The Forty-Nine Steps Quotes

“Second post-historical corollary: Common Exchange is mystical exchange. The unit of measure--that is, the capacity of anything to be translated into anything else, equivalence (only the elect are equal), reciprocity-- these are esoteric notions, and post-history makes them become the only immediate reality, since it is on them that it bases the circulation of commodities and on such circulation that it models every other exchange.”
― Roberto Calasso, The Forty-Nine Steps

“First post-historical corollary: The letter is nothing but the spirit. Among the experimental practices that nihilism, an astute rhetorician, has tried to put into operation in its theater, the first and main one is esotericism. A chilling oxymoron has thus been created, one that grips our whole life. Appearance having now been dissolved as referring to another, what one gets is unremitting tautology, the repetition of divine names, a constant exchange of incorruptible mystical commodities, whether they be words, bodies, images, phantasms, or objects. Seen from a distance, this dizzying circulation produces an effect of static hypnosis, a miserable condition of demigods who would like to die but cannot.”
― Roberto Calasso, The Forty-Nine Steps

“Here is the question Nietzsche raises: "To what extent can thought, judgement, all of logic be considered as the outer aspect, or symptom of a much more inner and fundamental occurrence?”
― Roberto Calasso, The Forty-Nine Steps

“Knowledge by simulcra appears here as a a sort of spell to which the mind subjects itself: a dangerous and beautiful enchantment, a risk we must accept because the knowledge that comes to us by this path would not be attainable in any
other way.”
― Roberto Calasso, The Forty-Nine Steps

“Groups always form around a corpse. When there is no corpse, that empty place evokes the many corpses that have been there and the many yet to appear.”
― Roberto Calasso, The Forty-Nine Steps