[Turbulence in a wave vortex that may lead to chaos; Image from wikipedia]
“(mass)think!”
“A language is never closed upon itself, except as a function of impotence.” –Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 8
“A life without dreams and without intoxication is a life sick, rancorous, and without value. One lives for dreams and for festive intoxication.” –Alphonso Lingis, “The Will to Power,” The New Nietzsche, 52
“A man who does not have anything can give up everything, let it all go, turn his back . . .”
“A man who has begun to have an inkling of the grandeur of the universe with all its complexities and its laws readily forgets his own insignificant self. Lost in admiration and filled with true humility, he all too easily forgets that he himself is a part of those active forces and that the way is open for him to try to alter a small portion of the destined course of the world.” –Sigmund Freud on Leonardo
“A reversed image of the origin accompanies the origin.” –Gilles Deleuze, “Active and Reactive,” The New Nietzsche, 92
“Act. Act fully!”
“Affirm a multiplicity of innumerable differences!” –Eugene Holland paraphrasing Deleuze and Guattari in Introduction to Schizoanalysis, 44
“All culture is originally colonial. [. . .] Every culture institutes itself through the unilateral imposition of some ‘politics’ of language. Mastery begins, as we know, through the power of naming, of imposing and legitimating appellations. We know how that went with French in France itself, in revolutionary France as much as, or more than, in monarchical France. This sovereign establishment may be open, legal, armed, or cunning, disguised under alibis of ‘universal’ humanism, and sometimes of the most generous hospitality. It always follows or precedes culture like its shadow.” –Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other or The Prosthesis of Origin, 39
“All these people drinking lover’s spit . . .” –Broken Social Scene, Lover’s Spit
“All these people formed by language and climate and popular songs and breakfast foods and the jokes they tell and the cars they drive have never had anything in common so much as this, that they are sitting in the furrow of destruction.” –Don DeLillo, Underworld
“All those who share in the great state phobia should know that they are following the direction of the wind and that in fact, for years and years, an effective reduction of the state had been on the way” –Michel Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics (1978)
“Although the practice of Empire is continually bathed in blood, the concept of Empire is always dedicated to peace—a perpetual and universal peace outside of history.” –Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, xv
“Although [the scientific and technical worker] has mastered a flow of knowledge, information, and training, he is so absorbed in capital that the reflux of organized, axiomatized stupidity coincides with him, so that, when he goes home in the evening, he rediscovers his little desiring-machines by tinkering with a television set—O despair!” –Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 236
“An offshoot of that totalitarian technique tries to gain life through the exploitation of plebiscite forms of democracy. What such voices of the popular soul hate most is anything of free spirit; they sympathize with stale reaction. While the total social constitution formally guarantees equal rights, it nonetheless continues to conserve the educational privilege, granting the possibility of differentiated and progressive spiritual experience to only a few. The platitude that progress of spiritual things, particularly of art, proceeds in the beginning against the will of the majority, makes it possible for the mortal enemies of all progress to entrench themselves behind those who, without any guilt of their own, to be sure, are excluded from the vital expression of their own concern. A cultural policy which has rid itself of social naiveté must see through this complex without fear of the mass of majorities.” –Theodor W. Adorno, “Culture and Administration,” The Culture Industry, 128-9
“And I get all that way . . . I get all that way . . .”
“And not only historical fascism, the fascism of Hitler and Mussolini—which was able to mobilize and use the desire of the masses so effectively—but also the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.” –Michel Foucault, revealing Anti-Oedipus’s target in the preface, xiii
“And you call yourself a liberal . . .”
“Anyone who resists can survive only by being incorporated.” –Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 104
“Are you really that convinced of your own personal rectitude / (self-)righteousness / genius?”
“As for the good life or reason or the world of the spirit, you can afford to be poetic about it because you are here. You forget one thing: we are there.” –Vic, F. Sionil Jose, My Brother, My Executioner, 73
“As long as I desire . . .”
“At the end of the book, when the reader finally learns of the presuppositions, hitherto withheld, which underlie the plot, this leads not to his enlightenment, but to his utter bewilderment.” –Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny, 141
“At times the schizophrenic loses his patience and demands to be left alone. Other times he goes along with the whole game and even invents a few tricks of his own, introducing his own reference points in the model put before him and undermining it from within.” –Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 14
“Basic human kindness—‘benevolence’; ‘mercy’— the most important—impossible—thing in the world.”
“Be a monster!”
“Be differant!”
“Be gay!”
“Be safe. Have fun.”
“Because you wanted to think about life rather than just functioning . . .”
“Before the war, as with the municipio, this house was burned by a small band of men–fanatics who professed an implacable hatred for the Asperris, members of some native religion that enshrined Bonifacio and Rizal and the whole phalanx of heroes who had fought the Spaniards. He had read about them, heard about them from his grandfather and mother, and secretly he shared the sentiments that had propelled them to violence. There were even times when Luis had mused how it would have turned out if they had chanced upon his father in the old house and killed him, too, as they killed his uncle and his aunt. Then he would not have been born–a wish that came to him in those moments of anguished self-doubt that were far more frequent now that he was secure and never in want, than in the days when he was sunburned, barefoot and perpetually hungry in that God-forsaken corner called Sipnget.” –F. Sionil Jose, My Brother, My Executioner, 7
“Big mistake!”
“Breaking my back just to know your name . . .” –The Killers, Somebody Told Me
“But the love, not for Feuerbachian man, nor for Moelschott’s metabolism, nor for the proletariat, but the love for the sweetheart, and namely for you, makes the man a man again.” –Karl Marx to his wife
“But then . . .”
“But so much of thinking and studying and analyzing is congelation!”
“By literature I mean, just really good writing.”
“Capital from its inception tends toward being a world power, or really the world power.” –Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, 225
“Capitalism increasingly lives on faith alone.” –David Harvey, Limits to Capital, xxvi
“Capitalism only triumphs [. . .] when it becomes identified with the state, when it is the state.” –Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri quoting Fernand Braudel, Empire, 236
“Catatonic youths dressed as women in gowns of burlap and rotten rags, faces heavily and crudely painted in bright colors over a stratum of beatings, arabesques of broken, suppurating scars to the pearly bone . . .” –William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch
“Classes are the negative of castes and statuses; classes are orders, castes, and statuses that have been decoded.” –Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 254
“Conform to the synthesis of the unconscious . . .” –Eugene Holland paraphrasing Deleuze and Guattari in Introduction to Schizoanalysis, 15
“Dedicate yourself to a cause!”
“Degradation marks a man who frequents milieux without law, of false unanimity or false community, and can only maintain falsely integrated forms of behavior, cracked ways of behaving which can no longer succeed in organizing their own segments. This man is a ‘born loser,’ ‘takes it too hard.’ [...] But, in fact, if the gangsters are losers–in spite of the power of their milieu and the effectiveness of their actions–it is because something eats away at both, reversing the spiral to their cost.” –Gilles Deleuze, Cinema I, 145
“Desire does not lack anything; it does not lack its object. It is, rather, the subject that is missing in desire, or desire that lacks a fixed subject; there is no fixed subject unless there is repression.” –Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 26
“Desire is an exile, desire is a desert that traverses the body without organs and makes us pass from one of its faces to the other. Never an individual desire, never a personal desert, but a collective exile and a collective desert.” –Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 377
“Desire, not happy.”
“Do not be domesticated!”
“Do you care about me (at all)?”
“Do you ever feel lonely?” “Just . . . all the time.”
“You raise my taxes and freeze my wages and my son’s in Vietnam. You give me second-class houses, second-class schools—Do you think that all colored people are just second-class fools?” –Nina Simone, Backlash Blues
“Don’t be afraid . . .”
“Don’t be like that . . .”
“Don’t bring out the General in you!” –Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 25
“Don’t f**king analyze me!”
“Don’t lose sight of other things . . . It’s not everything, you know.”
“Don’t the necessary weapons reside precisely within the creative and prophetic power of the multitude?” –Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, 65
“Don’t worry. I’ll live.”
“Every time I try not to be alone, I just feel even more so.”
“Every time you try to have a nice, normal life, you f**k it up! You’re never gonna have your little happily ever after moment, no matter how many white veils you put on. You’re just too f**ked up for all that!” –ex-wife of her husband Lisa to Brenda on her wedding day, Six Feet Under, Season 5, Episode 1
“Everybody knows what psychoanalysis means by resolving Oedipus: internalizing it so as to better rediscover it on the outside, in social authority, where it will be made to proliferate and be passed on to the children.” –Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 79
“Everyday I wake up I think, ‘I want to change my life. I want it to be better.’”
“Everybody’s got quirks!”
“Everything is political, but every politics is simultaneously a macropolitics and a micropolitics.” –Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 213
“Everything which is different, from the idea to criminality, is exposed to the force of the collective, which keeps watch from the classroom to the trade union. Yet even the threatening collective is merely a part of the deceptive surface, beneath which are concealed the powers which manipulate the collective as an agent of violence.” –Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 22
“Experiment!”
“Fascism is inseparable from a proliferation of molecular forces in interaction, which skip from point to point, before beginning to resonate together in the National Socialist State. Rural fascism and city or neighborhood fascism, youth fascism and war veteran’s fascism, fascism of the Left and fascism of the Right, fascism of the couple, family, school, and office: every fascism is defined by a micro-black hole that stands on its own and communicates with the others, before resonating in a great, generalized central black hole.” –Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 214
“Fiction should get rid of plot, its least interesting element.”
“Fraternity! Fairness! Friendship!”
“Free from any and all determinations!” –Eugene Holland paraphrasing Deleuze and Guattari in Introduction to Schizoanalysis, 17
“From what tribe did you come from?”
“F**k the fascist!”
“F**kin’ conservative!”
“Get interested in something!”
“Go back to the virtual!”
“Go for it, just be careful.”
“Good or bad, politics and its judgments are always molar, but it is the molecular and its assessment that makes it or breaks it.” –Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 222
“Habit is the ballast that chains the dog to his vomit.” –Brian Massumi, A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 47
“He does not seek an army to follow him, he despises people, all people, sends away all who would be disciples, that is both his fascination and the force of his destiny.” –Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day, 756
“He felt inside himself the presence of a small, wounded girl who was trying to cry—not in pain, or to appease any who would harm her further, but as if in fear of being left to the hazards of a winter street known to abandon its poor.” –Kit, after having heard that his anarchist father was dead, Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day, 321
“He has been in many ways a great man.But for this very reason he is odd. It is only petty men who seem normal.” –Umberto Eco, Name of the Rose, 65
“He understood for a moment, as if in the breeze from an undefined wing passing his face, that the history of all this terrible continent, clear to the Pacific Ocean and the Arctic ice, was this same history of exile and migration, the white man moving in on the Indian, the eastern corporations moving in on the white man, and their incursions with drills and dynamite into the deep seams of the sacred mountains, the sacred land.” –Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day, 928-9
“He was gentle and kindly to everyone; he declined to eat meat since he did not think it justifiable to deprive animals of their lives; he took pleasure in buying birds in the market and setting them free. But this delicacy in feeling did not deter him from accompanying condemned criminals on their way to execution to study their features distorted by fear and to sketch them on his notebook.” –Sigmund Freud on Leonardo
“He’s just a man.”
“His heart was still young enough not to have forgotten the anxiety and trembling that disciplined the youth,that the adult learned to control, but that no man outgrows” –Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 7
“Horror and defeatism, which issue in the reactive, introjective production of pain, change into awe and hilarity.” –Alphonso Lingis, “The Will to Power,” The New Nietzsche, 47
“How hard it is to step outside, go beyond—escape the culture in which you are steeped, i.e. avoid Freud’s failing.”
“How silly was I . . .”
“How you treat other people, how much you matter to them . . .”
“How’d you like to be alone and drowning?” –Third Eye Blind, Narcolepsy
“How’s it goin?”
“Hylomoprh, ew!”
“I am a multiplicity!”
“I am becoming God, I am becoming woman, I was Joan of Arc and I am Heliogabalus and the Great Mongol, I am a Chinaman, a redskin, a Templar, I was my father and I was my son. And all the criminals, the whole list of criminals, the decent criminals and the scoundrels: Szondi rather than Freud and his Oedipus.” –Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 85
“I am one, but many . . .”
“I came to this god-forsaken place because I wanted peace. But the fights just kept going on in my head. And then the conquerors came . . .” –something that could have been quoted by Nietzsche
“I can never repay you for what you are about to do, but [with it] I can repay everyone else.” –Alma’s father to her, Deadwood, Season 1, Episode 4
“I don’t care, baby I don’t care . . .” —Third Eye Blind, Wounded
“I don’t f**king believe in anything!”
“I don’t love you. I don’t love you. I don’t love you.” –Brod, to everything, in Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated
“I don’t know. I need to think/reflect about it.”
“I feel like all I do all day long is manage myself . . . try to f**king connect with people—but it’s like no matter how much energy you pour into getting to the station on time or getting on the right train, there’s still no f**king guarantee that anybody’s gonna be there for you to pick you up when you get there . . .” –Nate, Six Feet Under, Season 5, Episode 4
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“I have to pay to go to school—Huh?”
“I have to remember . . .”
“I like having you around.”
“I like it all that way . . . I like it all that way . . .” –Broken Social Scene, Lover’s Spit
“I like the way you think.”
“I like this job, I like it . . .” –The Joker, The Dark Knight
“I learned that there are a variety of roles to play if you’re hustling: youngmanoutofajob butlooking, dontgiveadamnyoungman drifting, perrennialhustler easytomakeout, youngmanlostinthebigcity pleasehelpmesir. There was, too, the pose learned quickly from the others along the street: the stance, the jivetalk–a mixture of jazz, joint, junk sounds–the almost-disdainful, disinterested, but, at the same time, inviting look; the casual way of dress.” –John Rechy, City of Night, 32
“I love you.”
“I need the sun.”
“I need to eat, sir.”
“I only know that I do not know.” –Socrates
“I ought to be somewhere else some other time . . .”
“I remember thinking to myself, so this is the beginning of happiness. This is where it starts, and of course there will always be more. Never occurred to me, it wasn’t the beginning. It was happiness. It was the moment, right then.” –Clarissa, The Hours
“I robs drug dealers.” –Omar, The Wire, S2E6
“I stick to reality because I can’t imagine.”
“I tell ya, after seven, eight hours of writing throughout the day, all I can do is go to the gym. Everything else would just make me feel depressed or impotent.” –Guess who
“I think about me dying / years from now / never having known / who you are . . .” –Third Eye Blind, Farther
“I was as common as dirt. You showed me a snapshot, a place with them columns and I pulled you down off them columns and you loved it. Having them color lights going …” –Marlon Brando in Streetcar Named Desire
“I wish to face my murderers.” –Jose Rizal, before his execution by firing squad
“I wouldn’t want a boy to think I was pretty unless he was the kind of boy who thought I was pretty.” –Brod, Everything is Illuminated, 76
“If desire is repressed, this is not because it is a desire for the mother and for the death of the father; on the contrary, desire becomes that only because it is repressed, it takes that mask on under the reign of repression that models the mask for it and plasters it on its face. [. . .] The real danger is elsewhere. If desire is repressed, it is because every position of desire, no matter how small, is capable of calling into question the established order of a society: not that desire is asocial; on the contrary. But it is explosive: there is no desiring-machine capable of being assembled without demolishing entire social sectors. Despite what some revolutionaries think about this, desire is revolutionary in its essence—desire, not left-wing holidays!—and no society can tolerate a position of real desire without its structures of exploitation, servitude, and hierarchy being compromised.” –Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 116
“If much in the world were mystery the limits of that world were not, for it was without measure or bound and there were contained within it creatures more horrible yet and men of other colors and beings which no man has looked upon and yet not alien none of it more than were their own hearts alien in them, whatever wilderness contained there and whatever beasts.” –Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, 138
“If Snot Boogey always stole the money, why did you let him play?” “Got to. This is America, man.” –The Wire, S1E1
“If you can look down on us it is only because you stand on a pile of carrion.” –Luis, F. Sionil José, My Brother, My Executioner, 148
“If you really wanna know . . .”
“In a specialized and co-opting world, we rhetors take the time—and the consequences for doing so—to think about life, the world, to call attention to things that, as we see it, aren’t quite right . . .”
“In order to designate something exactly, anexact expressions are utterly unavoidable.” –Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 20
“In the end, there is no longer anyone but daddy, mommy, and me, the despotic sign inherited by daddy, the residual territoriality assumed by mommy, and the divided, split, castrated ego.” –Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari on what psychoanalysis achieves, Anti-Oedipus, 265
“In time and on time . . . With time . . .”
“Incest as it is prohibited (the form of discernible persons) is employed to repress incest as it is desired (the substance of the intense earth).” –Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 162
“Insofar as they are visible, they are the frailest and the most distant form of all reality. [. . .] Insofar as they stand outside the picture and are therefore withdrawn from it in an essential invisibility, they provide the center around which the entire representation is ordered.” –Foucault, The Order of Things, 14
“Is scientific method perhaps no more than fear of and flight from pessimism? A subtle defense against—truth?” –Friedrich Nietzsche in the Preface to The Birth of Tragedy, 4
“Is The Gay Science in your hands–the most personal of all my books? As everything personal is essentially very comical, I really anticipate a ‘gay’ effect.” –Friedrich Nietzsche to friend Paul Rée
“Is the schizophrenic sick and cut off from reality because he lacks Oedipus—or on the contrary is he sick by virtue of the oedipalization he is unable to bear, and around which everything combines in order to force him to submit?” –Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 91
“It doesn’t feel right . . .”
“It doesn’t matter . . .”
“It doesn’t matter how it begins. Just get going, get somewhere . . .”
“It doesn’t matter how much you love (desire doing, are attached to) your work (products of your creation). You get tired of being overworked (exerting effort, spending your life-flow) and underpaid (unappreciated, unvalued, in fact devalued, demeaned), especially when there’s nothing on the horizon: no future into which you cross, just an abyss over the edge.”
“It doesn’t work like that, kid.”
“It even thought that its most inveterate enemies could be captured and turned into vigilant guards.” –Michel Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, 14
“It is always by rhizome that desire moves and produces.” –Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 14
“It is always from the depths of its impotence that each power center draws its power.” –Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 226
“It is not a question of ideology. There is an unconscious libidinal investment of the social field that coexists, but does not necessarily coincide, with the preconscious investments, or with what the preconscious investments ‘ought to be.’ That is why, when subjects, individuals, or groups act manifestly counter to their class interests—when they rally to the interests and ideals of a class that their own objective situation should lead them to combat—it is not enough to say: they were fooled, the masses have been fooled. It is not an ideological problem, a problem of failing to recognize, or of being subject to, an illusion. It is a problem of desire, and desire is part of the infrastructure.” –Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 104
“It is not enough to say, ‘Long live the multiple’ [. . .]. The multiple must be made.” –Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 6
“It is as though our vision were formed in the heart of the visible, or as though there were between it and us an intimacy as close as between the sea and the strand. What there is are not things first identical with themselves, which would then offer themselves to the seer, nor is there a seer who is first empty and who, afterward, would open himself to them . . .” –Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible
“It would have been comedy if it wasn’t so tragic.”
“Its attempt to detach itself from an object without at the same time completely renouncing it seems to be conditioned by an increase in the ego’s own strength. It succeeds in this compromise by denying the importance of its good objects and also of the dangers with which it is menaced from its bad objects and the id. At the same time, however, it endeavours ceaselessly to master and control all its objects, and the evidence of this effort is its hyperactivity.” –Melanie Klein, “Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States,” p. 277
“It’ll be over before you know it.”
“It’s a dark world out there . . .”
“It’s about time!”
“It’s like it’s all about you. Don’t you ever get tired of yourself? You’re not that interesting—especially if you’re stuck up in yourself!”
“It’s like just the f*ckin’ regularness of life is too f*ckin hard for me or somethin, I dunno” –Christopher, The Sopranos, S1E8
“It’s like the more I learn, the harder it is to articulate!”
“It’s not one or the other. It’s both! And oh, much more . . .”
“It’s only a manner of speaking.” –Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 3
“It’s too easy to be antifascist on the molar level, and not even see the fascist inside you, the fascist you yourself sustain and nourish and cherish with molecules both personal and collective.” –Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 215
“I’m a disaster when I fall in love, especially when I fall in love . . .”
“I’m glad today sucked. ‘Cause I wouldn’t want the happiest day of our lives to be over already, would you?” –Nate to Brenda on their wedding day, Six Feet Under, Season 5, Episode 1
“I’m no businessman like you, String. I’m just a gangster I suppose.” –Avon Barksdale, The Wire, S3E6
“I’m out of sync!”
“I’m so confused, always.” –Daniel Coffeen, Rhetoric 10, UC Berkeley, Spring 2008
“I’m sorry.”
“Just business. It’s all just business with us.” –Spiros, The Wire, S2E5
“Just how the hell is that supposed to make things better?”
“Langue and competence are bedfellows to linguistic terrorism in the cause of uniformity.” –Brian Massumi, A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 42
“Lately I feel like I’m making way too many critical mistakes.”
“Leap of faith . . . Leap of faith.”
“Left to its own devices capital would never abandon a regime of profit.” –Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, 268
“Legitimate philosophy is the handiwork of ‘bureaucrats’ of pure reason who speak in ‘the shadow of the despot’ and are in historical complicity with the state. They invent ‘a properly spiritual . . . absolute State that . . . effectively functions in the mind.’ Theirs is the discourse of sovereign judgment, of stable subjectivity legislated by ‘good’ sense, of rocklike identity, ‘universal’ truth, and (white male) justice. ‘Thus the exercise of their thought is in conformity with the aims of the real State, with the dominant significations, and with the requirements of the established order.’” –Brian Massumi, A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 1
“Let go. Let loose. Let free. Be truly free.”
“Let it go . . . Let it go . . .”
“Let’s do something new today.”
“Liberté! Egalité! Fraternité!”
“Life is long and something is wrong / But I want to know what’s going on . . .” –Third Eye Blind, Another Life
“Look who’s talking!”
“Love thy neighbor.” –Jesus
“Love—that most potent of all Western order-words!” –Brian Massumi, A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 41
“Make friends.”
“Marriage is not an alliance between a man and a woman, but ‘an alliance between two families,’ ‘a transaction between men concerning women.’ [. . .] Through women, men establish their own connections; through the man-woman disjunction, which is always the outcome of filiation, alliance places in connection men from different filiations.” –Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 165
“Many a State that now declines any connection with the tenets of the Populists, itself adhered to such ideas in an earlier stage of the development of the State.” –Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History
“Maybe I’m losing faith in assassinating the great and powerful anymore, maybe all it is, is just another dream they like to tease us with.” –Flaco in Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day, 852
“Maybe you should pick up a book for a change!”
“Miss Hansen, you live in a world of wealth and order. We maintain that world, understand. Our ways may not be known to you but believe me, they are both scientific and necessary, [...] based on a precise knowledge of the human capacity for pain and—oh, drat! I’m speaking like the professor again.” –Col. Amor, Ninotschka Rosca, State of War, 55
“Modernity itself is defined by crisis, a crisis that is born of the uninterrupted conflict between the immanent, constructive, creative forces and the transcendent power aimed at restoring order.” –Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, 76
“Morality itself—might it not be a ‘will to negate life,’ a secret instinct for annihilation, a principle of decay, belittlement, calumny, the beginning of the end?” –Friedrich Nietzsche in the preface to The Birth of Tragedy, 4
“Need to think!”
“Never underestimate the opponent.”
“No compromises. No repentance. No apologies.”
“No difference without repetition, no repetition without difference!” –Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition
“No I don’t write like the historian of the King. My readings are all bastard and nomadic.”
“No one has ever died from contradictions. [. . .] The more it breaks down, the more it schizophrenizes, the better it works, the American way.” –Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 151
“No one has yet determined what the body can do . . .” –Baruch Spinoza, Ethics
“No rush. Take your time . . .”
“Not that they are too abstract but, on the contrary, [. . .] they are not abstract enough.” –Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 7
“Not what we call democracy, which is a system that allows a population every once in a while to choose between selected business and landowner groups who share control of the state between them, while the military makes sure that nobody is causing any trouble. That’s what we call democracy.” –Noam Chomsky, “The Empire and Ourselves”
“No, it’s not real, honey. It’s just pretend.”
“Oedipus is belief injected into the unconscious, it is what gives us faith as it robs us of power, it is what teaches us to desire our own repression. Everybody has been oedipalized and neuroticized at home, at school, at work. Everybody wants to be a fascist.” –Mark Seem in the introduction to Anti-Oedipus, xx
“Oh well time goes by / And I realize that I’m all right / You thought nothing would be the same / Then life comes ’round again” –Third Eye Blind, Another Life
“Old emotions are coming back to me . . .” –Third Eye Blind, Persephone
“On the bright side . . .”
“One inside the other and both plugged into an immense outside that is a multiplicity in any case.” –Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 23
“One lies well when one loves, about oneself and to oneself: one seems to oneself transfigured, stronger, richer, more perfect, one is more perfect.” –Alphonso Lingis quoting Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Will to Power,” The New Nietzsche, 49
“One of her sons would jump ship in Mexico and with six other indios make his way to Louisiana to create the first Malay community in North America. The other five roamed Europe and in a parody of the legend of de Goiti, who razed a Moslem city to erect the Ever Loyal Spanish City of Manila, rutted among the languorous maidens of France, Spain, and Italy and other places which had borne the same name for ages, leaving olive-skinned descendents whose Malay genes were explained away as Moorish. They never returned.” –Ninotchka Rosca on the galleon trade, State of War, 157
“One of the fundamental problems of the State is to appropriate this war machine that is foreign to it and make it a piece in its apparatus, in the form of a stable military institution; and the State has always encountered major difficulties in this. It is precisely when the war machine has reached the point that it has no other object but war, it is when it substitutes destruction for mutation, that it frees the most catastrophic charge. Mutation is in no way a transformation of war; on the contrary, war is like the fall or failure of mutation, the only object left for the war machine after it has lost is power to change. War, it must be said, is only the abominable residue of the war machine, either after it has allowed itself to be appropriated by the State apparatus, or even worse, has constructed itself a State apparatus capable only of destruction. When this happens, the war machine no longer draws mutant lines of flight, but pure, cold line of abolition.” –Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 230
“Out of (the fear of) nothing, writing.”
“Patience is a virtue, son . . .”
“Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel!” –Samuel Johnson
“People don’t give a damn. They just don’t!”
“People’s eyes say I’m no damn good / Shook down and left lonely / Only with the maybe we could / I stay inside cause I’m misunderstood / I can’t get no release” –Third Eye Blind, Another Life
“Philosophy is itself a piece of culture, is enmeshed in culture; and if it behaves as if it were rendered immediate by some allegedly primal questions that elevate it above culture, if blinds itself to its own conditions and truly succumbs to its cultural conditionality; in other words, it becomes straightforward ideology. There is no knowledge that can repudiate its mediations; it can only reflect them.” –Theodor Adorno, “Selections from Metaphysics: Concepts and Problems,” Can One Live After Auschwitz?, 453
“Power, as it produces, organizes; as it organizes, it speaks and expresses itself as authority. Language, as it communicates, produces commodities but moreover creates subjectivities, puts them in relation, and orders them.” –Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri on the communications industries, Empire, 33
“Producing-machines, desiring-machines everywhere, schizophrenic machines, all of species life: the self and the non-self, outside and inside, no longer have any meaning whatsoever.” –Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 2
“[Professional] sport[s] is not play but ritual in which the subjected celebrate their subjection. [. . .] This is the school for that integration which finally succeeded politically in transforming the powerless into a band of applauding hooligans.” –Theodor Adorno, “The Schema of Mass Culture,” The Culture Industry, 89-90
“Psychoanalysis was from the start, still is, and perhaps always will be a well-constituted church and a form of treatment based on a set of beliefs hat only the very faithful could adhere to, i.e. those who believe in security that amounts to being lost in the herd and defined in terms of common and external goals.” –Mark Seem in the Introduction to Anti-Oedipus, xvi
“Rather than resurrect the dead, breathe life into the text!”
“Repressing desire, not only for others but in oneself, being the cop for others and for oneself—that is what arouses, and it is not ideology, it is economy.” –Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 346
“Resist!”
“Revolution!”
“Rewrite the slogan of the United States Army: Dare to become all that you cannot be!” –Brian Massumi, A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 41
“Run lines, never plot a point!” –Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 24
“Say that it’s Oedipus, or you’ll get a slap in the face. The psychoanalyst no longer says to the patient: ‘Tell me a little bit about your desiring-machines, won’t you?’ Instead he screams: ‘Answer daddy-and-mommy when I speak to you!’” –Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 45
“See the world!”
“See them as mere illusions which are not less illusory for being seen to be necessary.” –György Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, 13
“Senator Davis, people are telling me it might just be a good day for the poor.” –Frank Sobotka, The Wire, S2E3
“So true!”
“So what?”
“Some things are not worth their price.”
“Someone’s got to be rational around here.”
“Sometimes I feel like maybe I have A.D.D. I just find it really hard to concentrate sometimes, to develop a train of thought, write out a coherent sentence, remember what I was gonna say. Why does this sort of thing happen? What’s the cause of all this? The many worries that I have? Too much thinking? Too much information in my head that I can’t decide which of them to use? Or perhaps I can’t keep them all up on the surface, in short-term memory, so I have to go digging them up from long-term, dig deep? It’s just really upsetting when I can’t think, respond, act fast enough. Add to that that I can’t even get myself to focus on what I’m doing in the first place.”
“State, justify yourself to me!”
“Still is the bottom of my sea: who would guess that it harbors sportive monsters? Imperturbable is my depth, but it sparkles with swimming riddles and laughters.” –Friedrich Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, 228
“Stones can make people docile and knowable.” –Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 172
“S/he seems nice. I like him/her.”
“Take me to the place where the [hot] boys dance.” –The Killers, Where the White Boys Dance
“Take your time . . .”
“Tax wars in a country that considers public payment to be an infringement on private liberty guarantee that all costs remain hidden, shunted off on revolving credit until the unpayable sum comes due.” –Richard Powers, Operation Wandering Soul
“That’s got to be one of the most ridiculous things I ever heard . . .”
“That’s my dream, yo. That’s my dream …”
“The agent does not alleviate or mask domination. He displays and demonstrates them with the clear conscience of the law enforcer, and brings violence into the homes and minds of the colonized subject.” –Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 4
“The Americans didn’t even think about the outcome of the bombing, because the Sudanese were so far below contempt as to be not worth thinking about. Suppose I walk down the sidewalk in Cambridge and, without a second thought, step on an ant. That would mean that I regard the ant as beneath contempt, and that’s morally worse than if I purposely killed that ant.” –Noam Chomsky
“The ancient or recent past must submit to trial, go to court, in order to disclose what it is that produces decadence and what it is that produces new life; what the ferments of decadence and the germs of new life are, the orgy and the sign of the cross, the omnipotence of the rich and the misery of the poor. A strong ethical judgment must condemn the injustice of ‘things,’ bring compassion, herald the new civilization on the march, in short, constantly rediscover America … more especially as, from the beginning, all examination of causes has been dispensed with.” –Gilles Deleuze, Cinema I, 151
“The answer is simple, really.”
“The baker’s trade terrified the young man. He learn’d as much of it as would keep him going–but when he began to see into it—the smells, the unaccountable swelling of the dough, the oven door like a door before a sacrament—the daily repetitions of smell and ferment and some hidden Drama, as in Mass—was he fleeing to the repetitions of the Sky, believing them safer, not as saturated in life and death? If Christ’s body could enter Bread,then what else might?might it not be as easily haunted by ghosts less welcome?” –Thomas Pynchon, Mason and Dixon, 205
“The boys whom he loves as he grows up are after all only substitutive figures and revivals of himself in childhood–boys whom he loves in the way in which his mother loved him when he was a child.” –Sigmund Freud on Leonardo
“The cause (and answer) to most of the world’s injustice lies in a small set of basic, simple everyday moral choices.”
“The concepts were formulated to help meet the challenge of thinking the unique. That is, to meet the challenge of thinking—for there is nothing in this world but uniqueness.” –Brian Massumi, A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia
“The constriction of representational politics into the almost imperceptible space between the ideological positions of reactionary major parties (not only in the United States but throughout the industrial world), one of the truisms of postmodern cynicism, is contested by new forms of social organization that emerge precisely at the geographical points where this constriction is most severe: the use of Western technology to strengthen anti-Western, fundamentalist revolutions in once ‘pro-Western’ Islamic states like Iran and Algeria; the rise of drug cartels, organized like multinational corporations, in regions of South America rendered politically unstable through American intelligence activity directed against earlier mass social movements that were hostile to American economic projects; the manipulation of the mass media by the Zapatistas in order to embarrass the Mexican government on the day the North American Free Trade Agreement takes effect; and [. . .] the constitution of ethnic gangs as defenders against police brutality and purveyors of drugs within the ghettoes and barrios that form an internal Third World within the United States.” –Timothy S. Murphy, Wising Up the Marks, 32-3
“The deliberate creation of lack as a function of market economy is the art of a dominant class. This involves deliberately organizing wants and needs amid an abundance of production; making all of desire teeter and fall victim to the great fear of not having one’s needs satisfied; and making the object dependent upon a real production that is supposedly exterior to desire (the demands of rationality), while at the same time the production of desire is categorized as fantasy and nothing but fantasy.” –Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 28
“The dream of this model was that eventually every worker in the world, sufficiently disciplined, would be interchangeable in the global productive process.” –Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, 247
“The essences found though philosophical interrogation do not reveal the things themselves productive of their appearances, issuing signs of themselves, but reveal the acts and laws of the subject that interprets.” –Alphonso Lingis, “The Will to Power,” The New Nietzsche, 37
“The evils of imperialism cannot be confronted except by destroying capitalism itself.” –Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, 229
“The family is never a microcosm in the sense of an autonomous figure, even when inscribed in a larger circle that it is said to mediate and express. The family is by nature eccentric, decentered. [. . .] There is always an uncle from America; a brother who went bad; an aunt who took off with a military man; a cousin out of work, bankrupt, or a victim of the Crash; an anarchist grandfather; a grandmother in the hospital, crazy or senile. The family does not engender its own ruptures. Families are filled with gaps and transected by breaks that are not familial: the Commune, the Dreyfus Affair, religion and atheism, the Spanish Civil War, the rise of fascism, Stalinism, the Vietnam War, May ’68—all these things form complexes of the unconscious, more effective than everlasting Oedipus.” –Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 97
“The family was entrusted with functions that became the measuring rod of the responsibility of its members and their possible guilt. [. . .] It is completing the task begun by nineteenth-century psychology, namely, to develop a moralized, familial discourse of mental pathology, linking madness to the ‘half-real, half-imaginary dialectic of the Family,’ deciphering within it ‘the unending attempt to murder the father,’ ‘the dull thud of instincts hammering at the solidity of the family as an institution and at its most archaic symbols.’” –Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 50
“The fascist State has been without doubt capitalism’s most fantastic attempt at economic and political reterritorialization. But the socialist State also has its own minorities, its own territorialities, which re-form themselves against the State, or which the State instigates and reorganizes. (Russian nationalism, the territoriality of the party: the proletariat was only able to constitute itself as a class on the basis of artificial neoterritorialities; in parallel fashion, the bourgeoisie reterritorializes itself in forms that are at times the most archaic.) –Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 158
“The formation of Empire is a response to proletarian internationalism.” –Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, 51
“The fundamental problem of political philosophy is still precisely the one that Spinoza saw so clearly, and that Wilhelm Reich rediscovered: ‘Why do men fight for their servitude as stubbornly as though it were their salvation?’ How can people possibly reach the point of shouting, ‘More taxes! Less bread!’? [. . .] The astonishing thing is not that some people steal or that others occasionally go out on strike, but rather that all those who are starving do not steal as a regular practice, and all those who are exploited are not continually out on strike: after centuries of exploitation, why do people still tolerate being humiliated and enslaved, to such a point, indeed, that they actually want humiliation and slavery not only for others but for themselves?” –Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 29
“The giant awakens!”
“The grammatical functions determine the terms of thought as well as the rules for thought.” –David Allison’s introduction to The New Nietzsche, xxii
“The greatest shame that humanity has committed is to co-opt desire in the name of love.”
“The horse is as much a part of the West as the landscape, but Kim never really made it with the horse. He tried at first to establish a telepathic bond with his horse,but thehorse hated the relationship and tried to kill him every opportunity. It would swell itself up when he put on the saddle, or it would suddenly scrape against a tree or run under a low branch. All the old horse tricks.” –William S. Burroughs, The Place of Dead Roads, 12
“The human and social sciences have accustomed us to see that figure of Man behind every social event, just as Christianity taught us to see the Eye of the Lord looking down upon us. Such forms of knowledge project an image of reality, at the expense of reality itself. They talk figures and icons and signs, but fail to perceive forces and flows. They blind us to other realities, and especially the reality of power as it subjugates us. Their function is to tame, and the result is the fabrication of docile and obedient subjects.” –Mark Seem in the introduction to Anti-Oedipus, xx
“The hypnosis and the reign of images, the torpor they spread; the hatred of life and of all that is free, of all that passes and flows; the universal effusion of the death instinct; depression and guilt used as a means of contagion, the kiss of the Vampire: aren’t you ashamed to be happy? follow my example, I won’t let go before you say, ‘It’s my fault,’ O ignoble contagion of the depressives, neurosis as the only illness consisting in making others ill; the permissive structure: let me deceive, rob, slaughter, kill! but in the name of the social order, and so daddy-mommy will be proud of me; the double direction given to ressentiment, the turning back against oneself, and the projection against the Other: the father is dead, it’s my fault, who killed him? it’s your fault, it’s the Jews, the Arabs, the Chinese, all the resources of racism and segregation; the abject desire to be loved, the whimpering at not being loved enough, at not being ‘understood,’ concurrent with the reduction of sexuality to the ‘dirty little secret,’ this whole priest’s psychology—there is not a single one of these tactics that does not find in Oedipus its land of milk and honey.” –Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari on the “cynical tactics of bad conscience,” Anti-Oedipus, 268
“The imperial machine lives by producing a context of equilibria and/or reducing complexities, pretending to put forward a project of universal citizenship and toward this end intensifying the effectiveness of its intervention over every element of the communicative relationship, all the while dissolving identity and history in a completely postmodernist fashion. Contrary to the way many postmodernist accounts would have it, however, the imperial machine, far from eliminating master narratives, actually produces and reproduces them [. . .] in order to validate and celebrate its own power.” –Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, 34
“The individual is interpellated as a (free) subject in order that he shall submit freely to the commandments of the Subject, i.e. in order that he shall (freely) accept his subjection, i.e. in order that he shall make the gestures and actions of his subjection ‘all by himself.’ There are no subjects except by and or their subjection.” –Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” 123
“The leadership has a tendency rather to reply: when I hear the word ‘desire,’ I pull out my gun.” –Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 257
“The look of desire in his eyes. That’s all I needed.”
“The man of power will always want to stop the lines of flight.” –Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 229
“The man who looks for security, even in the mind, is like a man who would chop off his own limbs in order to have artificial ones which will give him no pain or trouble.” –Henry Miller, Sexus, 428
“The ‘merely cultural’ experimentation had very profound political and economic effects.” –Hardt and Negri on the 60s, Empire, 274
“The most boring thing you can do is to be typical.”
“The neurotic is the one whom the Oedipal imprints take, whereas the psychotic is the one incapable of being oedipalized, even and especially by psychoanalysis. The first task of the revolutionary [. . .] is to learn from the psychotic how to shake off the Oedipal yoke and the effects of power, in order to initiate a radical politics of desire freed from all beliefs.” –Mark Seem in the introduction to Anti-Oedipus, xxi
“The notions of ‘totalitarianism’ that were constructed during the period of the cold war proved to be useful instruments for propaganda but completely inadequate analytical tools, leading most often to pernicious inquisitional methods and damaging moral arguments. The numerous shelves of our libraries that are filled with analyses of totalitarianism should today be regarded only with shame and could be thrown away with no hesitation.” –Michael Hart and Antonio Negri, Empire, 421n
“The official enemy is what president Kennedy called the “monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that is attempting to thwart our benevolence.” The “monolithic and ruthless conspiracy” was renamed “the Evil Empire” by the Kennedy clone Ronald Reagan. The real enemy has always been the indigenous population. And the principle under which we have defended ourselves from indigenous populations throughout the world has been our freedom to rob and exploit. If we cannot destroy such elements by force, as we typically try to do, then the next best thing is to drive them into the hands of the Russians so we can then provide a retrospective justification for the violence and terror that we launch against them for quite different reasons” –Noam Chomsky, “The Empire and Ourselves”
“The one vocation of the sign is to produce desire, engineering it in every direction.” –Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 39
“The prospect of getting a job that guarantees regular and stable work for eight hours a day, fifty weeks a year, for an entire working life, the prospect of entering the normalized regime of the social factory, which had been a dream for many of their parents, now appeared as a kind of death. The mass refusal of the disciplinary regime, which took a variety of forms, was not only a negative expression but also a moment of creation, what Nietzsche calls a transvaluation of values.” –Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri talking about the 60s, Empire, 274
“The required qualities of attention have become so familiar from other films and other culture products already known to him or her that they appear automatically. [. . .] The products of the culture industry are such that they can be alertly consumed even in a state of distraction.” –Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 100
“The revolutionary knows that escape is revolutionary—withdrawal, freaks—provided one sweeps away the social cover on leaving, or causes a piece of the system to get lost in the shuffle.” –Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 277
“The schizo knows how to leave: he has made departure into something as simple as being born or dying. But at the same time [. . .] his is a journey in intensity, around the desiring-machine that is erected here and remains here. [. . .] These men of desire—or do they not yet exist?—are like Zarathustra. They know incredible sufferings, vertigos, and sicknesses. [. . .] They must reinvent each gesture. But such a man produces himself as a free man, irresponsible, solitary, and joyous, finally able to say and do something simple in his own name, without asking permission; a desire lacking nothing, a flux that overcomes barriers and codes, a name that no longer designates any ego whatever. He has simply ceased being afraid of becoming mad. He experiences and lives himself as the sublime sickness that will no longer affect him.” –Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 131
“The terror of death today is largely the terror of seeing how much the living resemble it. And it might therefore be said that if life were lived rightly, the experience of death would also be changed radically, in its innermost composition.” –Theodor Adorno, “Selections from Metaphysics: Concepts and Problems,” Can One Live After Auschwitz?, 460
“The truth is that sexuality is everywhere: the way a bureaucrat fondles his records, a judge administers justice, a businessman causes money to circulate; the way the bourgeoisie fucks the proletariat; and so on. And there is no need to resort to metaphors, any more than for the libido to go by way of metamorphoses. Hitler got the fascists sexually aroused. Flags, nations, armies, banks get a lot of people aroused. A revolutionary machine is nothing if it does not acquire at least as much force as these coercive machines have for producing breaks and mobilizing flows.” –Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 293-4
“The unconscious is structured like a language.” –Jacques Lacan
“The way you treat other people, . . .”
“There are also assholes there, but then, there are assholes everywhere . . .”
“There are appearances without anything appearing; there is no truth in the luminous visions the artist dreams. It is their inconsistency that is their radiance; they do not reveal a transphenomenal power of the essences of reality. They are rather symptoms of the protean power of life, of the play of light, ever differentiating itself.” –Alphonso Lingis, “The Will to Power,” The New Nietzsche, 46
“There has never been but one State, the Urstaat, the Asiatic despotic formation, which constitutes in its shadow existence history’s only break, since even the modern social axiomatic can function only by resuscitating it as one of the poles between which its produces its own break. Democracy, fascism or socialism, which of these is not haunted by the Urstaat as a model without equal? The name of the local dictator Duvalier’s chief of police was Desyr.” –Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 261
“There is a sense [. . .] in which we have all become neoliberals.” –David Harvey, Limits to Capital, xiii
“There is no ideology and never has been.” –Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 4
“There is no Job who can sustain such suffering!” –Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri on the legacy of modernity, Empire, 46
“There is no pure immediacy of culture: wherever it permits itself to be consumed arbitrarily by a public as consumer goods, it manipulates people. The subject becomes the subject of culture only through the mediation of objective discipline; the advocate thereof—in the administrated world, at any rate—is the expert.” –Theodor W. Adorno, “Culture and Administration,” The Culture Industry, 129
“There is only so much that thinking can do.”
“There is so much shit out there!”
“There is the potential for rupture and the motor for a future that is not simply doomed to repeat the past cycles of capitalism.” –Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, 239
“There’s a word for it, what does that tell you? Others have felt it too.”
“There’s no sex in your violence . . .” –Bush, Everything Zen
“They don’t just stop existing!”
“They produce needs, social relations, bodies, and minds—which is to say, they produce producers.” –Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri on “the great industrial and financial powers,” Empire, 32
“Things have got to change around here!”
“Think complexity!”
“Think otherwise.”
“This is all not in the plan!”
“This is embarrassing. The soldiers only found things to destroy, nothing to steal. It’s terrible to be poor.” –Manolo, Ninotschka Rosca, State of War, 64
“This place is sick!”
“This too shall pass . . .”
“This was not a theory, but Kafka’s daily experience: each time one writes a letter, a phantom consumes its kisses before it arrives, perhaps before it leaves, so that it is already necessary to write another one.” –Gilles Deleuze, Cinema I, 100
“Those who feel they remain alone naturally hope. Hope of having said the truth, and that the truth is revolutionary.” –Antonio Negri, Marx Beyond Marx, xvii
“Those who sneer at us, and sneer at themselves for paying to let us fool them, what they never see is the yearning. If it was religious, a yearning after God–no one would dream of disrespecting that. But because this is a yearning only after miracle, only to contradict the given world, they hold it in contempt.” –Zombini the magician, Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day, 354
“Thought lags behind nature.” –Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 5
“To be sure, it is not psychoanalysis that makes us believe: Oedipus and castration are demanded, then demanded again, and these demands come from elsewhere and from deeper down. But psychoanalysis did find the following means, and fills the following function: causing beliefs to survive even after repudiation; causing those who no longer believe in anything to continue believing; reconstituting a private territory for them, a private Urstaat, a private capital (dreams as capital, said Freud).” –Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 314
“To get your man you have to seduce him and dazzle him.” –Marcel Mauss, The Gift, 26
“To pass these defendants a poison chalice is to put it to our own lips as well.” –Justice Robert Jackson, chief prosecutor of the Germans at Nuremberg
“To want sex with another man is not exactly a credential for political radicalism …” –Leo Bersani, “Is the Rectum a Grave?”
“To the people!”
“Unfortunately for this neat schema, this is not Marx.” –Louis Althusser, “Contradiction and Overdetermination,” 111
“We are confronted with simple and basic—but tough—moral questions everyday.”
“We are statistically or molarly heterosexual, but personally homosexual, without knowing it or being fully aware of it, and finally we are transsexual in an elemental, molecular sense.” –Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 70
“We exist in the Real, but (because of the Symbolic) live in the Imaginary.”
“We have to work in order to live.” –A Palestinian tunnel-worker in Gaza
“We live in reactionary times . . .”
“We should stop believing in trees, roots, and radicles. They’ve made us suffer too much.” –Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 15
“We’ll have our legal folks draw up some language we can all live with.”
“Well there’s a reason for / an answer to that.”
“Well, no, it doesn’t [. . .]”
“What an excuse!”
“What are you an agent for?” –William S. Burroughs
“What does it mean to struggle against capital when capital has subjugated all of lived time, not only that of the working day, but all, all of it. Reproduction is like production, life is like work. At this level, to break with capital is to make a prison break.” –Antonio Negri, Marx Beyond Marx, xvi
“What is that [statement] supposed to mean?”
“What is the schizo, if not first of all the one who can no longer bear ‘all that’: money, the stock market, the death forces, Nijinsky said—values, morals, homelands, religions, and private certitudes? There is a whole world of difference between the one who escapes, and the one who knows how to make what he is escaping escape, collapsing a filthy drainage pipe, causing a deluge to break loose, liberating a flow, resecting a schiz. The schizo is not revolutionary, but the schizophrenic process—in terms of which the schizo is merely the interruption, or the continuation in the void—is the potential for revolution.” –Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 341
“What is this escape? The word is poorly chosen to please. Courage consists, however, in agreeing to flee rather than live tranquilly and hypocritically in false refuges. Values, morals, homelands, religions, and these private certitudes that our vanity and our complacency bestow generously on us, have as many deceptive sojourns as the world arranges for those who think they are standing straight and at ease, among stable things. They know nothing of this immense flight that transports them, ignorant of themselves, in the monotonous buzzing of their ever quickening steps that lead them impersonally in a great immobile movement. An escape in advance of the escape. [. . . But] perhaps that is what the fall is, that it can no longer be a personal destiny, but the common lot.” –Maurice Blanchot, L’amitié, 232-3, quoted in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 341-2
“What literature is really trying to do is figure out, ‘What does it mean to live?’ Thing is, it don’t mean a thing.”
“What the f**k kind of logic is that?”
“What thus seems to take place outside ideology [. . .] in reality takes place in ideology. What really takes place in ideology seems therefore to take place outside of it. That is why those who are in ideology believe themselves by definition outside ideology: one of the effects of ideology is the practical denegation of the ideological character of ideology by ideology: ideology never says, ‘I am ideological.’ It is necessary to be outside ideology, i.e. in scientific knowledge, to be able to say: I am in ideology (a quite exceptional case) or (the general case): I was in ideology. As is well known, the accusation of being in ideology only applies to others, never to oneself [. . .]. Which amounts to saying that ideology has no outside (for itself), but at the same time that it is nothing but outside (for science and reality).” –Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” 118-9
“What revolution is not tempted to turn against its subject-groups, stigmatized as anarchistic or irresponsible, and to liquidate them? How do we combat the deadly inclination that makes a group pass from its revolutionary libidinal investments to revolutionary investments that are simply preconscious investments or investments of interest, then to preconscious investments that are simply reformist?” –Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 349
“What right have you to assume [. . .]?”
“What right have you to represent me?”
“Whatever you will, will it in such a way that you also will its Eternal Return.” –Gilles Deleuze paraphrasing Friedrich Nietzsche, “Active and Reactive,” The New Nietzsche, 100
“When the synthesis of sovereignty and capital is fully accomplished, and the transcendence of power is completely transformed into a transcendental exercise of authority, then sovereignty becomes a political machine that rules across the entire society.” –Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, 87
“Where does time go?” “All I know is that it’s always come.”
“Where it is, I am.” –Sigmund Freud
“Whether he is among his accomplices or among his victims, each [sadistic] libertine, while engaged in reasoning, is caught in the hermetic circle of his own solitude and uniqueness. […] Likewise the masochistic hero appears to be educated and fashioned by the authoritarian woman whereas basically it is he who forms her, dresses her for her part and prompts the harsh words she addresses to him.” –Gilles Deleuze, Coldness and Cruelty, 19; 22
“Who are these beings, they who come like fate? (‘Some pack of blond beasts of prey, a conqueror and master race which, organized for war and with the ability to organize, unhesitatingly lays its terrible claws upon a populace perhaps tremendously superior in numbers but still formless . . .’)” –Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, quoting Nietzsche, on the arrival of the State, Anti-Oedipus, 192
“Why can’t I f**king find the one thing that I need?”
“Why do you write–so much?” “Why is the world as it is?”
“Why does everyone wanna be so f**king happy?”
“Why don’t you learn yourself a foreign language?”
“Why is this computer so slow?”
“Why so serious, son?” –The Joker, The Dark Knight
“Working men of all countries, unite!” –Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto
“You boys were hard work, but that’s only hard work. A daughter pretends to be so easy, a little lady, smilin, dancin, all the time she’s waitin on that perfect moment that’ll hurt the most. And mercy, did it.”—Mayva Traverse, Against the Day, 470
“You can’t give up hope just because it’s hopeless. You gotta hope even more and cover your ears and go Blah blah blah” –Futurama, “Godfellas”
“You don’t do this now, you may never do it.”
“You don’t need all that.”
“You don’t need erudite, sophisticated, technical training in arcane, mind-blowing, rocket-science philosophy to figure that out!”
“You have no f**king idea what goes through people’s heads.” –my friend John from Louisiana
“You mean to say gold, silver, these shinin and wonderful metals, basis of all the world’s economy, you go in a laboratory, fool with em a little, acid and so on, and you get a high explosive that all you got to do’s squeeze at the wrong time and it’s adios, muchachos?” –Webb Traverse, Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day, 77-8
“You never reach the horizon” –something I realized while looking straight ahead, at ominous clouds
“You taught me language, and my profit on ‘t is I know how to curse. The red plague rid you for learning me your language!” –Caliban, William Shakespeare, The Tempest
“You try to save money, this is what happens . . .”
“You’ll always wanna do more and you will never finish . . .” –curse on the scholar/artist
“You’re dead wrong!”
“You’re in denial.” “Uh, thank you. I really wanted to know that.”
“You’re lying down here, enjoying yourself, when over there they scramble for their lives as they are left for dead?”
