John Atkinson Grimshaw, Stapleton Park (1877)

Fitz Henry Lane, Lumber Schooners at Evening on Penobscot Bay (1863)

Martin Johnson Heade, Sailing off the Coast (1869)

William Trost Richards, Seascape with Distant Lighthouse (1873)

Fitz Henry Lane, Gloucester Harbor (1862)

Fitz Henry Lane, Three Master in Rough Seas (1856)

Michelangelo, Pieta (1498)

The weapon of criticism cannot, of course, replace criticism of the weapon, material force must be overthrown by material force; but theory also becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses. Theory is capable of gripping the masses as soon as it demonstrates ad hominem, and it demonstrates ad hominem as soon as it becomes radical. To be radical is to grasp the root of the matter. But, for man, the root is man himself.

Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Introduction (1843)

It is, therefore, from the history of nature and human society that the laws of dialectics are abstracted. For they are nothing but the most general laws of these two aspects of historical development, as well as of thought itself.

And indeed they can be reduced in the main to three:

- The law of the transformation of quantity into quality and vice versa;
- The law of the interpenetration of opposites;
- The law of the negation of the negation.

Friedrich Engels, Dialectics of Nature (1883)

A man to be remembered:

https://dailynous.com/2025/09/22/jonathan-lear-1948-2025/

Edward Said throwing rocks at an IDF guard tower (2000)

These are historic pages: Immanuel Kant's handwritten notes in his copy of Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten's Metaphysica (1739).

Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or: A Fragment Of Life (1843)

Umberto Eco on the American reading of Derrida.

The house is full of remnants, it emprisons us in its memory of sorrows—they are on the entryway carpet, on the floors, in the corners of the living room, in the kitchen right up to the sink; they stop there, then they start off again toward the balcony, and there, stuck for eternity, between the eleventh and twelfth banister: minuscule, powerful claws caught in the little squares of lattice-work. In vain we return there. Everything is there still, the strong smell like an unforgettable name, phantom vision; it’s as if I saw you, I see it again, we see it. The whole house is now a mausoleum.

Shared at dawn, translated by Keith Cohen, Hélène Cixous

Death is what we are and what we live. We are born dead, we deadly exist, and we are already dead when we enter Death.

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

Freedom will prove to have been merely an interlude. Freedom is felt when passing from one way of living to another—until this too turns out to be a form of coercion. Then, liberation gives way to renewed subjugation. Such is the destiny of the subject; literally, the ‘one who has been cast down’. Today, we do not deem ourselves subjugated subjects, but rather projects: always refashioning and reinventing ourselves. A sense of freedom attends passing from the state of subject to that of project. All the same, this projection amounts to a form of compulsion and constraint—indeed, to a more efficient kind of subjectivation and subjugation. As a project deeming itself free of external and alien limitations, the I is now subjugating itself to internal limitations and self-constraints, which are taking the form of compulsive achievement and optimization.

Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power

We can express our feelings regarding the world around us either by poetic or by descriptive means. I prefer to express myself metaphorically. Let me stress: metaphorically, not symbolically. A symbol contains within itself a definite meaning, certain intellectual formula, while metaphor is an image. An image possessing the same distinguishing features as the world it represents. An image — as opposed to a symbol — is indefinite in meaning. One cannot speak of the infinite world by applying tools that are definite and finite. We can analyse the formula that constitutes a symbol, while metaphor is a being-within-itself, it’s a monomial. It falls apart at any attempt of touching it.

Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time