act as though you are free you might get lucky! you might be free - who knows! act that way it’s worth trying!
As if one could escape it by turning a switch. That’s why I say you can’t turn off TV. It can turn you off, but you can’t turn it off. You can’t make it disappear, but it can make you disappear.
http://rickroderick.org/307-derrida-and-the-ends-of-man-1993
a possibility once is a necessity forever.
for Derrida all words are metaphorical. By that he means that no word is the thing. The word “horse” is not a horse. The word “cat” is not a cat. The word “neutrino” is not itself a neutrino. There are some exceptions, but not really. Is the word “word” a word? No, because I have mentioned it and not used it. It has now become a token of a word.
http://rickroderick.org/107-kierkegaard-and-the-contemporary-spirit-1990/
But to return to our topic of human values, Kierkegaard wants to build a case in a very famous book and I’ll talk about it next. And it is another reaction against accepting Hegel’s, sort of, conservative thesis that the world kind of came to an end with modern life; the bureaucratic state, the capitalist economy. Kierkegaard is a critic of that and he’s a critic of a fundamental notion to it which is that each one of us are individual subjects somehow separated from each other, almost like monads, individuals. A concept that might be criticised in a West Texas way by saying “Rugged individualism leads to ragged individuals”. So, a more sophisticated version I’ll give you in Kierkegaard of that, and remind you that we are talking here about one of the most sophisticated defenders of Christianity, so that you’ll see that I am going to try to be balanced, tolerant, liberal and fair, and give both versions.
“This country has socialism for the rich, rugged individualism for the poor.”: Well-known tweet by Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders
“On the contrary, the torment of despair is precisely this inability to die”. This is not an argument for suicide, it’s even worse than that. Suicide won’t help either, for Hamlet’s kind of reasons.
a paradoxical answer to this is a relation with Christ, which he admits is absurd. You can read more of him and decide if you want to believe something absurd. He admits it, he’s a joker about it.