“An individual's torments only have meaning within his or her personal experience.

Faced with
the collective we are as naked and helpless as the day we were born. Our individual development
depends on realizing that others cannot understand our experience. Sometimes the obstacles we
meet tempt us to place our destiny in the hands of another. But we cannot live by proxy, we must
take everything on our own shoulders. Then we know we are alone. We must allow this
sensation to fill our being and live like abandoned children because only thus is our life in our
own hands. From time to time a mirage will surface of some way of life that will free us from the
feeling of abandonment; but a mirage is exactly what it will remain.

We can of course live solely within the collective, with the illusion of speaking a common
language and of not being alone, but this deception can cost our lives. If we act according to the
general rule, we are following a code that is not our own. Everyone must find his or her own
tune, accepting the resulting abandonment by those who continue singing in concert. Great artists
create modes of expression that are uniquely their own: they enter so deeply into their sense of
life that preexisting modes no longer serve their purpose. They invent new ways of writing
poetry, of painting and making music.”

Aldo Carotenuto, Eros and Pathos: Shades of Love and Suffering

"The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations
in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to
repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking
of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities
as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure
inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and
strategies of the rearticulation of power." - Judith Butler

Now, any questions?