||"The slate has never been clean, and we can't wipe off the surface to start fresh--there's no 'fresh' to start... there is no primordial state which we might wish to go back to, no Eden we have desecrated, no pretoxic body we might uncover through enough chia seeds and kombucha," writes Shotwell. "[Purism] is a common approach for anyone who attempts to meet and control a complex situation that is fundamentally outside our control."||

- From Alexis Shotwell, Against Purity, as quoted by Emerson Whitney, Heaven, p130

#bookstodon #gender #purity #purism #exvangelical #atheism #embodiment #ComplexSubjectivity #AporeticFlow

Finished Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language by @gretchenmcc this morning & loved it, esp the "#ThirdSpace" framing. Reminds me of Anthony Pinn's #BlackHumanism work on secular sacred space, using that example of a coffee shop. That connected his discussion of time-space disruption in community, & also resonates with the notion of #AporeticFlow that I take from Monica R Miller (a once protégé who stretches & breaks his work in many ways on her own). #linguistics #bookstodon

I do love this quote from #JaneAusten, "I must learn to brook being happier than I deserve," it resonates with me, but also causes me to reflect again on the notion of "deserve" within a Protestant Ethic (read capitalist moral system); whether "deserve" deserves any structural place within a notion of #happiness, building a idea happiness based rather on the notion of building lived life no matter what the parameters of one's life are.

#ProtestantEthic #AporeticFlow

https://smutlandia.com/@AdaraAstin/109638593468045965

To be clear, this is rooted in #Derrida & Monica R Miller's notions of #AporeticFlow developed in her work on #Religion & #HipHop (like the #cypher). It then bears direct relations to a whole dendritic network of other work in Black Feminism, Caribbean thought, Indigenous Theories, Black Critical Theories, trans & gender theory. Also, there's so much really cool work that seems to come out of Canadian AfroCaribbean scholars & First Nations #scholars. #academicmastodon #criticaltheory #academic

But it's all about that #AporeticFlow (#aporetic #flow), about building a life in the now of where you're at, both within and rejecting the gaze of those parameters as mattering, while also knowing that "now," the now of Western #Philosophy's "#presence," cannot exist within that structure, that #episteme. It's the #ImpossiblePossibility. And this is all connected to self-defeat of White Men, its twilight. (🧵 2/2)

I think the concepts & practices of things like #BlackJoy & #TransJoy are immensely important. I think they are directly linked to a lot of powerful theoretical work, too. Like Alexander Weheliye's #HabeasViscus. Like Christina Sharpe's #WakeWork. Katherine McKittrick's #DemonicGrounds (& thence into #SylviaWynter). And the one that's hooked me most into its cipher, Monica R Miller's notion of #AporeticFlow. (Her work is initially what motivated my work into #JacquesDerrida.)

Do what you can when you can where you can if you can.

#ActivistAdvice

I don't remember where I've heard or cobbled that together from, but it's one of those things that's in the atmosphere a lot, and is useful to remind myself of, whether it's an active time or down time. It's consistent with the notions of #AporeticFlow that have become cornerstone for me.

#MyPhilosophy tidbit, it's the kind of thing I come back to a lot: I do think Beauty will save the world, but I don't believe in Saviors & Saviorism, so I think saving is aporetic, and that Beauty can be a very particular and disruptive and non-teleological and non-eschatological and therefore unpredictable kind of thing; an event, if you will; I believe Beauty is aporetic flow, finding or making a way and a space where there is none, the impossible possibility.

#Beauty #AporeticFlow