It’s Levinas Thursday!

“Responsibility for the other, this way of answering without prior commitment, is human fraternity itself, and it is prior to freedom. The face of the other in proximity, which is more than representation, is an unrepresentable trace, the way of the infinite. It is not because among beings there exists an ego, a being pursuing ends, that being takes on signification and becomes a universe. It is because in an approach, there is inscribed or written the trace of infinity, the trace of a departure, but trace of what is inordinate, does not enter into the present, and inverts the arche into anarchy, that there is forsakenness of the other, obsession by him, responsibility and a self. The non-interchangeable par excellence, the I, the unique one, substitutes itself for others. Nothing is a game. Thus is being transcended.”

—Emmanuel Levinas, “Substitution”

Me too

"I confess I'm scared.

I'm scared of a history that has only one version. History has dozens of versions, and for it to ossify into one leads only to death."

—Elias Khoury, Gate of the Sun

Part of the dream

“Part of the dream is that you accept your waking life as part of the dream.”

—CAConrad, The Book of Frank

Exactly what I've been trying to say:

“The One, the flourish of stars which perhaps comprise the unattackable body of Truth. Yes, every passion of the world, of the living, of the tremor by which being is provoked, begins with this consensual lack: the One. And each persuades himself that the One is abrupt, that it is only attainable through outburst, through spark and revelation. Generous naiveté, but a necessary ardor, without which departure is defective, hardened. To move beyond the ecstatic ambition of the One is to build with patience, without denying the primordial burst, the stages of a knowledge at long last approached. The oeuvre in its continuity traces this itinerary, beyond which, perhaps, the more or less victorious accidents which are its markers or, to the letter, its milestones: books.”

—Édouard Glissant, Poetic Intention

I thought you should see this

The coldest dust in the Andromeda galaxy is here depicted in red, the warmer stuff in blue. An odd choice, but it does look cool. The cold bits are where stars get birthed, billions of 'em, like bugs. Look close.