"...the practico-inert puts up with arbitrary demands: a friendship is not only a matter of day-by-day existence; it also falls into the past and becomes a set reality that we are compelled to accept...." (22)

"...when I lost myself in the object upon which I gazed, or in moments of physical or emotional ecstasy, or in the delight of memory, or in the heart-raising anticipation of what was to come, it seemed to me that I brought about the impossible junction between the in-itself and the for-itself. And I also wanted to realize myself in books that, like those I had loved, would be existing objects for others, but objects haunted by a presence-- my presence." (29)

"To begin with I was amorphous, but I was not manifold. On the contrary, what strikes me is the way the little girl of three lived on, grown calmer, in the child of ten, that child in the young woman of twenty, and so forward." (29)

"One of the meanings of paranoia is a refusal to abandon the subjective position: we are all more or less affected by it; we are all more or less blind to our inert presence in the Other's world. Yet from time to time some incident destroys my pullucid familiarity with myself. Friends point out words I have uttered or things I have done without noticing it; I said or did them without the least suspicion of having done so, and this realization disturbs me." (37-38)

"Every historical period is an absolute entity, one that cannot be compared with others by any universal criterion. THe varying destinies of mankind do not challenge one another. The future's wealth does not impoverish me." (39)

"No work that has reference to the world can be a mere transcription, since the world has not the power of speech. Facts do not determine their own expression; they dictate nothing. The person who recounts them finds out what he has to say about them through the art of saying it. If he produces no more than commonplace, conventional observations, then he is outside the scope of literature, but if on the other hand his living voice is heard, then he is within it." (115)

"In all cases, if the work is successfully accomplished it is defined as a unique universal in the imaginary mode. By means of this work the authors provides himself with a fictitious constitution: Sartre is referring to this operation when he states that every writer is inhabited by a 'vampire.' The I that speaks stands at a distance from the I that has been experienced, just as each sentence stands at a distance from the experience out of which it arises." (115)

"Bourgeois culture is a promise: it is a promise of a world that makes sense; a world whose good things may be enjoyed with a clear conscience; a world that guarantees sure and certain values forming an essential part of our lives and giving them the magnificence of an Idea. It was by no means easy to tear myself away from such splendid expectations." (117)

"The human being, stripped of pretensions and reduced to its simple truth, has something comic, ludicrous and touching about it, and at times something mysterious, as we see in Senecio: the name calls to mind both old age and the flower of the coltsfoot (senecio) and the picture shows us a lunar, childish face.
"The title makes one think: for although there is nothing literary about Klee's painting, words have great importance in it-- he brings printed and written letters into his pictures and he chooses his titles with great care, so that they form part of the painting and modify its meaning. It is these interchanges between the written language and that of painting, between the various earthly creatures, and between nature and architecture that give Klee's world its poetry. His process is the opposite of Picasso's, for Picasso's painting breaks reality down and analyses it. Klee sees it as a universal presence that beyond its apparent limits: everything is bound to the cosmos as a whole, and it is the painter's task to make this connection visible by isolating the analogies that exist between all things." (205-206)

"A person is shown as clearly by what he does not grasp as by what he does; sometimes even more so. Both Louis XVI and the last Tsar, by writing in effect 'Today, nothing' in their private diaries when revolution was breaking out all round them, tell us more about themselves than by any of their words or deeds." (23)

"One shatters the rational world by blind violence: for want of a solution, it is a radical means of escape." (31)

"[Klee's] is above all the vision of a world in gestation, begotten by the vectors, arrows and vortices. 'Adventures of the line,' as Michaus rightly put it." (205)

"A journey is also a personal adventure, a change in my relationship with the world, with space and time. It often begins in bewilderment: the novelty of the place and the people make me lose my head and I am filled with a desire to do a great many things and to do them all at once." (213)

Simone de Beauvoir, All Said and Done

"The collective assemblage is always like a murmur from which I take my proper name, the constellation of voices, concordant or not, from which I draw my voice.... To write is perhaps to bring this assemblage of the unconscious to the light of day, to select the whispering voices, to gather the tribes and secret idioms from which I extract something I call my self."
- Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues, pp. 84.

"This so prevalent human desire to be set apart by clothes discloses us in fact, particularly to the keen eyes of the camp. It seems to us that we're clothing ourselves, but in fact we're baring ourselves, we are showing what we're worth. I did not understand that my military uniform had the same price as Matronina's red scarf." (183)

"There was a famous incantation repeated over and over again: "In the new social structure there can be no place for the discipline of the stick on which serfdom was based, nor the discipline of starvation on which capitalism is based."
And there you are -- the Archipelago managed miraculously to combine the one and the other." (155)

"Somewhere young men of our age were studying at the Sorbonne or at Oxford, playing tennis during their ample hours of relaxation, arguing about the problems of the world in student cafes. They were already being published and were exhibiting their paintings. They were twisting and turning to find ways of distorting the insufficiently original world around them in some new way. They railed against the classics for exhausting all the subjects and themes. They railed at their own governments and their own reactionaries who did not want to comprehend and adopt the advanced experience of the Soviet Union. They recorded interview through the microphones of radio reporters, listening all the time to their own voices and coquettishly elucidating what they wished to say in their last or their first book. They judged everything in the world with self-assurance, but particularly the prosperity and higher justice of our country. Only at some point in their old age, in the course of compiling encyclopedias, would they notice with astonishment that they could not find any worthy Russian names for our letters-- for all the letters of our alphabet." (195)

"It has been known for centuries that Hunger rules the world! (And all your progressive Doctrine is, incidentally, built on Hunger, on the thesis that hungry people will inevitably revolt against the well-fed.) Hunger rules every hungry human being, unless he has himself consciously decided to die." (209)

"we shall be forced to admit to our astonishment that for the first time in history the people had become its own enemy, though in return it acquired the best of friends-- the secret police." (292)

"Just keep beating one after another-- and in the end you'll hit the one you need. The primary meaning of terror lies precisely in this: even the strong and well hidden who could never be ferreted out simply will be caught and perish." (295)

"If we are speaking not about the meat grinder for unwanted millions, not about the cesspool into which they were hurled without pity for the people-- but about a serious correctional system-- the most complex of questions arises: How is it possible to give monotonously uniform punishments on the basis of a singly unified criminal code? After all, externally equal punishments for different individuals, some more moral and others more corrupted, some more sensitive and some more crude, some educated and some uneducated, are completely unequal punishments....
English thought has understood this, and they say there (I don't know how much they practice it) that the punishment must fit not only the crime but also the character of each criminal." (630)

- Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956; an experiment in literary investigation, 1974, vol 2.

"an ideology always admits the failure of closure, and then goes on to regulate the permeability of the exchange with its outside" (29)

- Slavoj Zizek, In Defense of Lost Causes, 2008.

a certain something

2.Vanity.90. Anyone who wants to appreciate man's vanity to the full need only reflect on the causes and effects of love. The cause is a je ne sais quoi (Corneille) and its effects are appalling. The je ne sais quoi, which is such a tiny thing that we cannot even recognize it, rocks the world, thrones, armies, the whole of creation to their foundation.
The nose of Cleopatra: if it had been shorter, the face of the earth would have changed.
- Pascal, Pensees.

the power of image

2. Vanity. 81. Imagination. Our judges are very conscious of the secret power of imagination. Their red robes, the ermine in which they swaddle themselves like furry cats, the courts where they sit, the fleur de lys-- all the august display is very necessary; if physicians did not have cassocks and mules, and doctors did not have square hats and robes four sizes too large, they would never have fooled people who cannot resist a display which looks like authentic. If the judges possessed true justice and the physicians the true art of healing, there would be no need for square hats; the majesty of their science is purely fictitious, they are obliged to deck themselves out with vain ornaments that strike the imagination which is what they are aiming at; and in this manner, in fact, they win respect. Soldiers alone do not disguise themselves because the part they play is essential: they establish themselves by force, the rest by giving themselves airs.
- Pascal, Pensees

postmodernism, film

"Without much difficulty, postmodernism may be conceived as sharing some characteristics with the avant-garde that oppose it to mainstream cinema. These include "narrative intransivity" (gaps, interruptions, and digressions as contrasted to clear causal development of the story line) and Brechtian estrangement (an alienation effect rather than the viewer identification with characters sought by traditional filmmakers). ...[however] postmodernism does not share the avant-garde's overarching desire "to connect with the experience of particular classes and to place that experience within new explanatory models"...." (43)

"A. Spica is above all a speaker. Although Albert does not acknowledge the pleasures of speaking (he says early in the film: "money is my business; eating my pleasure") and says that he is always hungry, it is just as true to say that he is always speaking. As he speaks, he cannot tolerate any dissent, anything that will interrupt the relentless flow of words from his mouth-- and his mouth alone, for he is incapable of dialogue. He knows only monologue. Albert's monologue, which revels in puns and is constantly ripe with vulgarities, never shies from verbal abuse and is supplemented occasionally by acts of physical abuse. Albert's smearing Roy with dog shit and pissing on him at the beginning of the film is a grim harbinger of much worse to come." (47)

"Offered the opportunity to speak, Michael has the change to create a discourse of his own; as a reader, Michael has always been a consumer of others' discourses. Even Georgina is unable to understand Michael's pleasure in reading. ... She asks him, "What good are all these books to you? You can't eat them. How can they make you happy?" "I've always found them very reasonable," replies Michael, "They don't change their minds while you're not looking." It seems that Michael regards the texts he reads as essentially static, having stable fixed meanings.... These texts, then, are not postmodern. The bookkeeper's passive reading (which suggests that intentionality is somehow independent of his reading and is fixed within the pages of the book) is a far cry from the active reading encouraged, for example, by Roland Barthes. "The goal of literary work (of literature as work)," says Barthes, "is to make the reader no longer a consumer, but a producer of the text" (S/Z 4)." (48-49)

"Jameson shrewdly suggests that it is misleading to talk about realism, modernism, and postmodernism as existing independently of one another. In fact, these three terms represent three stages in the evolution of capitalism; and "the three stages are not symmetrical, but dialectical in their relationship to each other" (Signatures 157). Thus, although we may imagine that we can escape postmodernism and find outselves in realism or that we can move from realism into postmodernism, it is not a question of moving backward or forward in time, but of existing constantly within the dialectic. At a particular stage of the dialectic, the tell-tale signs of postmodernism remain for Jameson the eclipse of the individual self and a privileging of space rather than time, but a work can never be purely postmodern any more than it can be purely modernist." (50)
Pagan, Nicholas O. 1995. "The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, & Her Lover": Making Sense of Postmodernism. South Atlantic Review 60(1):43-55.

urban art forms

"…urban art is not site-specific but relationship-specific. The relation always arrives, coming to us through a leading perceptual edge-- usually visual-- in advance of its next sequential unfolding. In other words, it arrival is a promised event that has yet to occur: an appointment with a known but not yet actually afforded outcome. To afford oneself of the outcome is to eventuate the relationship, to perform it: to follow through with its actual step-by-step unfolding.
…The art parasitizes the expected event with its own happening. The Situationists also had a name for this practice of inserting unexpected encounters-with-potential into existing landing sites: detournement (hijacking or detouring).
"Documentation is the art event’s park bench: the form in which it rests. Except that documentary rest is for transport, since it is in documentary form that the event may move from one “park” to another. Documentation as vehicular event benching. To vehiculate the event, the documentation cannot be conceived merely as reflecting or representing it. It must be thought of as, and designed to be, the event in seed for. If the documentary germ falls on fertile urban ground, the performative prototyping may well resprout. … It is the event’s way of angling itself, or generally affording its own rehappening. (11-12)
-- Massumi, Brian. “Urban Appointment: A Possible Rendez-Vous With the City.” In Making Art of Databases, ed. Joke Brouwer and Arjen Mulder. Pp. 28-55.

More Jean Genet

"I live in so closed a universe, the atmosphere of which is thick, a universe seen through my memories of prisons, through my dreams of galleys and through the presence of convicts: murderers, burglars, gangsters, that I do not communicate with the usual world or, when I do perceive it, what I see of it is distorted by the thickness of the wadding in which I move with difficulty. Each object in your world has a meaning different for me from the one it has for you. I refer to everything in my system, in which things have an infernal signification, and even when I read a novel, the facts, without being distorted, lose the meaning which has been given them by the author and which they have for you, and take on another so as to enter smoothly the otherworldly universe in which I live."
- Miracle of the Rose

"Life brings its modifications, and yet the same disturbance (through one that, paradoxically, would spring from the end of a conflict-- for example, when the concentric waves in a pond move away from the point at which the stone fell, when they move farther and farther away and diminish into calm, the water must feel, when this calm is attained, a kind of shudder which is no longer propagated in its matter but in its soul. It knows the plenitude of being water."

"I ruminated for perhaps six second on the words "get used to" and felt a kind of very slight melancholy that can be expressed only by the image of a pile of sand or rubbish. Jean's delicacy was somewhat akin (since it suggests it) to the grave sadness that issues-- along with a very particular odor-- from mortar and broken bricks which, whether hollow or solid, are made of apparently very soft clay. The youngster's face was always ready to crumble, and the words "get used to" have just crumbled it. Amidst the debris of buildings being demolished I sometimes step on ruins whose redness is toned down by the dust, and they are so delicate, discreet, and fragrant with humility that I have the impression I am placing the sole of my shoe on Jean's face."
- Funeral Rites

Jean Genet

"Every premeditated murder is always governed by a preparatory ceremonial and is always followed by propiatory ceremonial. The meaning of both eludes the murderers mind."

"If Divine is willing to see in her man anything other than a hot, purplish member, it is because she can follow its stiffness, which extends to the anus, and can sense that it goes further into his body, that this is the body of Darling erect and terminating in a pale, tired face, a face of eyes, nose, mouth, flat cheeks, curly hair, beads of sweat."
- Our Lady of the Flowers

"Certain acts dazzle us and light up blurred surfaces if our eyes are keen enough to see them in a flush, for the beauty of a living thing can be grasped only fleetingly. To pursue it during its changes leads us inevitably to the moment when it ceases, for it cannot last a lifetime. And to analyze it, that is, to pursue it in time with the sight and the imagination, is to view it in its decline, for after the thrilling moment in which it reveals itself it diminishes in meaning."

"My childhood was dead and with it died the poetic powers that had dwelt in me. I no longer hoped that prison would remain the fabulous world it had long been. One day I realized from certain signs that it was losing its charm, which meant perhaps that I was being transformed, that my eyes were opening to the usual view of the world. I saw prison as any ordinary roughneck sees it. It is a dungeon where I rage at being locked up, but today, in the hole, instead of reading "Tattoed Jean" on the wall of the cell, I read, because of a malformation of the letters carved in the plaster, "Tortured Jean."
- Miracle of the Rose