Levi Strauss Jeans Quotes

Eskiden deliler dilsizdi. Oysa bugün herkes onları dinlemektedir çünkü günümüzde, eskiden saçma ve çözülmesi olanaksız görünen deli mesajlarını çözebilen bir yöntem bulunmuştur. Artık çocuklar da konuşmaktadır. Çocuklar, artık büyüklerin evreni dışında kalan anlaşılması olanaksız tuhaf yaratıklar değildirler. Anlam üreten çocukların bir anlamı olmalıdır. Konuşmalarının nedeni onlara bir konuşma “özgürlüğünün” tanınmış olması değil, büyüklerin kafayı çalıştırarak bu sessizliğin bir tehdide dönüşmesini engelleyecek bir kurnazlık düşünmüş olmalarıdır. İlkellere bile söz hakkı tanınmaktadır. Konuş -maları istenmekte ve söyledikleri dinlenmektedir. Onlar artık bir hayvan gibi görülmemektedir. Zaten Levi-Strauss’da ilkellerin zihinsel yapılarının bizimkilerin aynısı olduğunu söylemedi mi? Psikanaliz de onları Ödip kompleksi ve libidoyla buluşturmadı mı? Bize ait kodların tümüne uyduklarına göre bir sorun yok demektir. Eskiden sessizliğe mahkûm etmiş olduğumuz insanları bugün “konuşmaya” mahkûm ediyoruz. Doğal olarak “farklı” şeyler söylüyoruz çünkü gündemi belirleyen madde: “Farklılıktır”. Tıpkı eskiden Akıl birliğinin gündemi belirlemiş olması gibi. Bunda şaşıracak bir şey yok çünkü düzende bir değişiklik yok. Aklın emperyalizminden sonra şimdi de farklılığın neo-emperyalizmi.

Levi Strauss & Co. invented the first blue jeans in 1873. They were built to withstand the daily rigor of construction, agricultural, and industrial work. As a youngster visiting my grandparents on the family dairy farm, I remember standing beside my grandfather fixing his tractor in his Levi's, and asking him if I could get a pair, He said, "Sure but jeans are meant for the fields and the barn." Over the years, Levi's played a role in making America and worked themselves into mainstream fashion. How times have changed.

And yet what are the writings of Barthes, Lacan, Foucault (and even Althusser) but a philosophy of disappearance? The obliteration of the human, of ideology. The absent structure, the death of the subject, lack, aphanisis. They have died of these things and their deaths bear the characteristics of this inhuman configuration. They bear the mark of a Great Withdrawal, of a defection, of a calculated failure of will, of a calculated weakening of desire. They all became shrouded in silence towards the end, in their various ways, and words fell away one by one. One can see no rosy future for their philosophies. They are even in danger, to the great despair of their disciples, of having no consequences at all. Because theirs are subtle modes of thought and ones therefore which subtilize their own traces and which have never, when all is said and done, produced constructive effects (at least that's not the best of what they have done). Those thinkers whose minds were rooted in a humanist configuration, whether liberal or libertine (Levi-Strauss, Lefebvre, Aron - and Sartre too) survive better. Whether or not they are still alive, they have not ' disappeared' in the same way; they have not been infected with the virus; their works perpetuate them and they bear the glory of those works without weakening. A whole generation, by contrast, will have disappeared in a manner wholly coherent with what it described, what it sensed, of the inhuman. It is ironic signs they have left behind, and the whole labour that is left for those whom they have sumptuously disappointed will be to make positive monuments out of those signs, monuments worthy of memory, of a juicy, intellectual memory, with no regard for the elegance and style of their disappearance.

It used to be the Right that was pessimistic while the Left was unfailingly optimistic. Today on the Right it's 'sunrise' neoliberalism and, on the Left, the Tristes Tropiques. If it is Italian terrorism's ambition to destabilize the state, then it is absurd: the state is already so nonexistent that it would be a joke to try and kill it off any more. Or else it is fuelled by the perverse desire to do too much which might lead to law and order and the state becoming more stable, or at least being perpetually reestablished, fragile as they are. Perhaps that is the terrorists' dream. They long for an immortal enemy. Since if it no longer exists, it is much more difficult to destroy it. Tautologies like these really are the genuine article. But terrorism is tautological. And its ultimate lesson is of the order of the syllogism: if the State really existed, terrorism would make political sense. Since it manifestly does not, that proves the State doesn't exist.

2 Nikes and my pair of blue jeans, Levi Strauss.