Death Execises

My exercise

"Imagine you are going to die tomorow, what would you have done differently in your life?"
The same basic answer should be ready everyday: "I would not change a single thing of what I have done"

Someone Else's exercise

"You never imagine yourself naked, smelling of formaldehyde, flat on your back in a marble tub, waiting for them to cut open your ribs with a huge pair of scissors?", Lobo Antunes in the New Yorker

Discipline and Punish

"The judges of normality are present everywhere. We are in the society of the teacher-judge, the doctor-judge, the educator-judge, the 'social-worker'-judge; it is on them that the universal reign of the normative is based; and each individual, wherever he may find himself, subjects to it his body, his gestures, his behavior, his aptitudes, his achievements"
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish

My answer to the question - IV - On the possibility of the inexistence of an answer

It's been quite a while I've been "playing philosophy" with myself and a few bookish friends. Some years have passed without any political ideology revision.
After such a long period away from real political life, options, decisions, or even study, the idea came quite naturally...
Democracy is obviously not the answer. Democracy is obviously the obvious answer. There is no philosophical answer, so, why would there be a political answer? And democracy is not a non answer. It is not passive. Democracy is an active answer, as active as a despot.

If I'm feeling like a child, there might be an Anarchism that fits my needs. But again, that would be an answer. There is no answer.

I have put my voter card in the trash bin (cartão de eleitor). It's been more than 10 years I have it. I never used it anyway.

Not so out of topic as it may seem:


(free translation)
In the court:
Judge: Will the defendant please rise.
Defendant: You rise, you son of a bitch, I'm innoncent...)

Novo livro, nova insónia

Ando um pouco acima do chão
Nesse lugar onde costumam ser atingidos
Os pássaros
Um pouco acima dos pássaros
No lugar onde costumam inclinar-se
Para o voo


Estou ligeiramente acima do que morre
Nessa encosta onde a palavra é como pão

(Daniel Faria, Explicação...)

E o procurado "Seguir-te não será morrer" sobre Aquiles e Pátroclo.

Signifiance and Interpretosis

It's been years that this basic idea follows me. I never knew where I got it.

It's around the idea of Social Neurosis: neurotic behaviours that are not considered sick. Things that are obviously Neurotic but at the same time are part of our way of being "normal".
All health professionals will say the same: the different between a Neurosis and what I'm talking about here is the suffering: a real Neurosis always involves suffering.

We are all Neurotic, being neurotic is part of being normal. But some types of Neurosis, some ways of being neurotic are considered a disease. The normal mechanisms are the same as the sick mechanisms, neurotic mechanisms.

The neurotic mechanisms of normality are varied. I just wanted to post Deleuze talking about one of many varieties of this mechanism, the most important variety for him:
"In truth, signifiance and interpretosis are the two diseases of the earth or the skin, in other words, humankind's fundamental neurosis.", Mille Plateaux, Deleuze