æ > æ's Quotes

“Alors même que je suis en train de lire, je commence à oublier ce que j’ai lu et ce processus est inéluctable, il se prolonge jusqu’au moment où tout se passe comme si je n’avais pas lu le livre et où je rejoins le non-lecteur que j’aurais pu rester si j’avais été mieux avisé. Dire que l’on a lu un livre fait alors surtout figure de métonymie. On n’a jamais lu, d’un livre, qu’une partie plus ou moins grande, et cette partie même est condamnée, à plus ou moins long terme, à la disparition. Plus que de livres ainsi, nous nous entretenons, avec nous-même et les autres, de souvenirs approximatifs, remaniés en fonction des circonstances du temps présent.”
― Pierre Bayard, How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read

“Aussi conviendrait-il, pour parvenir à parler sans honte des livres non lus, de nous délivrer de l’image oppressante d’une culture sans faille, transmise et imposée par la famille et les institutions scolaires, image avec laquelle nous essayons en vain toute notre vie de venir coïncider. Car la vérité destinée aux autres importe moins que la vérité de soi, accessible seulement à celui qui se libère de l’exigence contraignante de paraître cultivé, qui nous tyrannise intérieurement et nous empêche d’être nous-même.”
― Pierre Bayard, How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read

“Study’s good, because it microcosms everything—if you understand everything within the walls of what you study you can identify other walls too, other areas of study. Everything’s separate and discrete and there is no macrocosm, really. When there are no walls there is no study, only chaos. And so you break it down.”
― Chris Kraus, I Love Dick

“That spring everyone in Judy Chicago’s class collaborated on a 24 hour performance called Route 126. The curator Moira Roth recalls: “the group created a sequence of events throughout the day along the highway. The day began with Suzanne Lacy’s Car Renovation in which the group decorated an abandoned car…and ended with the women standing on a beach watching Nancy Youdelman, wrapped in yards of gossamer silk, slowly wade out to sea until she drowned, apparently…” There’s a fabulous photo taken by Faith Wilding of the car—a Kotex-pink jalopy washed up on desert rocks. The trunk’s flung open and underneath it’s painted cuntblood red. Strands of desert grass spill from the crumpled hood like Rapunzel’s fucked-up hair. According to Performance Anthology—Source Book For A Decade Of California Art, this remarkable event received no critical coverage at the time though contemporaneous work by Baldessari, Burden, Terry Fox boasts bibliographies several pages long. Dear Dick, I’m wondering why every act that narrated female lived experience in the ’70s has been read only as “collaborative” and “feminist.” The Zurich Dadaists worked together too but they were geniuses and they had names.”
― Chris Kraus, I Love Dick

“The idea of a voyage was something crucial for Guy’, Alice told me. He’d seen it the way Gypsies do: not so much experiential as ontological. It’s not that Gypsies necessarily voyage from place to place as they are voyagers; the voyage is immanent in who they are, in what they do, irrespective of whether they travel or not. Guy had similarly understood life as an ontological voyage. Time moves on, ineluctably, and people are consumed by fire.”
― Andy Merrifield, Guy Debord

“To the question ‘Would you envisage living with a Jewish partner?’, 8 per cent of the total questioned replied ‘No, I couldn’t envisage this for myself’, and Brenner notes that this response was given by 24 per cent of those of Maghrebian origin (a difference of 16 points). The figure for those individuals classified as ‘right-wing’ was 16 per cent (a difference of 8 points). If this does indeed confirm a more pronounced anti-Jewish prejudice among young people who class themselves as ‘right-wing’, for the question on the media the difference is less significant on the basis of our own ideological reading. Furthermore, the advantage here is more distinctly in favour of Brenner’s ethno-cultural hypothesis, which is not relativized by a high degree of equality on other questions (as above for the areas of politics and economics). This is why Brenner remarks that ‘the cleavage is most clearly marked by the question dealing with the personal sphere’, though we now have to correct this by making clear that only the personal sphere seems to mark such a ‘cleavage’, at least so far as validating his explanatory hypothesis is concerned. But the correction does not stop here. This would in fact mean forgetting that these figures do not offer any enlightenment at all as to the origin of this negative response on the part of young people of Maghrebian origin – at least, until we know how many of them would respond negatively to the broader question ‘Would you envisage living with anyone who is not Muslim (or not Maghrebian)?’ For it is only in so far as the percentage of young people of Maghrebian origin who would not envisage living with any non-Muslim (or non-Maghrebian) is clearly lower than the percentage of the same young people who would not envisage living with a Jewish person that the difference is significant. In other words, if 24 per cent of these same young people of Maghrebian origin would no more envisage living with any non-Maghrebian or non-Muslim, then the ‘cleavage’ would not be a sign of anti-Jewish prejudice, but simply the assertion of a Muslim or Maghrebian identity. Since this question was not asked, it is impossible to draw any conclusion.”
― Alain Badiou, Reflections On Anti-Semitism

“It is in this context, clearly dominated by a classist propaganda, chauvinist and persecutory, that the accusation of anti-Semitism and hidden negationism – despite being completely unfounded – tetanizes the majority of its victims. How should we explain this strange phenomenon?

A first reason lies in the brutality of the accusation, very unusual in a society bathed in a polite consensus – at least among well-behaved people. Suddenly, in a procedure reminiscent of the logic of fascism in which insult overshadows argument, we are dealing with a genuine provocation: an accusation so serious and so incongruous that we can well imagine it leaves some people speechless.

And then, it’s very difficult to defend yourself against such an accusation: ‘No, I’m not anti-Semitic’ being a double negation (‘I’m not one of those people who don’t like Jews’) with the fragility this implies. How, indeed, can one prove that one is not something? Say that one has Jewish friends? That’s the worst of all. (‘Ah! He’s got his good Jews.’) Remind people, in certain cases, that one is Jewish oneself? We have seen how that is an aggravating factor. Launch a legal action? Lost in advance, as the accusers are clever enough to use terms that shelter them from prosecution for defamation, which has its precise rules. They will never say that you’re anti-Semitic; they’ll even say that ‘of course, you’re not’, letting their argument, their tone, their comparisons and their historic references do the slandering work while they remain protected.”
― Alain Badiou, Reflections On Anti-Semitism

“La vérité du vin et des enfants est vérité qui ne se cherche ni ne se trouve, qui ne se prouve ni ne s'établit: elle est donnée, entièrement donnée, donnée avant toute donation. On ne remonte pas en amont. Elle coule de source, et voilà comment on peut
boire poésie ou vertu: à la source, à la bouteille, dans une coulée qui ne doit rien qu'à la gorge qui l'accueille. Poésie ou vertu, image ou musique, pensée, émotion: boire signifie absorber, devenir éponge.”
― Jean-Luc Nancy, Ivresse

“L'ivresse porte le legs du sacrifice: la communication, par le fluide et par son épanchement, avec le sacrum, l'exception, l'excès, le dehors, l'interdit, le divin. L'ivresse serait en somme la réussite d'un sacrifice dont la victime serait le sacrificateur lui-même. Àla limite où le sacrificateur de tous les sacrifices demeure intact Bataille reconnaissait pour finir un caractère comique. Sans doute l'ivresse est à son tour comique puisque l'enivré n'y disparaît pas sans reste et revient de l'ivresse piteux, dégrisé, parfois désabusé de l'ivresse même.”
― Jean-Luc Nancy, Ivresse

“L'esprit, comme on le sait, ne dénomme pas par hasard les liqueurs les plus fortes, les esprits de vin ou les spiritueux à la confection desquels président une fermentation ou une distillation, processus destinés à dégager une essence, c'est -à -dire la vérité pure, idéelle et sensée d'une substance concrète, opaque et sensible. L'esprit ou la liqueur, la liquidité ou la liquoricité de l'esprit ne représente rien d'autre que la sensibilité de l'insensible, la sensualité exquise du Sens pur: vérité, transcendance, divinité, révélation, extase.”
― Jean-Luc Nancy, Ivresse

“On dit que le buvard boit l'encre ou bien que le sel boit le vin répandu, rouge sur la nappe. Boire, c'est absorber. La nourriture, pour être assimilée, doit être d'abord ingérée, puis digérée. La boisson, en revanche, semble plutôt se répandre immédiatement à travers le corps. C'est une imprégnation, une irrigation, une diffusion et une infusion. S'il existe un double symbolisme du pain et du vin - que le christianisme a hérité de cultes plus anciens, dionysiaques, aphrodisiaques, c'est en raison d'une double valence, l'une, solide et substantielle, l'autre, liquide et spirituelle.”
― Jean-Luc Nancy, Ivresse

“You see … I know nuclear warheads have a bum rap in our culture—radiation, nuclear winter, massive extinction, sad little doll heads lying in the gutter covered with bits of black muck. But to watch one exploding in real life is insanely fucking awesome. Yes. It is true. I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it myself, snacking on saltines and drinking Arrowhead bottled water while our plane circled a heaving, pulsating, smoking-hot 15-kiloton explosion, with Neal pointing out little sparkling patches on the ocean where extra-dense bits of plastic trash were blipping into a green eco-friendly solution for a better tomorrow.
Yes, yes, I know, I know. Atomic weapons. Charred little kittens. Nuns vaporizing. The economy in shambles. But still … what a fucking sight!”
― Douglas Coupland, Worst. Person. Ever.

“The thing about Jason Bourne is that he only really shines when he’s being chased. Without the forces of evil pursuing him, Jason Bourne is basically council house trash living on KFC and the proceeds of his illegal Polish and Romanian girlfriends who’ll toss you off for a tenner at the local lottery ticket kiosk.”
― Douglas Coupland, Worst. Person. Ever.

“Я даже считаю, что можно было бы дать хорошее описание мнимо демократических обществ, в которых мы живём, простой констатацией: в рамках этих обществ онтология повеления заняла место онтологии утверждения, не в ясной форме императива, но в более коварной форме совета, приглашения, уведомления, которые даются во имя безопасности, так что повиновение приказу принимает форму сотрудничества и зачастую — форму повеления самому себе. Я думаю здесь не только о сфере рекламы или предписаний безопасности, которые даются в форме приглашений, но и о сфере технологических диспозитивов. Эти диспозитивы определяются тем фактом, что субъект, их использующий, полагает, будто повелевает ими (и, в действительности, нажимает на клавиши, названные «командами»), но реально он только и делает, что повинуется повелению, вписанному в саму структуру диспозитива. Свободный гражданин демократическо-технологических обществ — это существо, которое непрестанно повинуется, самим жестом, каковым он даёт повеление.”
― Giorgio Agamben, What Is an Apparatus? and Other Essays

“Je vous propose alors une idée militante. Il serait très juste d’organiser une vaste manifestation pour une alliance des jeunes et des vieux, à vrai dire dirigée contre les adultes d’aujourd’hui. Les plus rebelles des moins de trente ans et les plus coriaces des plus de soixante contre les quadras et les quinquas bien installés. Les jeunes diraient qu’ils en ont assez d’être errants, désorientés, et interminablement dépourvus de toute marque de leur existence positive. Ils diraient aussi qu’il n’est pas bon que les adultes fassent semblant d’être éternellement jeunes. Les vieux diraient qu’ils en ont assez de payer leur dévalorisation, leur sortie de l’image traditionnelle du vieux sage, par une mise à la casse, une déportation dans des mouroirs médicalisés, et leur totale absence de visibilité sociale. Ce serait très nouveau, très important, cette manifestation mixte ! J’ai du reste vu, durant mes nombreux voyages dans le monde entier, pas mal de conférences, pas mal de situations où le public se composait d’un noyau de vieux briscards, de vieux rescapés, comme moi, des grands combats des sixties et des seventies, et puis d’une masse de jeunes qui venaient voir si le philosophe avait quelque chose à dire concernant l’orientation de leur existence et la possibilité d’une vraie vie. J’ai donc vu, partout dans le monde, l’esquisse de l’alliance dont je vous parle. Comme à saute-mouton, la jeunesse semble devoir sauter aujourd’hui par-dessus l’âge dominant, celui qui va en gros de trente-cinq à soixante-cinq ans, pour constituer avec le petit noyau des vieux révoltés, des non-résignés, l’alliance des jeunes désorientés et des vieux baroudeurs de l’existence. Ensemble, nous imposerions que soit ouvert le chemin de la vraie vie.”
― Alain Badiou, La vraie vie : Appel à la corruption de la jeunesse

“Какая тревога на сердце простом.
Умерли гуси в ветре густом.
Остались без веток пустые кусты.
Висели без рек безстыдно мосты.

Вдруг море погасло.
И я
Остался без мира,
Как масло.”
― Геннадий Гор, Красная капля в снегу: Стихотворения 1942-1944

“И в нас текла река, внутри нас,
Но голос утренний угас,
И детство высохло как куст.
И стало пусто как в соломе…
Мы жизнь свою сухую сломим,
Чтобы прозрачнее стекла
Внутри нас мысль рекой текла.

1942”
― Геннадий Гор, Красная капля в снегу: Стихотворения 1942-1944

“Люди, которые снятся,
Деревья, которым не спится,
Реки, которые злятся,
Руки, в которых влюбиться.
Мне бы с горы бы сгорая
Или в прорубь с сарая.
Мне бы как поезд об поезд,
Птицей об птицу разбиться.

1942”
― Геннадий Гор, Красная капля в снегу: Стихотворения 1942-1944

“Дерево раскрыло двери
Дерево раскрыло окна
Дерево покрыло ноги
Дерево раскрыло все.
В дерево я вхож как нож.
В дерево я влез как бес
В дерево я впился, въелся
В дерево я вперся, вполз
Дерево меня в себя
Приняв, обняв, мною жажду утолив
Бросило меня в залив.

1942”
― Геннадий Гор, Красная капля в снегу: Стихотворения 1942-1944

“Я утром встал была ещё весна
Желтело небо белое синело
И дым стоял недвижно как сосна
Над улицей что ласково блестела

И мне казалось ждут меня в бюро
Где жёлтые на солнышке столы
И где мальчишка городской урод
Разносит чай или метёт полы

Я думал: воскресенье на носу
Как сладко встать в двенадцатом часу
А вечером идти в кинематограф
Светилось сердце как больной фотограф

Я вспомнил вдруг читателей друзей
Что ждут с дубьём мою литературу
Едва споткнись попробуй ротозей
И зрителей что сколько не глазей
Остались тем же дураком и дурой

Так стал я вдруг врагом литературы

1925”
― Борис Поплавский, Небытие: Неизвестные стихотворения 1922-1935 годов

“Посвящ. Тютчеву

Люблю я деревенские клозеты
Где остального мира мне не жаль
Где я читал помятые газеты
О нежное воспоминанье, жаль!

Окно являет подметённый двор
А далее пригорки и лощинки.
Ползут от напряжения морщинки
Я этот миг у Вас украл как вор

О мягкий кал на выступе не медли
Там мокрый мрак и тихий белый глист
Но на него упал пахучий лист
И я последние застёгиваю петли.

Париж 1923”
― Борис Поплавский, Небытие: Неизвестные стихотворения 1922-1935 годов

“АКВАР<И>УМ

Марку Мария Талову

Кафе, нейтральный час подводный свет
Отёки пепла на зелёных лицах
Вторые сутки говорит сосед
И переутомлённо веселится

Всплывает день над каменной рекой
Возобновляется движение и счастье
И воскресенью честь отдав рукой
Восходит флаг над полицейской частью

Так вот она [так вот она]: земля
Я наконец достиг её и тронул
Как рваный киль пустого корабля
Что в мягкий ил врезается без стону

Так вот она какая жизнь людей
Вот место где пристёгнуты подтяжки
Вот рай где курят и играют в шашки
Под дикое жужжание идей”
― Борис Поплавский, Небытие: Неизвестные стихотворения 1922-1935 годов

“L'autre fait notable, c'est qu'un médiatique a désormais le droit de plaisanter avec son outil professionnel, en certains cas. Un général, par exemple, n'avait pas le droit de plaisanter à la tête de ses troupes, ou un juge en prononçant ses sentences, et je ne sais même pas s'il est encore tout à fait permis au respon-sable d'une centrale où l'on produit l'énergie nucléaire de plaisanter, au sens propre du mot, à l'instant où il fait connaître ses directives. Mais il est littéralement hors de doute qu'un médiatique ne peut être privé de ce droit. C'est un salarié remarquablement spécial, qui ne reçoit d'ordre de personne, et qui sait tout sur tous les sujets dont il veut parler. Il porte donc, suivant sa déontologie, qu'il ne saurait trahir sans hideuse concussion, littéralement toute la conscience de l'époque. S'il n'avait pas le droit de plaisanter, où serait donc la liberté de la presse et, partant, la démocratie elle-même?”
― Guy Debord, Cette mauvaise réputation...

“It is important to record that the ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ poster was never mass-produced until 2008. It is a historical object of a very peculiar sort. By 2009, when it had first become hugely popular, it seemed to respond to a particularly English malaise, one connected directly with the way Britain reacted to the credit crunch and the banking crash. From this moment of crisis, it tapped into an already established narrative about Britain’s ‘finest hour’ – the aerial Battle of Britain in 1940–41 – when it was the only country left fighting the Third Reich. This was a moment of entirely indisputable – and apparently uncomplicated – national heroism, one which Britain has clung to through thick and thin. Even during the height of the boom, as the critical theorist Paul Gilroy spotted in his 2004 book After Empire, the Blitz and the Victory were frequently invoked, made necessary by ‘the need to get back to the place or moment before the country lost its moral and cultural bearings’. ‘1940’ and ‘1945’ were ‘obsessive repetitions’, ‘anxious and melancholic’, morbid fetishes, clung to as a means of not thinking about other aspects of recent British history – most obviously, its Empire. This has only intensified since the financial crisis began.

The ‘Blitz spirit’ has been exploited by politicians largely since 1979. When Thatcherites and Blairites spoke of ‘hard choices’ and ‘muddling through’, they often evoked the memories of 1941. It served to legitimate regimes which constantly argued that, despite appearances to the contrary, resources were scarce and there wasn’t enough money to go around; the most persuasive way of explaining why someone (else) was inevitably going to suffer. Ironically, however, this rhetoric of sacrifice was often combined with a demand that the consumers enrich themselves – buy their house, get a new car, make something of themselves, ‘aspire’.”
― Owen Hatherley, The Ministry of Nostalgia

“Living through the Blitz, edited by MO’s Tom Harrisson, makes clear just how much the ‘1945’ we now consume is a construct, a convenient fairy tale built up piece by piece several generations later. Most interesting for our purposes is its plentiful evidence that the imperative (in rhetoric, if not in the specific form of the unprinted poster) to ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ actually had much the opposite effect. The patronising message infuriated most of the scores of mostly working-class diarists and interviewees whose materials make up the book. And rather than an alliance between the ‘decent’ people and their ‘decent’, benevolent public servants, Living through the Blitz finds a total divorce between the interests of each, with the civil service and local government desperately scared of the workers they were supposed to be sheltering from bombs.

For example, while the Labour left and radical architects were advocating communal shelters, central government had a firm preference for the privatisation of bomb protection. ‘Whitehall’, Harrisson writes, ‘had long declared that there must be no “shelter mentality”. If big, safe, deep shelters were established, people would simply lie in them and do no work. Worse, such concentrations of proletarians could be breeding grounds for mass hysteria, even subversion. The answer was the Anderson shelter.’2 That is, private shelters in back gardens, not necessarily safer, but less likely to encourage sedition.”
― Owen Hatherley, The Ministry of Nostalgia

“Lancastrian workers, the dumb and dignified beasts of burden that line the Road to Wigan Pier, thronged tours by Soviet leaders, workers, soldiers and trade unionists in the UK after the Soviets entered the war in 1941. One delegation leader, Nikolai Shvernik, was mobbed by Mancunian women; after his speech at a munitions plant a woman climbed on the stage, ‘clung to his neck, kissed his forehead and then shouted “Come on girls, let’s all kiss him.”’ Moments later, ‘scores of elderly gray-haired women jumped onto the platform and struggled to kiss’ Shvernik. Management convinced the women to go back to their seats, and ‘in what may have been an attempt to cool their ardor, they all sang the Internationale’.”
― Owen Hatherley, The Ministry of Nostalgia

“If a social and democratic city is going to be built again, it will most probably be built by those who have no investment in the past, no fond memory of it. That isn’t to say they’ll be building on nothing. There is something to conserve, Tony Judt was right about that much – the very fact a publicly owned Carpenters Estate existed at all was the reason why it sat empty, and the reason why the slogan of the young mothers who occupied it could be so clear and so practical: ‘These people need homes, these homes need people.’ Such words are unlikely to find their way into white letters on a red poster, with an emblem of the crown above them. If we’re ever going to escape from austerity, this clear statement of collective utility is the most likely way out.”
― Owen Hatherley, The Ministry of Nostalgia