There is politics because man separates himself from his own bare life

There is politics because man is the living being who, in language, separates and opposes himself to his own bare life and, at the same time, maintains himself in relation to that bare life in an inclusive exclusion.

Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer (Stanford University Press, 1998) p. 8

The force of an idea lies primarily in its ability to be displaced

The force of an idea lies primarily in its ability to be displaced.

Kristin Ross, The Emergence of Social Space (Verso, 2008) p. 152

The scope and manner of the mind's attention are social facts

The disequilibrium of the boat [...] is only a dialectical response, a fun-house mirror reflection of an initial disfiguration or mutilation inflicted under capitalism: the closure of fields of socially available perception, the reduction not only of the environment of freedom but also of the very desire for and memory of that environment. Familiarity with capitalist culture persuades us that this limitation – the specific way people, their bodies, and their physical perceptions are organized within capitalism – is not historical but natural and physical. Yet the scope and manner of the mind's attention, or of the body's capacity for sensation, are social facts – and it is precisely the blindness and dullness peculiar to social relation in market society that enable us to deny the social and allow it to be subsumed in the biological.

Kristin Ross, The Emergence of Social Space (Verso, 2008) p. 120

Détournement has no other place but the place of the other

Détournement has no other place but the place of the other; it plays on imposed terrain and its tactics are determined by the absence of a "proper place".

Kristin Ross, The Emergence of Social Space (Verso, 2008) p. 42

Emancipation must be based on a principle other than work

Emancipation – the transformation of a servile identity into a free identity – must be based on a principle other than work, since the exercise and defense of work are what constitute the servile identity. Emancipation follows from dispensing with the positivities of workers' community, and from radicalizing that atomization instead.

Kristin Ross, The Emergence of Social Space (Verso, 2008) p. 20

Artists are terrible people

Artists in my experience are not willing to wait for revolutionary change in order to express their sensuous beings and so are disloyal to communities of politics. Debord was right to expel them. They're terrible people.

Roman Vasseur, No Room To Move: Radical Art and the Regenerate City (Mute Books, 2010) p. 123

The state of exception

Indeed, the state of exception has today reached its maximum worldwide deployment. The normative aspect of law can thus be obliterated and contradicted with impunity by a governmental violence that – while ignoring international law externally and producing a permanent state of exception internally – nevertheless still claims to be applying the law.

Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception (The University of Chicago Press, 2005) p. 87

The purity of a being is never unconditional or absolute

It is a mistake to postulate anywhere a purity that exists in itself and needs only to be preserved.... The purity of a being is never unconditional or absolute; it is always subject to a condition. This condition varies according to the being whose purity is at issue; but this condition never inheres in the being itself. In other words: the purity of every (finite) being is not dependent on itself... For nature, human language is the condition of its purity that stands outside of it.

Walter Benjamin, The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin (University of Chicago Press, 1994) p. 206

We think not the distant, but the close that measures it

We believe that we think the strange and the foreign, but in reality we never think anything but the familiar; we think not the distant, but the close that measures it. And so again, when we speak of impossibility, it is possibility alone that, providing it with a reference, already sarcastically brings impossibility under its rule.

Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation (Minnesota University Press, 2008) p. 44

All speech is violence

All speech is violence, a violence all the more formidable for being secret and the secret center of violence; a violence that is already exerted upon what the word names and that it can name only by withdrawing presence from it – a sign, as we have seen, that death speaks (the death that is power) when I speak. At the same time, we well know that when we are having words we are not fighting. Language is the undertaking through which violence agrees not to be open, but secret, agrees to forgo spending itself in a brutal action in order to reserve itself for a more powerful mastery, henceforth no longer affirming itself, but nonetheless at the heart of all affirmation.

Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation (Minnesota University Press, 2008) p. 42

True hope is an affirmation of the improbable and a wait for what is

Hope is to be reinvented. Would this mean that what this hope aims at is to be obtained through invention, a beautiful utopian future, or through the splendor of the imaginary that certain romantics are said to have had as their horizon? Not at all. The hope that passes by way of the ideal – the lofty heavens of the idea, the beauty of names, the abstract salvation of the concept – is a weak hope. Hope is true hope insofar as it aspires to give us, in the future of a promise, what is. What is is presence. But hope is only hope. There is hope when, far from any present grasp, far from any immediate possession, it relates to what is always yet to come, and perhaps will never come; hope says the hoped-for coming of what exists as yet only in hope. The more distant or difficult the object of hope is, the more profound and close to its destiny as hope is the hope that affirms it: I hope little when what I hope for is almost at hand. Hope bespeaks the possibility of what escapes the realm of the possible; at the limit, it is relation recaptured where relation is lost. Hope is most profound when it withdraws from and deprives itself of all manifest hope. But at the same time we must not hope, as in a dream, for a chimerical fiction. It is against this that the new hope appoints itself. Hoping not for the probable, which cannot be the measure of what there is to be hoped for, and hoping not for the fiction of the unreal, true hope – the unhoped for of all hope – is an affirmation of the improbable and a wait for what is.

Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation (Minnesota University Press, 2008) pp. 40-41

Speaking is not seeing

– Words are suspended; this suspension is a very delicate oscillation, a trembling that never leaves them still.
– And yet, they are also immobile.
– Yes, of an immobility that moves more than anything moving. Disorientation is at work in speech through a passion for wandering that has no bounds. Thus it happens that, in speaking, we depart from all direction and all path, as though we had crossed the line.
– But speech has its own way, it provides a path. We are not led astray in it, or at most only in relation to the regularly traveled routes.
– Even more than that perhaps: it is as though we were turned away from the visible, without being turned back round toward the invisible. I don't know whether what I am saying here says anything. But nevertheless it is simple. Speaking is not seeing. Speaking frees thought from the optical imperative that in the Western tradition, for thousands of years, has subjugated our approach to things, and induced us to think under the guaranty of light or under the threat of its absence. I'll let you count all the words through which it is suggested that, to speak truly, one must think according to the measure of the eye.

Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation (Minnesota University Press, 2008) p. 27

Language lends itself to the movement of stealing and turning away

Speech is this turning. Speech is the place of dispersion, disarranging and disarranging itself, dispersing and dispersing itself beyond all measure. For the speech that sets into flight, preserves in this very flight the movement of stealing away that is not content with desperate or even panic flight, and thus retains the power of stealing away from it.
[...]
Naturally, when this speech becomes petrified in a watchword, "flight" simply ends and everything returns to order. But flight can also, even while maintaining itself as an infinite power of dispersal, recapture in itself this more essential movement of stealing and turning away that originates in speech as detour. This detour is equally irreducible to affirmation and to negation, to question and to response; it precedes all these modes, speaking before them and as though in turning away from all speech. Even if it tends to determine itself as a power to say no, particularly in the movements that manifest themselves in revolt, this no that challenges all constituted power also challenges the power to say no, designating it as what is not founded in a power, as irreducible to any power and, by virtue of this, unfounded. Language lends itself to the movement of stealing and turning away – it watches over it, preserves it, loses itself there and confirms itself there. In this we sense why the essential speech of detour, the "poetry" in the turn of writing, is also a speech wherein time turns, saying time as a turning, the turning that sometimes turns in a visible manner into revolution.

Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation (Minnesota University Press, 2008) p. 23

Contradiction does not represent a decisive separation

Two opposites, beacuse they are simply opposed, are still too close to one another – contradiction does not represent a decisive separation: two enemies are already bound in a relation of unity, while the difference between the "unknown" and the familiar is infinite. Therefore, in the dialectical form, the moment of synthesis and reconciliation always ends by predominating.

Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation (University of Minnesota Press, 2008) p. 8

My body is a thing that reveals other things

My body is a thing that reveals other things, and can do so only because it is of the same fabric as they. My flesh is where the lines of direction of the world are inscribed on a fold in their midst. The movements of the eye and hand that are not desultory, are movements where – like the red that precipitates because the red of bishop’s robes, gypsies’ dresses, flags of linemen and of the revolution, lips of lovers haunts it – each phase of the movement recalls and refers to the eyes and hands that folded over or will fold over those robes, dresses, flags, lips. Its tissue, like that of the structured layout of a world, is made of these cross-references.

Alphonso Lingis, 'Bodies That Touch Us' in Thesis Eleven no 36 (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1993) p. 163