Category: Quotes

Duras has always maintained this link with God, indulging in the ambiguity and the nostalgia that she voices in all her books and interviews. God is everywhere in her texts, in the children, in this fragile, scarcely perceptible unknown, a mysterious presence in her night, in the miracles of love, in the skies above the estuaries of the Seine, in the unpredictable movements of the sea, in Yann Andrea's sea-washed gaze, in her walk, with her hand in Yann's. God circulates beneath the little brother's smooth skin just as the water flowed from earthenware jars, suddenly appearing in the miracle of the book being composed, by some secret alchemy. God is so present in the writing that his name has 'become', she says, 'a common noun' – 'it is everything, it is nothing', but it is an appeal, and remains the object of her quest.

She always appeals to the religious, 'this silent impulse, stronger than anyone, and unjustifiable', the incomprehensible staring us in the face, a force that language cannot possibly describe, stumbling miserably, time after time, something unknown that can only be expressed in a stuttering voice, through silence, or words gasped out and, for want of anything better, finding breath enough to say: 'The noise, you know? … of God? … that thing? …'

Virondelet, Duras

Now she can go around in circles in her books. She has put into place a sufficient number of motifs, reverberating among one another, so many schoes, already, that there remains nothing for her to do but to weave the Work, like one of the Fates, rewriting the books, converting them for the stage, imagining new possibilities, new variations for them. For one book to the next, from one dramatic scene to the next, she draws from writing the song of exile that goes out in all directions, droning it pell-mell: there is ther mother, love, the seaside, especially the cries, the waiting, the pain.

Alain Vircondelet, writing about Duras

PHILIPPEAU: Peace is in God.

DANTON: In nothingness. What offers more peace, more oblivion, than nothingness? And if ultimate peace is God, then doesn't that mean that God is nothingness? But I'm an atheist! How I curse the dictum that 'something can't become nothing'! And I am something, that's the misery of it!

Creation's so rank and rampant that no void is left, there's seething and swarming wherever you turn.

Nothing has killed itself, creation is its wound, we are the drops of its blood, the world the grave in which it slowly rots.

Buechner, Danton's Death

I’m fortunate enough to not have instilled in me an aversion to Christianity, and to Christian terms and concepts. It’s sort of easy for me to translate any religious or Christian term or concept into a language I understand in a heartbeat. 

Will Oldham, new interview

My general argument is that the traditional leftist narrative, which was quite serviceable in its day as a critique of education as exploitation, is simply a Kantian critique, which is that education was treating people as means and not ends, so is an affront to human dignity — not to mention it’s bad for you physically and has these deleterious effects on all levels of the person, like what Marx talked about in terms of factory work. The great Marxist critiques of education in the English speaking world — Bowles and Gintis, Daniel Liston, a lot of the critical pedagogy school — is that education is exploitation, it’s excessively vocational and narrowed down in an artificial way to service the needs of capital accumulation and not to service a broader conception of human needs.

My argument is that this critique was serviceable for its day, but I think capitalism has moved beyond that and made that critique almost quaint. Anyone of a certain age in the US and Western Europe realizes that being exploited may even be good, “please, find a capitalist to exploit me, at least that means I have a job.” If I could boil it down to one quote that inspired me to think about this it would be from Joan Robinson, who is an English economist, and she said something to the effect that for the worker “there’s only one thing worse than the capitalist exploiting you, and that is not being exploited by the capitalist within a capitalist economy.” So you are placed outside the loop of production in this precarious, disposable position, and I think that’s because capitalism itself has shifted.

In the book I say that that traditional leftist critique of education was appropriate for what I call the “all hands on deck” phase of capitalism, which coincides with the advent of universal schooling. […]

Due to an intensification of automation, technology, etc., I think that capitalism has advanced beyond that and it’s not the case that quantitatively more and more workers are functional and useful for profit accumulation, for the system. We’ve reached a point where we’ve out-produced ourselves, where productivity has increased so that simply not as many workers are needed. From the cold logic of capitalist accumulation, this increasingly youthful, educated group is kind of just surplus, they are more of a management and political stability problem — which we see inklings of in the Arab spring, or occupy movements, or London, or Greece, where there are huge levels of youth under-employment, or here where people with massive student debt are working for minimum wage at Starbucks.

David Blacker, interviewed

A saying from the Zohar: On the sixth day, having created man, God said to him: I have worked heretofore, now you shall continue.

A saying: Cain's true punishment? He unlearned the meaning of Shabbat.

The return of the scouts, discouraged and discouraging, provoked such distress among the tribes that Moses decided to commmemorate it every year. At every anniversary Moses ordered the Jews to dig graves for themselves and to lie in them overnight. The next morning heralds ran between the trenches, shouting: Let the living separate from the dead, let the living detach themselves from the dead!  On the fortieth anniversary all rose, for by that time all of them belonged to the new generation; they were worthy of entering the Promised Land, for to them, bondage was no longer a temptation.

Elie Wiesel, Messengers of God

Many attempted in vain to say the most joyful things joyfully; here, finally, they are expressed in mourning.

Hoelderlin

You ask what I mean by the 'nothingness' of revelation? I understand by it a state in which revelation appears to be without meaning, in which it still asserts itself, in which it has validity but no significance. A state in which the wealth of meaning is lost and what is in the prfocess of appearing (for revelation is such a process) still does not disappear, even though it is reduced to the zero point of its own content, so to speak.

Scholem in a letter to Benjamin

Surely one of the things that make it so difficult to write about Sebald, to say anything genuinely new or revelatory about his work, is that he has done so much himself to frame the discourse of his own reception, to provide in advance the terms for critical engagement with the work; his fiction already practices a rather efficient sort of autoexegesis that leaves the critic feeling a certain irrelevance (the posture of awestruck adoration that one finds in so much of the critical literature is, I think, one of the guises such irrelevance assumes). 

Eric Santner, On Creaturely Life

… melancholy, the contemplation of the movement of misfortune, has nothing in common with the wish to die. It is a form of resistance. And this is emphatically so at the level of art, where it is anything but reactive or reactionary. When, with rigid gaze [melancholy] goes over again just now things could have happened, it becomes clear that the dynamic of inconsolability and that of knowledge are identical in their execution. The descriptino of misfortune includes within itself the possibility of its own overcoming.

Sebald, cited by Santner

I am learning to see. I don't know why it is, but everything enters me more deeply and doesn't stop where it once used to. I have an interior that I never knew of. Everything passes into it now. I don't know what happens there.

Rilke, Malte

Sitting before my little fire, I know, when the wind blows outside, moaning in the fieldstone chimmney I caused to be built for ornament, shrieking in the gutters and the ironwork and trim and trellises of the house, that this planet of America, turning round upon itself, stands only at the outside, only at the periphery, only at the edges, of an infinite galaxy, dizzingly circling. And that the stars that seem to ride our winds cause them. Sometimes I think to see huge faces bending between those stars to look through my two windows, faces golden and tenuous, touched with pity and wonder; and then I rise from my chair and limp to the flimsy door, and there is nothing; and then I take up the cruiser ax (Buntings Best, 2 lb. head, Hickory Handle) that stands beside the door and go out, and the wind sings and the trees lash themselves like flagellants and the stars show themselves between bars of racing cloud, but the sky between them is empty and blank.

Gene Wolfe, Peace

Nietzsche never seemed to lose sight of his own condition: he simulated Dionysus or the Crucified and took a certain delight in the enormity of his simulation. The madness consisted in this delight. No one will ever be able to judge to what degree this simulation was perfect and absolute; the sole criterion lies in the intensity with which Nietzsche experienced the simulation, to the point of ecstasy. […]

What he was conscious of was the fact that he had ceased to be Nietzsche. […]

In [eternal] return, everyday things abruptly receded into the distance: yesterday became today, the day before yesterday spilled over into tomorrow.

Klossowski, Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle

Almost everything I do now is a 'drawing-the-line under everything'. The vehemence of my inner oscillations has been terrifying, all through these past years; now that I must make the transition to a new and more intense form, I need, above all, a new estrangement, a still more intense depersonalization. So it is of greatest importance what and who still remain to me.

What age am I? I do not know – as little as I know how young I shall become…

Nietzsche, from the letter to Fuchs (14 December 1887)

This is the neoliberal period of capital in all its fetid glory: the ruthles marketization of everything existing – including itself, in the sense that the marketization is itself marketed as, among other things, 'natural', 'fair', 'win-win', 'progress', and other empty signifiers. […]

Neoliberalism triumphant presents us with the more frightening specter of what I am calling educational eliminationism, by which I mean a state of affairs in which elites no longer find it necessary to utlize mass schooling as a first link in the long chain of the process of the extraction of workers' surplus labour value. It has instead become easier for them to cut their losses and abandon public schooling altogether. Any remaining commitments are purely vestigal and ahve more to do with social stability rather than with education proper, as vast swathes of our school system (particularly in urban areas) are decisively repurposed as holding facilities for (putative) proto-criminals, lost within what Henry Giroux decries as a 'youth crime-control complex', with a special layer of legal menace for urban kids in what Michelle Alexander pointedly calls 'the new Jim Crow'. […]

It should now be clear to everyone that neoliberal education policy is not about reforming public schools. It is about obliterating any remaining vestiges of the public square via a market discipline that is officially supposed to apply to everyone but in reality is selectively applied only to those lacking sufficient wealth to commandeer state policy; ironically the sacred market applies to public schools not to megabanks. It is in essence the strategy of the gated community, where those at the top 'have theirs' and withdraw from the educational commons and into their state-backed corporatist enclaves. Our elite capitains are abandoning the public educational ship in whose hold lie nearly 90% of US school children. […]

The newer kind of non-recognition involves not merely reducing people to means but simply wishing them away and ignoring them altogether; in this way at the level of the concern for the Other, we are transforming from abuse to neglect. An increasing proportion of humanity – in the global South but also here at home – grows non-exploitable economically. Their labour is incapable of importing enough value to render them serviceable for traditional capitalist production and so they are economically 'out of the loop'[…] They have become 'extra people' and superfluous. At best their realtion to the formal economy is occasional and precarious as evidence by the stunning growth of those living most of their lives in what anthropologist Keith Hart desceribes as 'the informal economy', living, for example, under subsistence conditions of 'forced entrepreneurship' such as prostitution or the selling of odds and ends. They are the disposable ones[…] Their main productive function now is to serve as part of a disciplinary warning to precarious remaining workers that 'but for the grace of the (job)Creator, there go I'. […]

From a wider lens, what is actually occurring is that monopolistic neoliberal elites are asserting their grip more strongly by more directly harnessing all social institutions as adjuncts for their ever-more desperate drive to accumulate capital[…] the end result is […] a flattening-out and homogenising of the range of what human beings value, where every activity is to be translated into the language of only one would-be totalizing sphere. This in the end is the neoliberal leviathan in all its monomaniacal glory. It seeks only itself, a monomaniacal sameness, ultimately offering the existentially terrifying boredom of absolute self-identity. […]

Who are the these rugged competitive heroes who live by the global free market alone? Who actually embraces this?  It is manifestly not today's capitalist class, who by now by and large enjoy secure monopoly positions from which they can watch at a distance the little people tear each other apart as gladiatorial economic sport. 

David J. Blacker, The Falling Rate of Learning and the Neoliberal Endgame

What I suffer from this continuous idleness I am quite unable to describe. I would like most to hang myself on the nearest branch of the cheery trees standing now in full bloom. This wonderful spring with its secret life and movement troubles me unspeakably. These eternal blue skies, lasting for weeks, this continuous sprouting and budding in nature, these coaxing breezes impregnated with spring sunlight and fragrances of flowers … make me frantic. Everywhere this bewildering urge for life, fruitfulness, creation – and only I, although like the humblest grass of the fields of one of God’s creatures, may not take part in this festival of resurrection, at any rate not except as a spectator with grief and envy.

Hugo Wolf

There will never be any summer any more, and I am weary of everything. I stay because I am too weak to go. I crawl on because it is easier than to stop. I put my face to the window. There is nothing out there but the blackness and the sound of rain. Neither when I shut my eyes can I see anything. I am alone…. There is nothing else in my world but my dead heart and brain within me and the rain without.

Edward Thomas

But it is always a question of whether I wish to avoid these glooms…. These 9 weeks give one a plunge into deep waters; which is a little alarming, but full of interest…. There is an edge to it which I feel is of great importance…. One goes down into the well & nothing protects one from the assault of truth.

Virginia Woolf

The more I am spent, ill, a broken pitcher, by so much more am I an artist – a creative artist… this green shoot springing from the roots of an old felled trunk, these are such abstract things that a kind of melancholy remains within us when we think that one could have created life at less cost than creating art

Van Gogh

I am so ill – so terribly, hopelessly ILL in body and mind, that I feel I CANNOT live … until I subdue this fearful agitation, which if continued, will either destroy my life, or, drive me hopelessly mad.

Edgar Allan Poe

I roll on like a ball, with this exception, that contrary to the usual laws of motion I have no friction to content with in my mind, and of course have some difficulty in stopping myself when there is nothing else to stop me…. I am almost sick and giddy with the quantity of things in my head – trains of thought beginning and branching to infinity, crossing each other, and all tempting and wanting to be worked out.

John Ruskin

She talked almost without stopping for two or three days, paying no attention to anyone in the room or anything said to her. For about a day what she said was coherent; the sentences meant something, though it was nearly all wildly insane. Then gradually it became completely incoherent, a mere jumble of dissociated words.

Leonard Woolf on Virginia

… despite antennae exceedingly alert to the changing 'spirit of the age', I apprehended too late certain key shifts. Aware, early on, of the widening authority of the mathematical and experimental sciences, intensely involved in the 'language-revolution' and the coming of the new media of meaning, I none the less did not identify rigorously the underlying tectonic drift. Educated in a hypertrophied reverence for the classics, in that near-worship of the 'titans' of thought, music, literature and the arts, so characteristic of emancipated central European Judaism, I felt committed to the canonic, the confirmed and the 'immortal' (those immortels mummified in the French Academy!). It took too long before I understood that the ephemeral, the fragmentary, the derisive, the self-ironising are the key modes of modernity; before I realised that the interactions between high and popular culture, notably via the film and television – now the commanding instruments of general sensibility and, it may be, of invention – had largely replaced the monumental pantheon. Influential as they are, deconstruction and postmodernism are themselves only symptoms, bright bubbles at the surface of a much deeper mutation. It is, as I have suggested, of the related classical impulse in art and poetry to endure, to achieve timelessness which are, today, in radical question. It is the transformation of these ontological-historical categories, in Kant's sense of the word, it is the ebbing of ideals and performative hierarchies instrumental since the pre-Socratics, which define what I have called 'the epilogue' but which others acclaim as 'the new age'. There is too much I have grasped too late in the day. Too often my activity as a writer and teacher, as a critic and scholar, has been, consciously or not, an in memoriam, a curatorship of remembrance. But could it be otherwise after the Shoah.

George Steiner, Errata

If I were to resume in a single phrase the difference between messianic time and apocalyptic time, I would say that the messianic is not the end of time but the time of the end. What is messianic is not the end of time but the relation of every moment, every kairos, to the end of time and to eternity.

[…] In the Judaic tradition there is a distinction between two times and two worlds: the olam hazzeh, the time stretching from the creation of the world to its end, and the olam habba, the time that begins after the end of time. Both terms are present, in their Greek translations, in Paul’s Letters. Messianic time, however – the time in which the apostle lives and the only one that interests him – is neither that of the olam hazzeh nor that of the olam habba. It is, instead, the time between those two times, when time is divided by the messianic event (which is for Paul the Resurrection).

… what is at issue is a time that pulses and moves within chronological time, that transforms chronological time from within. On the one hand it is the time that time takes to end. But on the other hand it is the time that remains, the time which we need to end time, to confront our customary image of time and to liberate ourselves from it. In the one case, the time in which we believe we live separates us from what we are and transforms us into powerless spectators of our own lives. In the other case, however, the time of the messiah is the time that we ourselves are, the dynamic time where, for the first time, we grasp time, we grasp the time that is ours, grasp that we are nothing but that time. This time is not some other time located in an improbably present or future time. On the contrary, it is the only real time, the only time we will ever have. 

Agamben, The Church and the Kingdom

Once, the poet knew how to account for his poetry (‘To open it through prose’, as Dante puts it), and the critic was also a poet. Now, the critic has lost access to the work of creation and thus gets revenge by presuming to judge it, while the poet no longer knows how to save his own work and thus discounts this incapacity by blindly consigning himself to the frivolity of an angel. 

Agamben, Nudities

One day humanity will play with law just as children play with disused objects, not in order to restore them to their canonical use but to free them from it for good. What is found after the law is not a more proper and original use value that precedes the law, but a new use that is born only after it. And use, which has been contaminated by law, must also be freed from its own value. This liberation is the task of study, or play. And this studious play is the passage that allows us to arrive at that justice that one of Benjamin's posthumous fragments defines as a state of the world in which the world appears as a good that absolutely cannot be appropriated or made juridical.

Agamben, State of Exception

What had happened [with the appearance of consciousness – LI]? A breach in the very unity of life, a biological paradox, an abomination, an absurdity, an exaggeration of disastrous nature. Life had overshot its target, blowing itself apart. A species had been armed too heavily – by spirit made almighty without, but equally menace to its own well-being. Its weapon was like a sword without hilt or plate, a two-edged weapon cleaving everything; but he who is to wield it must grasp the blade and turn one edge toward himself.

Despite his new eyes, man was still rooted in matter, his soul spun into it and subordinated to its blind laws. And yet he could see matter as a stranger, compare himself to all phenomena, see through and locate his votal processes. He comes to nature as an unbidden guest, in vain extending his arms to beg conciliation with his maker: Nature answers no more; it performed a miracle with man, but later did not know him. He has lost his right of residence in the universe, has eaten from the Tree of Knowledge and been expelled from Paradise. He is mighty in the near world, but curses his might as purchased with his harmony of soul, his innocence, his inner peace in life's embrace.

Peter Zappfe, from 'The Last Messiah'

Whether we are sovereign or enslaved in our being, what of it? Our species will still look to the future and see no need to abdicate its puppet dance of replication in a puppet universe where the strings pull themselves. What a laugh that we would do anything else, or could do anything else. That our lives might be a paradox and a horror would not really be a secret too terrible to know for minds that know only what they want to know. The hell of human consciousness is only a philosopher's bedtime story we can hear each night and forget each morning when we awake to go to school or to work or wherever we may go day after day after day. What do we care about the horror of being insufferably aware we are alive and will die … the horror of shadows without selves enshrouding the earth … ort he horror of puppet-heads bobbing in the wind and disappearing into a dark sky like lost balloons?

[…] Almost nobody declares that an ancestral curse contaminates us in utero and pollutes our very existence. Doctors do not weep in the delivery room, or not often. They do not lower their heads and say, 'The stopwatch has started'. The infant may cry, if things went right. But time will dry its eyes; time will take care of it. Time will take care of everyone until there are none of to take care of.

from Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race

While consciousness brought us out of our coma in the antural, we still like to think that, however aloof we are from other living things, we are not in essence wholly alienated from them. We do try and fit in with the rest of creation, living and breeding like any other animal or vegetable. It is no fault of ours that we were made as we were made – experiments in a parallel being. This was not our choice. We did not volunteer to be as we are.

[…] No other life forms know they are alive, and neither do they know they will die. This is our curse alone. Without this hex upon our heads, we would never have withdrawn as far as we have from the natural […] Everywhere around us are natural habitats, but within us is the shiver of startling and dreadful things. Simply put: We are not from here. If we vanished tomorrow, no organism on this planet would miss us. Nothing in nature needs us.

[…] We are aberrations – beings born undead, neither one thing nor another, or two things at once … uncanny things that poison the world by sowing our madness everywhere we go, glutting daylight and darkness with incorporeal obscenities. From across an immeasurable divide, we brought the supernatural into all that is manifest. Like a faint haze it floats around us. We keep company with ghosts.

from Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race

Death – do we really believe it is part of the order of our lives? We say that we do. But when it becomes lucent to our imagination, how natural does it feel? W. A. Mozart's attributed last words are apropros here: 'The taste of death is on my tongue. I feel something which is not of this world'. Death is not like survival and procreation. it is more like a visitation from a foreign and engimatic sphere, one to which we are connected by our consciousness. No consciousness, no death. No death, no stories with a beginning, middle and an end. 

from Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race