Category: Quotes

Myshkin: … our people don’t simply become atheists, but they must believe in atheism, as in a new faith, without ever noticing that they’re believing in a zero.

… suddenly, amidst the sadness, the darkness of soul the pressure, his brain would momentarily catch fire, as it were, all his life’s forces would be strained at once in an extraordinary impulse. The sense of life, of self-awareness, increased nearly tenfold in these moments, which flashed by like lightning. His mind, his heart were lit up with an extraordinary light; all his agitation, all his doubts, all his worries were as if placated at once, resolved in a sort of sublime tranquility, filled with serene, harmonious joy, and hope, filled with reason and ultimate cause.

At that moment I was somehow able to understand the extraordinary phrase that time shall be no more.

… dullness, darkness of soul, idiocy stood before him as the clear consequence of these ‘highest’ moments.

Yes, for this moment one could give one’s whole life!

My gestures are inappropriate, I have no sense of measure; my words are wrong, they don’t correspond to my thoughts, and that is humiliating for the thoughts.

It’s all philosophy. You’re a philosopher and have come to teach us.

Such beauty has power. You can overturn the world with such beauty.

The point is in life, in life alone – in discovering it, constantly and eternally, and not at all in the discovery itself!

Why did I actually begin to live, knowing that it was no longer possible for me to begin; why did I try, knowing that it was no longer anything for me to try.

My dreams will change and perhaps become lighter.

stray lines from Dostoevsky's The Idiot

… we always view our own age as being the end of civilization, ‘its prophets false’ and so forth. Which is probably true. What was interesting about punk was that it actually celebrated and drew energy from this otherwise rather depressing generational habit.

Punk – this idea that you suddenly felt in your head as though we were living in the ruins of modernity. Jarman: It’s like the bomb has gone off in our heads already.

Michael Bracewell, The Space Between

The system doesn’t believe. It doesn’t need to believe. The system’s unhinging itself.

The system is nihilistic and affects itself nihilistically.

Notes on Baudrillard

Our cultivated, high society set only gorge themselves on Beckett, Cioran, Artaud and all today’s hallowed forms of cynicism and nihilism the better to evade any analysis of the current forms of despair. They denounce with the greatest moral and political energy ever present instance of nihilism, of the nihility of our values, while ‘culturally’ savouring the heroic but anachronistic forms of nihilism and the inhuman. They glorify the accursed share, but keep the holy water handy.

Baudrillard, Cool Memories II

The illuminating mind is like lightning, it flashes rapidly over the greatest distances. It leaves everything aside and shoots for one thing, which it does not know before illuminating it. Its effectivity begins when it strikes. Without some minimum of destruction, without terror, it never takes shape for human beings. Illumination per se is too boundless and too shapeless. The fate of the new knowledge depends on the place of the striking.

Canetti, The Human Province

Redemption is not redemption from time, but a redemption of time. Happiness would not be to free oneself from time but to free time in oneself.

Werner Hamacher, ‘Now’: Walter Benjamin on Historical Time

For a long time I had a system, I call it the 3-1-3 system. Three days of work. On the afternoon of the third day—drinking. Then you can get as drunk as you want. On the fourth day, you rest. Then you’re ready for three new days of work. I drink less now—age takes its toll. But when I was physically in better shape, I did that all the time. And it worked very well. It gives you a lot of work days, only one day off a week.

Dag Solstad, interviewed

Two fragments by Nietzsche written 1882-3:

I do not want my life to start again. How did I manage to bear it? By creating. What is it that allows me to bear its sight? Beholding the overman who affirms life. I have attempted to affirm it myself — Alas.

The instant in which I created the return is immortal, it is for the sake of that instant that I endure the return.

In a very fine article, Paolo D'Iorio comments: Nietzsche, the man of knowledge had attained the climax of his life at the very instant in which he had grasped the knowledge he regarded as the most important of all. When, at the end of his life, he became aware of having attained this summit, he ceased to need an alter ego in order to affirm the life that forever returns and as a conclusion to the Twilight of the Idols, which are the very last lines published in his lifetime, he let these words be printed: ―I, the last disciple of the philosopher Dionysus,—I the master of the eternal return.

A note on the relationship of Derrida and Blanchot, copied from this book. here, Derrida is being interviewed by Dominique Janicaud. Comments in square brackets mine.

[François Fédier asks Derrida to participate in a book of essays published in homage to Jean Beaufret, the French Heideggerian. Derrida agrees, after some persuasion, intending his piece to be critical.]

And then, one day, once he had the text, Laporte and his wife came to lunch at my house, in Fresnes, in the winter of 1967-68 (probably 1968 already). During a desultory discussion, Laporte, who had been [Beaufret's] student, spoke to me about some anti-Semitic remarks made by Beaufret. Disturbing remarks. He reported some of them, which concerned Levinas, or the fact that the alleged exterminations of the Jews were as little believable as the rumours that circulated concerning the horrors in Belgium after the war of 1914 (that the Germans were killing and slaughtering children); and finally, he spoke to me about remarks of this type that seemed shocking to me not just because of their anti-Semitism but because of their violence. And so I was shocked and upset. Laporte was a bit surprised. perhaps he had not predicted the effect that this could have on me. 

[Derrida writes to Fédier, asking to withdraw his text from the homage to Beaufret. Derrida is willing to do this discreetly, but Fedier would not accept this ('He reacted with violence: calumny, etc.!'). Fédier found out that it was likely Laporte who had spoken to Derrida about Beaufret's anti-Semitic remarks. Derrida arranges a meeting in his office at the École Normale between Beaufret and Laporte ('a confrontational meeting'). Following this, Laporte feels increasingly under attack from Beaufret's circle. His wife, Jacqueline, 'had alerted Blanchot in order to protect her husband'.]

Blanchot, too, was in the situation of having given a text to Fédier. Obviously, the Laportes knew that Blanchot was very sensitive, irritable, and anxious about these questions. So, as soon as Blanchot was alerted, he contacted me. I didn't know him at that point. I had read him, of course; we had exchanged a few letters, but I had never met him. It was on the occasion of this affair that I met Blanchot quite frequently, during this limited period in 1968, during the 'events' as one says. We met several times, asking ourselves what we should do – whether we should withdraw our texts or not. And then, after endless deliberations, we were in agreement: Beaufret did not admit to having said these things and we could not prove that he had – it was witness against witness, it was Laporte's word against his – we did not have the right to accuse Beaufret publicly of something that he denied, therefore we had to allow the promised texts to appear.

[Blanchot and Derrida agree to write to other contributors to the Beaufret homage once the book was published. Blanchot sent these letters to the publisher, who did not pass them on.]

Another thing as well: Blanchot said: 'we have to talk to Levinas about this'. Thus I remember one day when I had made an appointment with Blanchot and I picked him up with my car (he lived on rue Madame in those days), and I took him to see Levinas, to whom we then revealed this whole affair, since Levinas had been involved by name, having been the subject of the comments attributed to Beaufret. Levinas took things in a very relaxed way: 'Oh, you know, we are used to it'. He was less emotional about the affair than we were. So there you have it!

[Appendix 1. In a speech given at Blanchot's cremation on Feb 24th 2003, Derrida recalls the date of his meeting with Blanchot as being May 1968, and emphasises the importance of the Events for Blanchot. He also remembers 'the gentleness of a smile' that didn't leave Blanchot's face during their meetings. Appendix 2. Note that Derrida's account means Michael Levinas is wrong about the final meeting between Blanchot and Levinas, which he dates to 1961.]

If the fundamental ontological question today is not work but inoperativity, and if this inoperativity can, however, be deployed only through a work, then the corresponding political concept can no longer be that of ‘constituent power’ [potere constituente], but something that could be called ‘destituent power’ [potenza destituente]. And if revolutions and insurrections correspond to constituent power, that is, a violence that establishes and constitutes the new law, in order to think a destituent power we have to imagine completely other strategies, whose definition is the task of the coming politics. A power that was only just overthrown by violence will rise again in another form, in the incessant, inevitable dialectic between constituent power and constituted power, violence which makes the law and violence that preserves it.

Agamben, What is a Destituent Power? (draft of last section of The Use of Bodies – paywalled. Article can also be accessed here.)

[Reading In Search of Lost Time] gave me the powerful sense that it didn't matter if one could not see one's way forward, it didn't matter if one was silly and slow and confused, it didn't matter if one had got hold of the wrong end of the stick – what mattered was to keep going. I began to see that the doubts I had were in a sense the temptations of the Devil, the attempt to make me give up at the very start by presenting things in absolute terms (I can do it/ no, I can't do it); and that what Proust (like Dante before him, I later discovered) was offering was a way of fighting that by saying: All right, I am confused, then let me start with my confusion, let me incorporate my confusion into the book or story I am writing, and see if that helps. If I can't start, then let me write about not being able to start. Perhaps, after all, confusion and failure are not things one has to overcome before one can start, but deep human experiences which deserve themselves to be explored in art. Perhaps, indeed, the stick has no right end and therefore no wrong end.

Gabriel Josipovici, The Teller and the Tale

If this reign of despair causes suicidal behaviour to increase, then this desperation can itself give rise to desperate reasons, that is, transform this despair into struggle, by providing itself with objects of struggle. The problem is that it can get mixed up with some very bad intentions – and it is easy to let these bad intentions circulate, reproduce, and proliferate, more or less mimetically: youth needs to sacrifice itself. Youthfulness is an exalted state, tempted by excess because essentially transgressive, and this is where its very strength and beauty lie, as well as its future, and with this future, the future of the entire world: there lies its humanity. Because what is experienced by young people as exaltation becomes, in those with greater experience, tenacity, conviction, and patience, through which pleasure and reality are knotted together, and becomes the authority of those who pass into action –‘action’ here being understood in terms of those who work and act, and who transform the world through their practices. Such is humanity, a fact that Valery enjoined us to reflect upon, in the epoch of ‘the fall of spirit value’.

But whether or not such a maturity of adult belief exists, whether or not it offers reasons for hope to young people, they still need causes, however deceptive they may turn out to be, because the fundamental character of youth is not to be cynical, to not accept the cynicism that can reign in this world […], or that cynical reign of despair characteristic of the epoch of hyper-power, a hyper-power that shows itself to be nothing more than an effective impotence and an infinite injustice – therefore ceaseless reinforcing disbelief, miscreance, and discredit, drive-based behaviour and desperate reactivity, both suicidal and parasuicidal, both ordinary and pseudo-sublime.

Given this extremely serious context, it is the responsibility of the public collectivity to provide young people (and their elders, within whom they must find some of their resources) with reasons to hope -  failing which the different generations, and firstly the youngest, will find such reasons wherever they can or wherever they believe they can, even if they are being deceived. If society does not provide the objects of sublimation without which it would be capable of elevating itself or transindividuating itself (because transindividuation, being the condition of what is called the social bond, is the outcome of sublimation), it will instead incite desperation, with a far greater need for explosive compensatory objects, and will take these objects more easily for its own, regardless of their provenance – from extremist ideologies, religious sects, evangelical churches, clandestine mosques, videogames in which the score is calculated by the death drive, or from ‘reality television’, which measures how degraded and ‘available’  brains are for the hype and brainwashing of ‘power’.

from Bernard Stiegler, Uncontrollable Societies of Disaffected Individuals

One of the ironies of a song like ‘The Golden Age of rock n’ Roll’ is that it is based on a bygone period that was unaware of its own status as a golden age (because busy living it) and furthermore had no interest in or consciousness of any previous golden age (because full inhabiting the country of Now). Retro is dependent on the existence of the un-retro: moments of newness and newness that get trapped for ever in the amber of the archives. Revivals never require earlier revivals; they must always re-enact what was new in its own time, the truly nourishing and vigorous stuff.

from Simon Reynolds, Shock and Awe: Glam Rock and its Legacy

Walser’s assistants are made of the very same stuff – these figures who are irreparably and stubbornly busy collaborating on work that is utterly superfluous, not to say indescribable If they study – and they seem to study very hard – it is in order to become big fat zeros. And why should they bother to help with anything the world takes seriously? After all, it’s nothing but madness. They prefer to take walks. And if they encounter a dog or some living creature on their walks, they whispers: ‘I have nothing to give you, dear animal; I would gladly give you something, if only I had it’. Nevertheless, in the end, they lie down in a meadow to weep bitterly over their ‘stupid greenhorn’s existence’.

Agamben, Nudities

… when he was twenty-eight, Nijinsky stopped dancing and choreographing. He began his last recital, which he declared to be about the horrors of the First World War, by telling his audience, ‘I will show you how we live, how we suffer, how we artists create’. He then sat on a chair onstage for half an hour without moving. When he was encouraged by the spectator to begin his dance, he retorted angrily: ‘How dare you disturb me! I am not a machine, I will dance when I feel like it’.

from David Kishik's The Power of Life

WORLD FIXER:

Two very small eyes

appear to a very small child

in a pitch black night

and suddenly the child realizes

that the very small very kind eyes

are the lights of a locomotive

 

History digests all those people

The biggest monsters

the greatest atrocities

have already been digested by history

History has a good stomach

 

Voltaire I said

but they only gaped

When I say France

or Ireland

or Paraguay

they only gape

 

I can't stand strangers

They do everything wrong

nobody obeys

They don't hear anything

they don't see anything

but they incessantly demand

exorbitant payments

 

My tractate does not demand anything other 

than total abolition

but nobody has understood that

I want to abolish them

and they honour me for it.

from Thomas Bernhard, The World-Fixer 

FRAU ZITTEL:

Suddenly one day you discover your own children

are non-humans he said

we think we're raising human beings

and then they're just carnivorous cretins

hysterics megalomaniacs chaotics

 

PROFESSOR ROBERT:

I never contemplated suicide

your father toyed with the idea of it even as a child

I didn't even know what suicide was

when he was already thinking about it

 

the world today is all destroyed

and altogether unbearably ugly

go anywhere you like

the world today is just ugly

and meaninglessness through and through

everything ruined wherever you look

everything gone to the dogs wherever you look

one would rather not wake up any more

in the last fifty years the people in government

have destroyed everything

and it can never be put right

the architects have destroyed everything

with their stupidity

the intellectuals have destroyed everything

with their stupidity

the masses have destroyed everything 

with their stupidity

political parties the church

have destroyed everything with their stupidity

which has always been base stupidity

this Austrian stupidity is utterly repulsive

Industry and the church are to blame

for Austria's misfortune

the church and industry have always been to blame

for Austria's misfortune

governments are nothing but puppets

of industry and the church

it's always been like that

and in Austria it's always been the worst

people have always run after stupidity 

and trampled intelligence underfoot

Industry and clergy are behind

the Austrian sickness

Really I can understand your father very well

I'm surprised the entire Austrian people didn't commit suicide long ago

 

The Austrians were condemned to death long ago

they just don't know it yet

they haven't yet noticed

the judgement was passed long ago

the execution is just a matter of time

if you ask me it's imminent

 

The tragedy is not

that my brother is dead

but that we are left behind that's what's terrible

from Thomas Bernhard Heldenplatz

He was a man like you and me, or rather he was a man, but not like you, because he was ‘The God Man’. If he suffered, it was almost as if He only seemed to suffer, because he could not stop suffering when he wished (which you cannot do!) and because even in his suffering he had the beatific vision. God can cheat like that and get away with it. But you can’t get away with anything. On the contrary: this suffering has become your condemnation to suffer without reprieve. All his life long, then, he was looking around at the men he has come to save, knowing he was not like them. Death could not hold him. He did not really have to pray. He just pretended. And by pretending, he set a trap for man. He made all suffering final and inexorable.

Rimbaud

Not abstraction but subtraction.

The fullness of nothingness. That is the reason for the insistence on the zero point.

Against the term ‘absurd’. It presupposes the meaningful as the normal. But that is precisely the illusion[;] the absurd is the normal.

Everything so meaningless, yet at the same time the way one speaks is so normal, i.e. modern language may have shrunken – compared with Kafka’s epic language, brought as it were to the point of indifference with the absolute subject – but [it is] never replaced by linguistic absurdity

Criticism of B[eckett] amounts to the statement: but all that is terrible, it simply cannot be. Answer: it is terrible.

The fact that B[eckett] retains the label ‘novel’. What has become of the novel.

Something infinitely liberating comes from B[eckett] vis-à-vis death. What is it?

From Kafka the most effective motif [is] that of the Hunter Gracchus. Death, silence, without voices, as the unattainable goal. Living is dying because it is a not-being-able-to-die.

Adorno on Beckett

… suddenly, amidst the sadness, the darkness of soul the pressure, his brain would momentarily catch fire, as it were, all his life’s forces would be strained at once in an extraordinary impulse. The sense of life, of self-awareness, increased nearly tenfold in these moments, which flashed by like lightning. His mind, his heart were lit up with an extraordinary light; all his agitation, all his doubts, all his worries were as if placated at once, resolved in a sort of sublime tranquillity, filled with serene, harmonious joy, and hope, filled with reason and ultimate cause.

Prince Myshkin, from Dostoevsky's The Idiot

To those human beings who are of any concern to me I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities — I wish that they should not remain unfamiliar with profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, the wretchedness of the vanquished: I have no pity for them, because I wish them the only thing that can prove today whether one is worth anything or not — that one endures.

Examine the lives of the best and most fruitful people and peoples and ask yourselves whether a tree that is supposed to grow to a proud height can dispense with bad weather and storms; whether misfortune and external resistance, some kinds of hatred, jealousy, stubbornness, mistrust, hardness, avarice, and violence do not belong among the favorable conditions without which any great growth even of virtue is scarcely possible.

Nietzsche

We’re sick with eternity: its chronic state is time, its crisis – love and death. But, on the other hand, isn’t it also pathological that we see sickness in the very thing that constitutes the meaning of life, that determines what it means to live? That we take the essential discontinuity of our lives – the fact that life ‘passes away’, ‘becomes’, ‘flows’ – for a sickness to be treated? That we try to fill this gap with concepts, to remove that internal diversification of life with the help of some truth underlying it, and thus to render our lives consistent and comprehensible? It is precisely this pathology that N calls ‘nihilism’.

from Krzysztof Michalski's Flame of Eternity (one of the finest books on Nietzsche I've come across)

When can started I was finished with free jazz. I was not satisfied, they were not satisfied with me. In free jazz, there was no future, everything was destroyed. Repetition was not allowed, but for me, repetition was one of the basic elements in music.  I prefer music where you think rhythmically in cycles … with a cyclical rhythm you cannot change it, you have to obey the rhythmical movement. You can change some things but you must keep the basic shape of that rhythm.

Jaki Liebezit of Can (RIP)

… the joy of Can: their openness, their attentiveness to one another, to conflict as well as communion, a channel for the very electric energy of life itself, in all its variegation, its unpredictability, but also, when ears were open and egos suppressed, its potential for a harmony of which life itself has fallen short. Can were not just a group but a way of being, a way indeed of living forever, an infinite organic continuum. Said Michael Karoli, three years before he died: The soul of the entire thing was not composed of our four or five souls but was a creature named Can. That is very important. And this creature, can made the music., When my hour comes, I’ll know that, apart from my children, I’ve helped create another living being.

from David Stubbs, Krautrock and the Building of Modern Germany

… much of Mark’s work amounted to the expression of a single message: there is no private cure for your problems. That unease you feel, whether it’s just a lingering anxiety or a deep full-blown depression, is not something that can be cured by way of individualised therapies or just pursuing a successful career. It can only be addressed by knowing it for what it is and by building relationships around it and despite it which are more potent than the forces which produce it. It can only be treated in struggle. I suppose I would say this – the critique of individualism has always been my overriding philosophical obsession – but it was an absolutely central feature of Mark’s thinking. You are not an individual (and this is the putative title of yet another book that I promised Mark I would one day write). You are never alone. Even when you think you are, you aren’t – and social relations will define your ‘interior’ life just as much as any aspect of your being. Connect, engage, relate, create, not because these are nice things that humans and other nice creatures do, but because they are what life is, what becoming is, and they are what Capital does not want you to do.

Jeremy Gilbert, remembering Mark Fisher

People like Lou and I are probably predicting the end of an era … I mean that catastrophically. Any society that allows people like Lou and me to become rampant is pretty well lost. We’re both pretty mixed-up, paranoid people, absolute walking messes. If we’re the spearhead of anything, we’re not necessarily the spearhead of anything good.

David Bowie, Press conference 16 July 1972

The End of History, which is the Corporate global slogan, is not a prophecy, but an order to wipe out the past and what it has bequeathed everywhere. The market requires every consumer and employee to be massively alone in the present.

John Berger (RIP)

Giorgio Agamben said in an interview that 'thought is the courage of hopelessness' – an insight which is especially pertinent for our historical moment, when even the most pessimistic diagnosis as a rule finishes with an uplifting hint at some version of the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel. The true courage is not to imagine an alternative, but to accept the consequences of the fact that there is no clearly discernible alternative: the dream of an alternative is a sign of theoretical cowardice, functioning as a fetish that prevents us from grasping the deadlock of our predicament. In short, the true courage is to admit that the light at the end of the tunnel is probably the headlight of another train approaching us from the opposite direction. 

Zizek, from Trouble in Paradise

To some extent we all come to terms with Genius, with what resides in us but does not belong to us. Each person’s character is engendered by the way he attempts to turn away from Genius, to flee from him. Genius, to the extent that he has been avoided and left unexpressed, inscribes a grimace on Ego’s face. An author’s style – like the grace displayed by any creature – depends less on his genius than on the part of him that is deprived of genius, his character. That is why when we love someone we actually love neither his genius nor his character (and even less his ego) but his special manner of evading both of these poles, his raid back and forth between genius and character.

Agamben

If humans cannot in any way experience the transmission of culture, then they are left like the angel, to helplessly watch the past accumulate while the continuum of linear time, the storm of progress, prevents them from finding the space of the present that would allow them to appropriate their own historicity, to deactivate the continual and automatic falling of their own potentiality into a small range of actualities that are delineated by the legal categories of will and necessity.

Adam Hillyer, The Disappearance of Literature

Green believed that well-groomed, well-behaved English was an obstacle to expression. But his style wasn’t a merely negative exercise, a winnowing or clearing out: he delivered a gorgeous, full-bodied alternative. (via)