here for now

aside: men who are neurotic about being convinced “by emotions”

collaterlysisters:

hey bros, group hug.  I’m gonna lay something on you, it’s going to make life a lot simpler.  Check this out: there is no such divide between reason and emotion.  When people talk about reason in this way they are actually using shorthand for a certain way of negotiating and conveying emotion.  What you argue for and how you do it are inevitably a product of your emotions.  There are emotional values that can be said to be generally reproducible and common - having food as a good thing, for example - but they are no less emotional than more specific kinds of sentiment.

There is a huge ass conversation to have about emotional tenor, about when the kinds of relations we (someone chauvinistically) call “reason” are and aren’t useful to various ends, but there is really nothing to say about “removing” emotion from a conflict or thinking reasonably “instead of” emotionally, because these are things that cannot actually be done *peels out*

Judith Butler on Peace

I think that peace is the active and difficult resistance to the temptation of war; it is the prerogative and the obligation of the injured. Peace is something that has to be vigilantly maintained; it is a vigilance, and it involves temptation, and it does not mean we as human beings are not aggressive. It does not mean that we do not have murderous impulses. This is a mistaken way of understanding non-violence. Many people think, “Oh, we need to be non-violent; humans can somehow get violence out of their souls; we’re not constituted by aggression.” Rather, I think it is precisely because we’re constituted with aggression, it’s precisely because we are capable of waging war, and of striking back, and of doing massive injury, that peace becomes a necessity. Peace is a certain resistance to the terrible satisfactions of war. It’s a commitment to living with a certain kind of vulnerability to others and susceptibility to being wounded that actually gives our individual lives meaning. And I think this way of viewing things is a much harder place to go, so to speak. One can’t just do it alone, either. I think it needs to be institutionalized. It needs to be part of a community ethos. I think in fact it needs to be part of an entire foreign policy.

(Source: believermag.com)