The uttermost form of terrorism is that which disguises the very fact that it is terrorism. That is the sort of terrorism, for example, that is practiced in the United States of America and across the globe it strives to dominate under the name of what President George W. Bush, in one of his common lapses of language and the thought that should accompany it, once called “the war on terror.”
Read moreGod, Selfhood, and Selfishness
The less secure one is in oneself, the more selfish one becomes; and where selfishness is, there is nowhere left for the self—or for God—to be.
Read moreAdvertising Diversions and Diverting Advertisements
Absorbed by Light, Design Bridge, 2018 Amsterdam Light Festival
All art done for the sake of advertising is improper art. It diverts from silence, and engenders possessive, not ideal, desire. Proper art has nothing to do with such diversion and diversification.
Read moreFor God's Sake
Doing something solely for God’s sake is pouring one’s deed out freely and without ever counting the cost, just the same as one might pour an evening’s libation on the ground in a ritual honoring and worshiping divinity, happily and holily wasting the entire cup of wine “to no purpose.”
Read moreMy Life as a Whore
If I were to follow my philosophical calling, yet still be able to help put food on the family table and keep a roof over our heads, I had to do for money something that should be done solely for love. In other words, I was a prostitute. I prostituted myself to the academic institutions that paid me.
Read moreVeneration, Venality, and the Venerable
It is not accidental—unless it is in the sense that necessity is the purest and highest manifestation of chance or accident—that the words venerate and venerable come eventually from verbal derivatives of the Latin venus, meaning “sexually desirable, possessing qualities that excite desire.”
Read moreIs There a Substitute for the Proletariat?
Is there today, when there is no longer any genuine proletariat, some segment of society that has the realistic possibility of uniting, and in uniting, throwing off the chains that have for so many centuries bound us all?Unfortunately, ever since that question first posed itself to me, which was in the 1960s, I have myself been bound to answer that there is not.
Read moreThe Very Seat of Sin
To worship truly is to honor what absolutely or unconditionally deserves to be honored. It is to attend to the call of that which, set apart from all purposes to which it might be put, calls out to be venerated for itself alone.
Read moreRecycling Reality
All the sham things and dummy life that constitute our ever-recycling reality today, where the drug of Disneyland garbage has gone global thanks to the U.S. having done such a great job as a pusher, don’t just keep us from saying the truth. They keep us from even seeing it any longer. We’re all so drugged we don’t even know we’re on drugs any more.
Read moreWhat Stands Alone
We accept because we are first accepted. That is the truth of the matter, a truth that stands whole and alone.
Read more