“Mediocrity is contextual.”

— David Foster Wallace, book Infinite Jest

Source: Infinite Jest

Last update May 22, 2020. History

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David Foster Wallace185

American fiction writer and essayist 1962–2008

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Reflections

“Meaning… is to be regarded as a complex of contextual relations, and phonetics, grammar, lexicography, and semantics each handles its own components of the complex in its appropriate context.”

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“The world is mediocre. About that there is no mistake. Well then, has the world been mediocre since time immemorial? No. In the beginning, the world was chaos, and chaos is not mediocre. The mediocratization began when people separated the means of production from daily life.”

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“Having liberated the key to a liberatory interpretation and contextualization of the Qur'an, the issue of patriarchal and misogynic interpretations of the Qur'an becomes a societal issue rather than an issue of the religion.”

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