either a fatalistic diagnosis or a rousing call to fight by any means whatever a lethal, insidious enemy. Then perhaps it will be morally permissible, as it is not now, to use cancer as a metaphor

„To describe phenomenon as a cancer is an incitement to violence. The use of cancer in political discourse encourages fatalism and justifies „severe“ measures [.]. The concept of disease is never innocent. But it could be argued that the cancer metaphors are in themselves implicitly genocidal. No specific political view seems to have a monopoly on this metaphor

20th century women‘s fashions (with all their cult of thinness) are the last stronghold of the metaphors associated with the romanticising of TB in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

My point is that illness is not a metaphor, and that the most truthful way of regarding illness - and the healthiest way of being ill - is one most purified of, most resistant to, metaphoric thinking.

Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone shocks born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.

You do not have to be me in order for us to fight alongside each other. I do not have to be you to recognise that our wars are the same. What we must do is commit ourselves to some future that can include each other and to work towards that future with the particular strengths of our individual identities. And to do this, we must allow each other our differences at the same time as we recognise our sameness.

We dont have to romanticise our past to be aware of how it seeds our present. We dont have to suffer the waste of an amnesia that robs us of the lessons of the past rather than permits us to read them with pride as well as deep understanding. We know what it is to be lied to, and we know how important it is not to lie to ourselves. We‘repowerfulbecausewehavesurvived,andthat‘swhatit’sallabout-survivalandgrowth.

Still preaching - There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.

„Klara begriff erst viele Jahre später, dass Jasmin etwas wusste, was den Allermeisten fehlte: In Zeiten großer Enge brauchte es jemanden, der den Mut gepachtet hatte und eine Richtung vorgab.“

Luckily, there is also historian Achille Membe, who directly connects Foucault's idea of the sovereign and of "bio-power" (the right to give or withhold life) to race and racism. "The politics of race," he writes, "is ultimately linked to a politics of death.....In the economy of biopower, the function of racism is to regulate the distribution of death and to make possible the state's murderous functions."

„Books can be teachers too. I needed to know that I could write about my own pain without being doomed to repeat it. I needed to know that I could write about suffering without seeking more suffering out. I needed to know that writing could free me of my past, not trap me in it.“

Still not sure about this book but learned the expression „opportunity splurge“ in „diplomatic parlance“ to describe self-serving diplomacy and I‘m intrigued

„Wir fuhren über eine breite Straße, vorbei an Fassaden von Häusern, die aussahen wie Menschen, die sich nicht mehr schick machen, weil sie nichts mehr vorhaben im Leben.“

Wir kennen die Lebenswirklichkeit dieses vulnerablen Teils der Bevölkerung nicht aus der „Innenperspektive,“ sondern nur aus der „Außenperspektive“

.. zu einer nahezu vollständigen Unsichtbarkeit: In der Theorie ist kein Platz für sie.

Konzept vom »Körper«, das Alter, Gebrechlichkeit, Krankheit etc. ausblenden muss, um die Existenz im Alltag, die Anwesenheit in der Welt oder politisches Handeln denken zu können, verurteilt alte Menschen oder Menschen, deren Selbstständigkeit abnimmt..

Eribon zeigt dass Sartre‘s und Beauvoir‘s Theorien nicht auf dass Altern und alte Menschen anwendbar sind. Aber - nicht das ist doch nicht nur ageist sondern auch ableist.

Allein die Möglichkeit, sich selbst in einem anderen zu sehen und sich mit ihm oder ihr zu identifizieren, und mehr noch die Möglichkeit, eine Vorstellung von dem Menschen zu entwickeln, der man ist, um zu dem Menschen werden zu können, der man sein will, ist ein entscheidender Faktor in der individuellen und kollektiven Identitätskonstruktion.

Bekanntermaßen ist es für Angehörige sämtlicher Minderheiten immens wichtig, in der Öffentlichkeit repräsentiert zu sein - im Fernsehen, im Film, in der Literatur, in der Politik etc. -, und zwar selbst dann, wenn das Bild abwertend und deformierend ist.