Magni Formica Laboris

THE MADMAN----Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place, and cried incessantly: "I seek God! I seek God!"---As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. Has he got lost? asked one. Did he lose his way like a child? asked another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? emigrated?---Thus they yelled and laughed The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. "Whither is God?" he cried; "I will tell you.We have killed him---you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up

From the end of Lecture 4 from his series on Nietzsche: I will bring up a few things from the Genealogy again, but by the time we have reached this moment of The Death of God, we already have a strange change in the discourse of Nietzsche’s text. Because now the challenge will be for me to present what I have only so far indicated. And it’s indicated in the parable. What new games, new festivals, can human beings – insofar there is any life that remains – what can be invented, now? To make up for what has already been destroyed. And that’s the challenge we’ll have in the next classes; is to see first what does Nietzsche offer us by way of any new myths like that, and more importantly, what myths could we construct ourselves; what games, what holy festivals, what interesting books, fascinating arguments, and new ways to live? Other than the pathetic tragic, stupid, banal array of ordinary, everyday, bourgeois stinking life. Surely we can do better than that. Surely. So that’s the pr

From Song of Myself With music strong I come, with my cornets and my drums, I play not marches for accepted victors only, I play marches for conquer'd and slain persons.

Posterity! You will never know, how much it cost the present Generation, to preserve your Freedom! I hope you will make a good Use of it. If you do not, I shall repent in Heaven, that I ever took half the Pains to preserve it.

A mobile army of metaphors,  metonyms , and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins. On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral [or Extra-moral] Sense

Although Pennsylvania had begun an  abolition  of slavery in 1780, it permitted slaveholders from other states to hold slaves in the state for up to six months. After that time, slaves would gain their freedom. Members of Congress were exempt from Pennsylvania's  Gradual Abolition Act , but not officers of the executive and judicial branches. Washington and other slaveholders  rotated their slaves out of the state  to prevent the slaves from establishing the 6-month residency needed to qualify for  manumission . His slave  Oney Judge  escaped from captivity in Philadelphia, and he gradually replaced most of his slaves in Philadelphia with  indentured servants   who were German immigrants. "This being the case, the Attorney General conceived, that after six months residence, your slaves would be upon no better footing than his. But he observed, that if, before the expiration of six months, they could, upon any pretense whatever, be carried or sent out of the State, but for a

The husband may demand a divorce on the ground of his wife's adultery. The wife may demand divorce on the ground of adultery in her husband, when he shall have brought his concubine into their common residence. (source: French Civil Code, Book I. Title VI. Chapter I. "Of the Causes of Divorce". http://www.napoleon-series.org/research/government/code/book1/c_title06.html)

"This great drama [the French Revolution] transformed the whole meaning of political change, and the contemporary world would be inconceivable if it had not happened. . . . In other words it transformed men's outlook. The writers of the Enlightenment, so revered by the intelligentsia who made the Revolution, had always believed it could be done if men dared to seize control of their own destiny. The men of 1789 did so, in a rare moment of courage, altruism, and idealism which took away the breath of educated Europe. What they failed to see, as their inspirers had not foreseen, was that reason and good intentions were not enough by themselves to transform the lot of their fellow men. Mistakes would be made when the accumulated experience of generations was pushed aside as so much routine, prejudice, fanaticism, and superstition. The generation forced to live through the upheavals of the next twenty-six years paid the price. Already by 1802 a million French citizens lay dead; a

Lucy calls into doubt the value of all of the specifically European modes of artistic or linguistic expression that are the touchstones not only of David's career, but his worldview: she jokes with him that he must think her activities - running a boarding kennel and growing produce for a farmers' market - worthless, that he must think she 'ought to be painting still lives' or learning Russian (p. 74). Where David stresses the apparent rights of individual desire, or self-expression, of a concern with individual consciousness and its apprehension of the sublime, Lucy emphasizes individual responsibility and responsibility to others - including non-human others  (p 28 of Andrew Van Der Vlies' J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace , Continuum 2010)