‘Ah who sey Sammy dead’ had been playing in my head —by now our signature tune — and a loud clear accentedvoice said with measured pace, “Thank you for helpingBen.” That was all. She was gone. Just that. I had no senseof loss or regret; I felt instead a connection that was here tostay and knew that whatever I was to get from her of her orof anything else, would come ‘in the fulness of time’ andthat there was no point in cither of us trying to force thepace.

The improbability of the relationship between Mia and Marsellus,she with her television pilots and hipster lingo and he with his intimate command of death,reflects the sense in which hyperreality is improbably married to death as its "excluded other." Atthe same time, the comic discrepancy between Mia and her husband lends a visual emphasis tothe manner in which marriage - with its outmoded proscription against the free exchange ofsexual relations - is discrepant with the aesthetic, moral, and economic values of the movie'shyperreal postmodernism. More than anything else, Mia's marriage is a game, designedconjointly by Mia herself and the screenwriter with the intention of trapping some haplessprotagonist like Vincent in the narrative web woven by the plot point of her inexchangeability.Free-floating hyperreality never congeals into a narrative. Events only shape themselves intonarrative around loci of significance that are weighted differently than the rest of the circulatingjunk: the forbidden object, the unattainable object, the impossible object. When Mia first appearsbefore Vincent, Vincent supposedly sees her face, but Tarantino shows us her deadly,inexchangeable feet, as if to suggest that, whereas her personality may seduce us into shiftingpatterns of hyperreal circulation, her character is "grounded" in her status as a totemic McGuffinof death.

There is thus something religious in the respect one gives to theprince. The service of God and respect for kings are inseparablethings, and St. Peter places these two duties together: "Fear God,Honor the King." 19God, moreover, has put something divine into kings. "I have said:You are Gods, and all of you the sons of the most High. " 20 It is Godhimself whom David makes speak in this way

Fourth Person

I have the dew,a sunray falls from me,I was born from the mountainI leave a path of wildflowersA raindrop falls from meI’m walking homeI’m walking back to belongingI’m walking home to happinessI’m walking back to long life.When he passed through the last hoopit wasn’t finishedThey spun him around sunwiseand he recoveredhe stood upThe rainbows returned him to hishome, but it wasn’t over.All kinds of evil were still on him.

When Sancho saw that he could not find the book, his face turneddeathly pale, and quickly patting down his entire body again, he saw againthat he could not find it, and without further ado he put both hands to hisbeard and tore out half of it, and then, very quickly and without stopping, hepunched himself half a dozen times on the face and nose until they werebathed in blood. Seeing which, the priest and the barber asked him what hadhappened to drive him to such lengths.

For the subject firmly installed in his superego, such writingnecessarily participates in the in-between-ness which characterisesperversion; and for this reason it provokes abjection in its turn.Nevertheless, these texts call for a softening of the superego. To writethem supposes the capacity of imagining the abject, that is, to putoneself in its place and to put it aside only by the displacement oflanguage games. It is only eventually after his death that the writer ofabjection will escape his lot of being waste, scrap or abject. Then, eitherhe will fall into oblivion, or he will accede to the rank ofincommensurable ideal. This would make of death the guardian( conservatrice ) of our imaginary museum; it would protect us in the lastinstance from the abjection that contemporary literature prides itself inexpending so much energy in speaking. A protection which puts paid toabjection, but perhaps also to the disquieting and incandescent stakes ofliterature itself which, raised to the level of the sacred, finds that itsspecificity has been reduced. In purifying (us of) literature, it constitutesour lay religio

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Left Book Club

I would have been frightened, she said. But I would have prayed for strength, andGod willing, yes, I would have killed him. It was for our freedom: I would have doneanything to be free.

Her voice had a deep, gravelly, almost masculine texture; I couldn’t decidewhether it had always been like that or whether it had changed.

lining out

melisma

musica contrafacta

motet

mass

Hybridity, syncretism, multidimensional temporalities, the double inscriptions ofcolonial and metropolitan times, the two-way cultural traffic characteristic of the contactzones of the cities of the ‘colonised’ long before they have become the characteristictropes of the cities of the ‘colonising’, the forms of translation and transculturationwhich have characterised the ‘colonial relation’ from its earliest stages, the disavowalsand in-betweenness, the here-and-theres, mark the aporias and re-doublings whoseinterstices colonial discourses have always negotiated and about which Homi Bhabhahas written with such profound insight (Bhabha, 1994).

The masses are his domain, as the air is the bird's and thesea the fish's. His passion is his profession-that of weddinghimself to the masses. To the perfect spectator, the impas-sioned observer, it is an immense joy to make his domicileamongst numbers, amidst fluctuation and movement, amidstthe fugitive and infinite. To be away from home, and yet tofeel at home; to behold the world, to be in the midst of theworld, and yet to remain hidden from the world-these aresome of the minor pleasures of such independent, impas-sioned and impartial spirits, whom words can only clumsilydescribe

Their most common strategy was to offer support andvolunteer labor to local government. Indeed, most of the pastors I inter-viewed sought out local political leaders as a matter of course in plantingtheir church. In step with Driscoll’sVintage Jesus, building rapport withinfluential individuals and institutions is a strategic means of changingthe city

Ayoreo ways of being were locked in a life or death struggle with moderncategories that they also at times embraced or simply ignored. Reducingthis complex ferment to a simple dichotomy of incommensurable worldsoffered an essential metanarrative of a colonizing power that justified theviolent subordination of Ayoreo-speaking people, fractured their sensesof the world, and rendered their tentative life projects untenable. Ayoreonotions of the moral human arose as a response to the disjunctures andcontradictions of these global politics of Indigenous life.

If Western multiculturalism is relativism as publicpolicy, then Amerindian perspectivist shamanism is multinaturalism as cosmicpolitics

The measure of values measures commodities considered as values ; the standard of pricemeasures, on the contrary, quantities of gold by a unit quantity ofgold, not the value of one quan tity of gold by the weight of another.

An individual,A, for instance, cannot be ' your majesty ' to another individual,B, unless majesty in B's eyes assumes the physical shape of A, and,moreover, changes facial features, hair and many other things,with every new ' father of his people ' .