Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

—W.H. Auden

Language is not a neutral tool with which to pick up and examine the world; it is partial, imperfect, and contingent. Language speaks us as much as we speak it; we have an imperfect grasp on the words we use, which in turn have an imperfect grasp on the world we speak about, and although our words can shape the world, they do so crudely, crushing or concealing complexity and nuance. Thinkers such as Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida paid attention to the difference and diversity that continually evade comprehension: to the slips of the tongue that betray our unconscious desires; the internal contradictions that expose the limits of our totalizing theories; the always present gap between our words and the world.
[…]

Excerpt from: “A Theology of Failure: Žižek against Christian Innocence” by Marika Rose

[The clown] is a fantastic being, one possessed of an alternate biology, a biology that can withstand blows to the head by hammers and bricks that would be deadly for any mere human, and the clown can sustain falls that would result in serious injury for the rest of us. Not only are clowns exaggeratedly misshapen and, at times, outright travesties of the human form – contortions played on our paradigms of the human shape – they also possess a physical resiliency conjoined with muscular and cognitive disfunctionalities that mark them off as an imaginary species.¹³

This interstitiality exhibited by the clown allows it to shift from a horrific monster to a (sometimes) funny sideshow entertainer. Replace the jolly, goofy smile of a clown with rows of razor-sharp teeth, and suddenly it plays a frequent part in many people’s nightmares.

Excerpt from: “Babbling Corpse: Vaporwave And The Commodification Of Ghosts” by Grafton Tanner.

In science fiction, ghosts in machines always appear as malfunctions, glitches, interruptions in the normal flow of things,” writes cultural theorist Janne Vanhanen. “Through a malfunction, a glitch, we get a fleeting glimpse of an alien intelligence at work.

Excerpt from: “Babbling Corpse: Vaporwave And The Commodification Of Ghosts” by Grafton Tanner.

one day you will find out about Death with a capital D, and at that moment, in the unlikely event that she gives you time to do so, you will understand the real difference between the relative and the absolute, between full and empty, between still alive and no longer alive.

Excerpt from: “Death with Interruptions” by José Saramago.