7

May 6   We Blackmail Ourselves

“In the last analysis a man tended to yield instinctively to a form of indirect blackmail exerted on him by his own personality.”

Bernhard  195 The Lime Works

May 10   One day it will all pour out

“ Like thousands of others before him, Konrad said, he too had fallen victim to a mad dream of one day suddenly bringing his great labor to fruition by writing it all down in one consistent outpouring, all triggered by the optimal point in time, the unique moment for perfect concentration on writing it.

. . . . .

. . . but he had lacked what was perhaps the most important quality of all:  fearlessness in the face of realization, of concretization, fearlessness, simply, when it came to turning his head over, suddenly, from one moment to the next, ruthlessly flipping it over to drop everything inside his head onto the paper, all in one motion.  "

240-241     The Lime Works

May 13  Or, I never knew what tort law was all about

At Last I Understand (more of) the Late 20th Century

Frances Ferguson writes in her latest book--- quote
Second, Sade arranges Justine's actions so that, for all the vaunted innocence of her intentions, she regularly inflicts grievous injury on other people and brings about the deaths of the persons she had meant to save.  Her actions can therefore be seen in the terms of tort law, a law that began redeveloping (along lines recognizable in classical antiquity) in the eighteenth century.  Tort law provides the model for seeing actions as created by the presence of an injured party, whether or not that injury was intended.  In tort law, an action is treated as producing a relationship even between persons who are unknown to one another, and tort law offers up the most basic pattern of objectification for action, in which the perception of injury constitutes the action without needing to have recourse to an account of the agent's intentions.     (58)