inquire

A crossing point for ideas, words, images, and energies

Brian Henderson

Significance

“In this sense, to know the significance of something is to know how and why it matters, where “to matter” means at once ‘to materialize’ and ‘to mean.'”

Judith Butler, from Bodies That Matter

 

 

 

Arrivals

“It matters how we arrive at the places we do.”

 

Sara Ahmed, from Queer Phenomenology

 

 

 

Disorientation

“It matters who one is within power relations of, for instance, gender, race, class, disability, and sexuality.  How we experience being disoriented and how such experiences shape us as moral and political agents depends on who we are and who is around us.”

 

Ami Harbin, from Disorientation and Moral Life

 

 

 

Need

“It matters whether we make ourselves in plenty or in unfulfilled need, including need for genuine knowledge and meaning.”

 

Donna J. Haraway, from Simians, Cyborgs, and Women

 

 

 

The Masses

“It matters politically because, like the masses in general, it is something to which the powerful must always attend if they are to move as they would like.”

 

Wendy Brown, from Manhood and Politics

 

 

 

Figures

“It is important to recognize that it matters what figures we think through, from, and with.”

 

Stefanie R. Fishel, from The Microbial State

 

 

 

At Stake

“Imagination means how we see and how we learn to see, how we suppose the world works, how we suppose that it matters, and what we feel we have at stake in it.”

 

Jedediah Purdy, from After Nature

 

 

Senses

“And, if one admits that one’s senses are hierarchized (and in space-time), it matters for “man” to find a vital speed, a growth speed that is compatible with all his senses and meanings, and for him to know how to stop in order to rest, to leave an interval between himself and the other, to look toward, to contemplate — to wonder.”

 

Luce Irigaray, from An Ethics of Sexual Difference

 

 

Thingness

“And again, because it matters, and because it matters the thingness of matter, as much as materializes forms of controlling matters: ‘uncertainty surrounds the holding of things.'”

André Lepecki, from Singularities