Marie-Louise Von Franz, Alchemy: An Introduction to the Symbolism and the Psychology
“…when Einstein makes a new model of reality he is helped by his unconscious, without which he would not have arrived at his theories.”
Katherine McKittrick, “Substructure”
“When I first engaged the world and work of Sylvia Wynter, one of the reasons I found her work so difficult to read and comprehend was that I was positioning her arguments within our present system of knowledge…When I began reading Sylvia Wynter, it took me time to grasp that she was inventing a heretical (interdisciplined) analytical frame that exceeded typical ways of knowing.”
Jacqueline Rose, Conversations with Jacqueline Rose
“There is also something, I think, about language. Jacques Lacan once said the only people who could really understand psychoanalysis were literature students, and people who wrote literature, because they are not fazed by the fact that one word can mean more than one thing at the same time, and might contradict itself. Indeed, they take great pleasure–that’s probably why we become literary students–in the fact that a word can carry two completely contrary meanings, and in holding that ambiguity or tension in place. Whereas, if you’re in one of the positive sciences, the instability of language, the way it floats over and away from meaning, is a problem that has to be bypassed or ignored.”
Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination
Aime Cesaire, “Poetry and Knowledge “
“Ghosts are a somewhat unusual topic of inquiry for a social analyst (much less a degreed sociologist)…The available critical vocabularies were failing (me)…the ghost is just the sign, or the empirical evidence if you like, that tells you a haunting is taking place…The way of the ghost is haunting, and haunting is a very particular way of knowing what has happened or is happening. Being haunted draws us affectively, sometimes against our will and always a bit magically, into the structure of feeling of a reality we come to experience, not as cold knowledge, but as a transformative recognition.”
“Poetic knowledge is born in the great silence of scientific knowledge…In short, scientific knowledge enumerates, measures, classifies and kills…It is gnawed away from within. Gnawed away by hunger, the hunger for feelings, the hunger for life…Only myth satisfies man entirely: his heart, his reason, his taste for the fragment and the whole, his taste for the false and the true, for myth is all of these at once. A hazy and emotional apprehension…”
Glyn Isaac, “Aspects of Human Evolution” (1983), quoted by Sylvia Wynter
“Understanding the literature on human evolution calls for the recognition of special problems that confront scientists who report on this topic. Regardless of how the scientists present them, accounts of human origins are read as replacement materials for genesis. They fulfill needs
that are reflected in the fact that all societies have in their culture some form of origin beliefs, that is, some narrative or configurational notion of how the world and humanity began. Usually, these beliefs do more than cope with curiosity, they have allegorical content, and they convey
values, ethics and attitudes. The Adam and Eve creation story of the Bible is simply one of a wide variety of such poetic formulations. . . . The scientific movement which culminated in Darwin’s compelling formulation of evolution as a mode of origin seemed to sweep away earlier beliefs
and relegate them to the realm of myth and legend. Following on from this, it is often supposed that the myths have been replaced by something quite different, which we call “science.” However, this is only partly true; scientific theories and information about human origins have been slotted into the same old places in our minds and our cultures that used to be occupied by the myths. . . . Our new origin beliefs are in fact surrogate myths, that are themselves part science, part myths.”
Sylvia Wynter, “We Must Learn to Sit Down Together and Talk About a Little Culture: Reflections on West Indian Writing and Criticism”
“A multitude of consumers is the negation of a multitude of men. Art which accepts man as a consumer belongs to what Malraux calls, “the appeasing arts”. These arts, as Malraux points out, are not inferior arts. They are anti-art. Art is a vital and functional element of the dynamics of a society, that which unites men – the more than bread by which they live. Anti-art, whether expressed in the James Bond novels, or the French anti-novel, the very latest avant of the avant garde, helps men to escape from the reality of a society which they have fashioned; which now fashions them; and which they can no longer endure. ‘Good art’, said Tolstoy with prophetic insight, ‘is that which serves the religious perception of our times — that of the unity of mankind.’ ‘Bad art’ is that which disserves it. The appeasing arts, says Malraux, the cinema, the soap opera, the television serial, invite men to escape to an illusion”
Aime Cesaire, “Calling the Magician: A Few Words for a Caribbean Civilization”
“True civilizations are poetic shocks: the shock of the stars, of the sun, the plant, the animal, the shock of the round globe, of the rain, of the light, of numbers, the shock of life, the shock of death.”
Dionne Brand, Theory
“I think of Selah and Yara and Odalys now, not as hindrances, not even as transit points to myself or as the lessons of my life–but as the life itself, the theory of my life… I must sit in the knowledge of them; we remain adjacent.”
Contrafiction // Wisdom is gathered here 