Consent Not to Be a (Human) Being.
by yours truly.
in a Special Issue of Philosophy Today. co-edited by @AntiClimaco + @tyrsttle
🙏🏾🙏🏾
https://t.co/RiOuBInV5w
I'm probably going to be thinking about this sentence for the remainder of my life:
"Love moves towards mastery, hatred towards an ambivalence of being.”
- Selamawit Terrefe
Rest in peace to you Dr. Terrefe. I wish I would have gotten the chance meet you in person + to tell you these things in real life. The news was very shocking. You will be very missed. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. 😔
I talked to Dr. Terrefe for the first + only time in 2018 the winter before I decided to fully commit to going to grad school. Speaking with them, played a major role in my decision to come to UCI + my decision to go get my PhD at all. I’ve said it in other places, so…
I am very very grateful for them. It was a small moment in time, very brief, nothing major really but it played a big part in the trajectory of my life up to this point + things would most likely be very different if not for that phone call all those many years ago.
I am not alright. It would not at all be an exaggeration to say that she is one of the most important thinkers to me. That her thinking excited and mobilized me. I'm wrecked now knowing that she is gone.
This demand for moral clarity/purity in fiction (or perhaps art more broadly) and a belief that anything that strays from that or requires a lot of grey is tacitly supporting Something Bad/Regressive Politics
The most ignorant form of “identity politics” is the one that assumes you have a comrade in someone simply because the political structure recognizes you two as belonging to the same identity group. Intra-mural/identity conflict is common, + only a real flat politics denies this.