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de playtime – jacques tati
You say there’s a certain tragic or melancholic tone in all this [Negri previously remarks “But I seem sometimes to hear a tragic note, at points where it’s not clear where the “war-machine” is going”]. I think I can see why. I was very struck by all the passages in Primo Levi where he explains that Nazi camps have given us “a shame at being human.” Not, he says, that we’re all responsible for Nazism, as some would have us believe, but that we’ve all been tainted by it: even the survivors of the camps had to make compromises with it, if only to survive. There’s the shame of there being men who became Nazis; the shame of being unable, not seeing how, to stop it; the shame of having compromised with it; there’s the whole of what Primo Levi calls this “gray area.” And we can feel shame at being human in utterly trivial situations, too: in the face of too great a vulgarization of thinking, in the face of tv entertainment, of a ministerial speech, of “jolly people” gossiping. This is one of the most powerful incentives toward philosophy, and it’s what makes all philosophy political.
Gilles Deleuze in conversation with Antonio Negri (via hollovv)
“The shame of being a man—what better reason is there to write?” or something like that. Deleuze is so good.
(via hookedonsemiotics)