Source: RMA

[Idiotes] deliberately withdrew from the status of metropolitan citizen to become cosmopolitan-figures without familiar topological or spatiotemporal grounds, or at least figures t~at presented the illusion of and allusion to such groundlessness.

P. 207 - It is important to note that all idiotae, self-declared or not, are apolitical figures without agency to engage in politics, without a polis, and specifically without a civic connection.

Three concepts of rhetoric: "logos" = rational appeal, "pathos" = emotional appeal, and "ethos" = ethical appeal

Townley Vase, 1773 - the idiotes is a heroic fool representing chaotic, irrational, random action intended to break the conventions of the polis.

p.210 - Most significantly of all, the idiotes is the archetypal puer aeternus, the eternal child. So the idiotes is half-devil/half-savior, the threat of destruction and the promise of creation held synthesised within it. The idiotes is fundamentally immature, incompatible with the public sphere as it can never be pubes, adult.

P. 211 - Such a state [of an eternal child] characterizes contemporary art today, which is distinguished by the paradigm of paradigm-less-ness, or a paradigm that permits the endless proliferation of disconnected paradigms.

p.212 - In order to challenge this apolitical hegemony, a non-idealist materialist critique of the quasi-syntagmatic ethico-economic conditions of art needs to supersede the self-limiting and confining illusions/allusions of freedom that are both the principal currency and the constraining embodied web like structures of art today.