"The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters"
Stacco Troncoso
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(Quote by Antonio Gramsci, of course).
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Stacco Troncoso Fri 9 Dec 2016 4:01PM
The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.
Loose translation, commonly attributed to Gramsci by Slavoj Žižek, presumably formulation by Žižek (see below). Source
More fun here: https://thecharnelhouse.org/2015/07/03/no-zizek-did-not-attribute-a-goebbels-quote-to-gramsci/
Paul B. Hartzog Fri 9 Dec 2016 4:53PM
Lol. This is the formulation of the Žižek/Gramsci that I am most familiar with:
“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born, in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”
Paul B. Hartzog Fri 9 Dec 2016 4:57PM
Simon Grant Fri 9 Dec 2016 4:58PM
How disappointing that people can argue like that about trifles. However, I do prefer the original quote, as given on the cited wikiquote page:
La crisi consiste appunto nel fatto che il vecchio muore e il nuovo non può nascere: in questo interregno si verificano i fenomeni morbosi piú svariati.
which is translated, perfectly reasonably to my eye, as
The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.
I prefer it because, in talking about "morbid phenomena" rather than "monsters" it is less prone to having fingers pointing at people taken as this or that "monster". (Actually I do prefer "phenomena", because "morbid symptoms" is too tied to medicine.)
I'm feeding this thread because I do think that the related issues matter, whether you call them "etiquette", "good manners", or something more like "positive commons culture". Not to judge or blame, but to educate and guide people into what we find helpful and constructive.
Paul B. Hartzog Fri 9 Dec 2016 5:15PM
Oh absolutely I prefer the quote I posted too. For starters, morbidity is a systemic condition, not a "monster" that you can blame. "Symptoms" implies that what you see is not the cause or even the condition itself, but only the manifestations of the invisible cause. It therefore demands that you seek out the root cause in order to deal with that directly.
Moreover, the fact that "the new cannot be born" creates the "interregnum." This claim implies that there must be a reason that the new cannot be born, i.e. something that is actively interrupting what would otherwise be a natural process.
I could go on... ;-)
Paul B. Hartzog · Fri 9 Dec 2016 2:21PM
LOVE the Gramsci quote. Got a citation reference? I'll put it on https://medium.com/incites