"Don't part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still exist, but you have ceased to live." - Mark Twain

***

"My honor stripped away, enraged,
          aggrieved, now I
will squeeze out all the poison in my heart
against the land for all I’ve suffered,
yes, poison now will ooze and drip
unbearably into the soil.
          And out of it pale fungus
blighting leaf and child (O justice!)
          will quicken across

the land to cover it and all the people
          in a miasmal fog of
killing illnesses. Sorrow!
What can I do? Mocked! Spit on
          by the citizens!
We suffer the insufferable,
          luckless daughters of Night
who have been wronged, stripped of our honor!...

That they would do this to me!
Force me, with all my age-old wisdom,
          under this earth
like some defiled contaminated thing!
I’m breathing rage, sheer rage.
          OTOTOTOI POPOI! DA!
What torture slides down over me
          and through my brain!
Hear me O mother night—the gods’
sleight of hand has snatched
my ancient rights away and made me
          less than nothing."

--- Eumenides, The Oresteia / Aeschylus


"We need to listen (psycho)analytically to its procedures of repression, to the structuration of language that shores up its representations, separating the true from the false, the meaningful from the meaningless, and so forth... What is called for instead is an examination of the operation of the “grammar” of each figure of discourse, its syntactic laws or requirements, its imaginary configurations, its metaphoric networks, and also, of course, what it does not articulate at the level of utterance: its silences.

But as we have already seen, even with the help of linguistics, psychoanalysis cannot solve the problem of the articulation... What remains to be done, then, is to work at “destroying” the discursive mechanism. Which is not a simple undertaking . . . For how can we introduce ourselves into such a tightly—woven systematicity?

There is, in an initial phase, perhaps only one “path,” the one historically assigned to the feminine: that of mimicry. One must assume the feminine role deliberately. Which means already to convert a form of subordination into an affirmation, and thus to begin to thwart it. Whereas a direct feminine challenge to this condition means demanding to speak as a (masculine) “subject,” that is, it means to postulate a relation to the intelligible that would maintain sexual indifference.

To play with mimesis is thus, for a woman, to try to recover the place of her exploitation by discourse, without allowing herself to be simply reduced to it. It means to resubmit herself—inasmuch as she is on the side of the “perceptible,” of “matter”—to “ideas,” in particular to ideas about herself, that arc elaborated in/by a masculine logic, but so as to make “visible,” by an effect of playful repetition, what was supposed to remain invisible: the cover-up of a possible operation of the feminine in language. It also means “to unveil” the fact that, if women arc such good mimics, it is because they are not simply resorbed in this function. They also remain elsewhere"

--- The Power of Discourse and the Subordination of the Feminine / Luce Irigaray


Fuckers.