words.provolot.com

that is perhaps why (have I talked about this again?) the phrase 'justice' is perhaps the most sinister of all; also unhelpful and sinister phrases are: 'love', 'justice', 'right', and so on. justice presupposes a pre-existing criterion; the question of justice is the application of a morality that defines quality/justness/rightness. when you have a situation in which the systems of moralities themselves are clashing against each other, perhaps you are in the space of pre-justice, which is itself a political space. ranciere: politics is not agreeing whether something is white or not; politics is an initial agreement onto what the word white means in the first place.

I said this a few months ago, when everything was absolutely different, and now here I am, and the world has changed, and it generates something like a chuckle: my world has changed. oh, don't you know? I've lost people, found people, found people, lost people, I've ran in the streets, I've stayed up all night, I've cried all night, I've laughed, and now here I am, and I am this being, this solid core of a being, and that's never changed, wavered sometimes but never vanished, and somehow now I feel that so solidly, and it is strange to feel it sometimes, like I'm pressing outside onto the world from the inside of a clear plastic beach ball, this invisible membrane that I'm always trying to make bigger. push, push, and push. there's nothing but desire, want, everything constituted in the want.

more than a year ago I said:

the more I think and the more I perceive the more I know that everything happens in the moment of desire, everything happens when you desire, it's not just that nothing happens when you don't desire but that there is nothing without desire...

and yes. that is true. yes, I would like to tell myself, with the strange calm that has descended upon me from god-knows-where, I would like to sit crosslegged and tell myself: yes, it's all just desire, want, the entire terrain is just wants, and so you are young, and you are full of energy, and to quote zizek: don't be afraid to really want what you desire.

and so that quote about justice? I disagree with my former self. justice is about desire, from a desire so strong it almost turns into a truth, and it is sinister yes but it's borne out of a bright light pushing hard (and yes this may be dangerous, a voice whispers, pushing hard for whom, on what grounds?), but it's borne out of a desire, a want, a statement that exists out of laws, rules, that is a simply a desire-to-have-this;

that the desire for 'justice' is the elemental component of the creation of groups, societies, communities, social contracts, that there was and never will be anything without the posit-ing force of "hey, listen, this is what I think we should have, and so this is what I want, and we should try our best to have it."

this realization is visceral. almost bodily. bodily, bodily, bodily. and the body says: there is nothing, nothing, nothing but aligned direction, motivated movement.