what is liberation *for* - and more importantly, what the hell is it exactly?

"An alleged triumph of corporate capitalism... our desire itself is taken from us, processed and labeled, and sold back to us before we've had a chance to name it for ourselves" ~ Adrienne Rich

In all this reading about love and desire in "development", I can't help but muse about what I am hoping for... what kind of world a "liberated" one would be. What I would be as an inhabitant.

It's funny how rhetoric and slogans swim around and one day, the actual meaning of it grabs you by the throat and holds onto your heart and then won't let you go. Of course many of you have probably heard, "I know what you are against, but what are you for?". One day, I played a little visualization game - who would I be outside of all the things that disgust me. I am not naive enough to think that I will exist in a world that won't make me want to vomit or that I could possibly insulate myself enough to live an existence that even comes close. But I am so jealous of those who are creative enough to live outside it in the moments they can. God, who would I be if I didn't have to fight all the time?

Life is characterized by a good amount of pain. And when I say that the pleasure, the happiness comes in hope, it also comes in the moment of the moment of the moment. Or retrospect. Of love. Love devoid of habit. Love in spite of it.

Liberatory potential in pleasure seems frivolous. Yet, it is what we all want in the form that it takes for us, no? The beauty of a wonderful meal, the satisfaction of a heartfelt laugh, the exaltation and release during and after an orgasm, staring into your lover's eyes, pregnant pauses, watching a child experience the world, experiencing the world as if a child... it can all be there. I know it can. Yet, all I see most days are poisoned oceans, dead activists trying to get food to colonized peoples, global financial cutthroat horribleness in which greed is understood as pleasure and encouraged as a means of transgression (and that's just the news today). Beauty seems so besides the point. Yet it is in those moments that we know what life is beyond its "bare" components (maybe I like Agamben more than I'll admit). It's so important to me to see my way beyond all of this and to force myself to be inspired by getting my nose out of the books and off the stupid internet.