Bon Mots

A Half-Million Thanks

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson BlogCounts, Bon Mots, RMWMTMBM Archive 0 Comments

Sometime late last night, this blog reached a major milestone: we passed the HALF-MILLION UNIQUE VISITORS mark!  I want to express my sincere gratitude to and appreciation for all of you who have stopped by this little corner of the Internet. Thank you, thank you, THANK YOU. The aim of my work here has always…

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Democracy Must Always Be Severe

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Bon Mots, Codifying Civility and Collegiality, Democracy, Philosophy, Politics, RMWMTMBM Archive 0 Comments

“Democracy must always be severe. Without either desire or dread of paradox, we may go even further. Democracy must always be unpopular. It is a religion, and the essence of a religion is that it constrains. Like every other religion, it asks men to do what they cannot do; to think steadily about the important…

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Bon Mots: Delueze on Philosophy

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Bon Mots, RMWMTMBM Archive 0 Comments

In the interview “On Philosophy” in Negotiations (Columbia University Press, 1995, p.136), Deleuze remarks: Philosophy is always a matter of inventing concepts. I’ve never been worried about going beyond metaphysics or any death of philosophy. The function of philosophy, still thoroughly relevant, is to create concepts. Nobody else can take over that function. Philosophy has…

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Bon Mots: Fanon on Racism

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Bon Mots, RMWMTMBM Archive 0 Comments

From his essay “Racism and Culture” in Toward the African Revolution (Grove Press, 1964, p.59-60), Frantz Fanon writes: It is at this level that racism is treated as a question of persons. “There are a few hopeless racists, but you must admit that on the whole the population likes…” “With time all this will disappear…”…

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Bon Mots: Coetzee on the Origin of the State

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Bon Mots, Politics, RMWMTMBM Archive 0 Comments

From his most recent novel, Diary of a Bad Year (Viking, 2007, p.3), J.M. Coetzee’s chief narrator, Señor C, speculates: Every account of the origins of the state starts from the premise that “we”– not we the readers but some generic we so wide as to exclude no one– participate in its coming into being….

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Bon Mots: Arendt on the Rights of Stateless People

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Bon Mots, Human Rights, Philosophy, Politics, RMWMTMBM Archive 0 Comments

From The Origins of Totalitarianism (Harcourt/HBJ, 1979, p. 295-6), Hannah Arendt tracks the coincidence of statelessness and rightlessness: The calamity of the rightless is not that they are deprived of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, or of equality before the law and freedom of opinion– formulas which were designed to solve problems within…

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Bon Mots: Agamben on Ausnahmezustand

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Bon Mots, Philosophy, Politics, RMWMTMBM Archive 1 Comment

In State of Exception (University of Chicago Press, 2003, p.86-7), Giorgio Agamben writes:The aim of this investigation– in the urgency of the state of exception “in which we live”– was to bring to light the fiction that governs this arcanum imperii [secret of power] par excellence of our time. What the “ark” of power contains…

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Bon Mots: Derrida on the future of the Humanities

June 9, 2024 Leigh M. Johnson Bon Mots, Human Rights, Philosophy, RMWMTMBM Archive 1 Comment

From “The University Without Conditions” in Without Alibi (Stanford University Press, 2002, p.231), Jacques Derrida describes “the Humanities of tomorrow”: These new Humanities would treat the history of man, the idea, the figure, and the notion of “what is proper to man.” They will do this on the basis of a nonfinite series of oppositions…

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