Stephanie Ludwig ~ Atelier Veritas / Kätzchen [Kitten], 1901. Photogravure.
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Shomei Tomatsu & Ken Domon, Hiroshima-Nagasaki Document, 1961 (東松 照明, 土門拳)
The market was supposed to be an arena of choice, and 'commercial society' the perfection of freedom. Yet this conception of the market seems to rule out human freedom. It has tended to be associated with a theory of history in which modern capitalism is the outcome of an almost natural and inevitable process, following certain universal, transhistorical, and immutable laws. The operation of these laws can, at least temporarily, be thwarted, but not without great cost. Its end product, the 'free' market, is an impersonal mechanism that can to some extent be controlled and regulated, but that cannot finally be thwarted without all the dangers—and the futility—entailed by any attempt to violate the laws of nature.
Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View
Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View
In 1843, Anna Atkins made a book of sea algae. Floating, like a ‘foam of daisies’ washed in from swelling folds of the ocean, the algae are fragments of short stories carried by the sea. The etymology of algae, which is Latin for seaweed, is obscure. Perhaps the word comes from alliga, which means ‘binding and intertwining’, which sounds like letters on a page, only the blue ink is white and the white page is blue.
— Carol Mavor on Anna Atkins cyanotypes, Blue Mythologies
— Carol Mavor on Anna Atkins cyanotypes, Blue Mythologies
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And yet nothing is more necessary than this wisdom. It is ethics itself: to learn to live—alone, from oneself, by oneself. Life does not know how to live otherwise. And does one ever do anything else but learn to live, alone, from oneself, by oneself? This is, therefore, a strange commitment, both impossible and necessary, for a living being supposed to be alive: "I would like to learn to live." It has no sense and cannot he just unless it comes to terms with death. Mine as (well as) that of the other. Between life and death, then, this is indeed the place of a sententious injunction that always feigns to speak like the just.
— Jacques Derrida from Exordium, in Specters of Marx
— Jacques Derrida from Exordium, in Specters of Marx