Christopher

“Since it is sure of its ability to control the entire domain of the visible and the audible via the laws governing commercial circulation and democratic communication, Empire no longer censures anything. All art, and all thought, is ruined when we accept this permission to consume, to communicate and to enjoy. We should become the pitiless censors of ourselves.”
― Alain Badiou

“Nowhere is the hostility of the Anglo-American tradition toward the dialectical more apparent, however, than in the widespread notion that the style of these works is obscure and cumbersome, indigestible, abstract-or, to sum it all up in a convenient catchword, Germanic. It can be admitted that it does not conform to the canons of clear and fluid journalistic writing taught in the schools. But what if those ideals of clarity and simplicity have come to serve a very different ideological purpose, in our present context, from the one Descartes had in mind? What if, in this period of the overproduction of printed matter and the proliferation of methods of quick reading, they were intended to speed the reader across a sentence in such a way that he can salute a readymade idea effortlessly in passing, without suspecting that real thought demands a descent into the materiality of language and a consent to time itself in the form of the sentence?”
― Frederic Jameson

“Another ideal runs ahead of us, a strange, tempting, dangerous ideal to which we should not wish to persuade anybody because we do not readily concede the right to it to anyone: the ideal of a spirit who plays naively - that is, not deliberately but from overflowing power and abundance - with all that was hitherto called holy, good, untouchable, divine; for whom those supreme things that the people naturally accept as their value standards, signify danger, decay, debasement, or at least recreation, blindness, and temporary self-oblivion; the ideal of a human, superhuman well-being and benevolence that will often appear inhuman - for example, when it confronts all earthly seriousness so far, all solemnity in gesture, word, tone, eye, morality, and task so far, as if it were their most incarnate and involuntary parody - and in spite of all of this, it is perhaps only with that great seriousness really begins, that the real question mark is posed for the first time, that the destiny of the soul changes, the hand moves forward, the tragedy begins.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs

“The various aspects of illusion described so far refer to a single function, a single structure, a single failure. The function is to protect from the real; the structure does not involve refusing to perceive the real but, rather, splitting it in two; the failure lies in recognizing the protective double too late as the very reality from which one thought one had found protection. This is the curse of evasion: by way of a phantasmatic duplication, it sends us back to the undesirable starting point, the real. We can see now why evasion is always a mistake: it is always inoperative, because the real is always right. We may, admittedly, try to protect ourselves from a future event, if that happens to be possible; we shall never protect ourselves from a past or present event or one that is 'certain to come to pass,' as in the oracular symbolics which announces in advance an ineluctable necessity that already has all the characteristics of a present necessity. And the act by which one attempts to slough off that necessity will never be able to 'do any better' than literally reproduce the feared even or, even more exactly, constitute that event. This is what happens to Oedipus, as it happens to everyone at odds with himself - that is to say, to everyone at some point or other of his existence.”
― Clément Rosset, Le réel et son double