unexpected events

Unexpected events, such as the sudden appearance of a stump across our path – when we manage to notice it – or Maxi's peccary sudddenly reviving can disrupt our assumptions of how the world is. And it is this very disruption, the breakdown of old habits and the rebuilding of new ones, that constitutes our feeling of being alive and in the world. The world is revealed to us, not by the fact that we come to have habits, but in the moments when, forced to abandon our old habits, we come to take up new ones. This is where we can catch glimpses – however mediated – of the emergent real to which we also contribute. 

Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think (University of California Press, 2013) pp. 65-66

So much Everything

There is so much Everything
that Nothing is hidden quite nicely.

Wislawa Szymborska, 'Reality Demands' in View with a Grain of Sand (faber & faber, 1995) p. 184

To exist is to coexist

Depression is the inner footprint of coexistence, a highly sensitive attunement to other beings, a feeling of being sensitized to a plenitude of things. De-pressed by them. So we don't want to reject the logical structure of consumerism. Enjoy a thing just for the taste of it. By listening to it rather than sadistically treating it as silent plastic. Ecognosis means: letting become more susceptible.

Melancholy is irreducible because it's ecological; there is no way out of abjection because of symbiosis and interdependence. To exist is to coexist. Yet this coexistence is suffused with pleasure, pleasure that appears perverse from the standpoint of the subject under the illusion that it has stripped the abjection from itself. Down below abjection, ecological awareness is deeply about pleasure.

Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology (Columbia University Press, 2016) p.129

A human is a heap of things that aren't humans

Since a human is a heap of things that aren't humans, just as a meadow is a heap of things that aren't meadows, such as grasses and birds, either ecological and biological beings don't really exist or there's a malfunction in the logic we have rather uncritically inherited from Aristotle. A malfunction, moreover, that is beginning to distort political decisions at scales appropriate for thinking global warming. If we relax our grip, we can allow for sets of things that don't sum to a whole, and this just is what we have when we think geological temporality as a series of nested sets of catastrophes.

Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology (Columbia University Press, 2016) p.75

Time has two aspects

Time goes in cycles, as well as in a line. A planet revolving: you see? One cycle, one orbit around the sun, is a year, isn't it? And two orbits, two years; and so on, one can count the orbits endlessly – an observer can. Indeed such a system is how we count time – it constitutes the time-teller, the clock. But within the system, the cycle, where is time? Where is beginning or end? Infinite repetition is an atemporal process. It must be compared, referred to some other cyclic or non-cyclic process, to be seen as temporal. Well, this is very queer and interesting, you see. The atoms, you know, have a cyclic motion. The stable compounds are made of constituents that have a regular, periodic motion relative to one another. In fact, it is the tony time-reversible cycles of the atom that give matter enough permanence that evolution is possible. The little timelessnesses added together make up time. And then on the big scale, the cosmos: well, you know we think that the whole universe is a cyclic process, an oscillation of expansion and contraction, without any before or after. Only within each of the great cycles, where we live, only there is there linear time, evolution, change. So then time has two aspects. There is the arrow, the running river, without which there is no change, no progress, or direction, or creation. And there is the circle or the cycle, without which there is chaos, meaningless succession of instants, a world without clocks or seasons or promises.
[...]
Can one dismiss either being, or becoming, as an illusion? Becoming without being is meaningless. Being without becoming is a big bore... If the mind is able to perceive time in both these ways, then a true chonosophy should provide a field in which relation of the two aspects or processes of time could be understood.

Ursula Le Guin, The Dispossessed (Gollancz, 2002) pp. 185-186

Contradiction

Let us suppose that a contradictory entity existed – what could happen to it? Could it lapse into non-being? But it is contradictory, so that even if it happened not to be, it would still continue to be even in not-being, since this would be in conformity with its paradoxical 'essence'. [...] Such an entity would be tantamount to a 'black hole of differences', into which all alterity would be irremediably swallowed up, since the being-other of this entity would be obliged, simply by virtue of being other than it, not to be other than it.

Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude (Continuum, 2008) pp. 69-70

A principle of unreason

The absolute is the absolute impossibility of a necessary being. We are no longer upholding a variant of the principle of sufficient reason, according to which there is a necessary reason why everything is the way it is rather than otherwise, but rather the absolute truth of a principle of unreason. There is no reason for anything to be or to remain the way it is; everything must, without reason, be able not to be and/or be able to be other than it is.

Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude (Continuum, 2008) p. 60

My thought of death

For I think myself as mortal only if I think that my death has no need of my thought of death in order to be actual. If my ceasing to be depended upon my continuing to be so that I could keep thinking myself as not being, then I would continue to agonize indefinitely, without ever actually passing away.

Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude (Continuum, 2008) p. 57

The absence of any reason for my being

Even if I cannot think of myself, for example, as annihilated, neither can I think of any cause that would rule out this eventuality. The possibility of my not being is thinkable as the counterpart of the absence of any reason for my being, even if I cannot think what it would be not to be. [...] For even if I cannot think the unthinkable, I can think the possibility of the unthinkable by dint of the unreason of the real.

Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude (Continuum, 2008) p. 56

A contemplative soul

A soul must be attributed to the heart, to the muscles, nerves and cells, but a contemplative soul whose entire function is to contract a habit.

Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (Continuum, 2004) p. 95

A sum of contractions

Every organism, in its receptive and perceptual elements, but also in its viscera, is a sum of contractions, of retentions and expectations.

Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (Continuum, 2004) p. 93

The simulacrum is the true character or form

When eternal return is the power of (formless) Being, the simulacrum is the true character or form – the "being" – of that which is. When the identity of things dissolves, being escapes to attain univocity, and begins to revolve around the different. That which is or returns has no prior constituted identity: things are reduced to the difference which fragments them, and to all the differences which are implicated in it and through which they pass.

Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (Continuum, 2004) p. 80

Returning is becoming

That identity not be first, that it exists as a principle but as a second principle, as a principle become; that it revolve around the Different: such would be the nature of a Copernican revolution which opens up the possibility of difference having its own concept, rather than being maintained under the domination of a concept in general already understood as identical. Nietzsche meant nothing more than this by eternal return. Eternal return cannot mean the return of the Identical because it presupposes a world (that of the will to power) in which all previous identities have been abolished and dissolved. Returning is being, but only the being of becoming.

Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (Continuum, 2004) p. 50

Purposefulness is part of our ineradicable basic human structure

You know, the truth is, I think I do know what really disturbs me about this work that you’ve described – and I don’t even know if I can express it, Andre – but somehow, if I’ve understood what you’ve been saying, it somehow seems that the whole point of the work that you did in those workshops, when you get right down to it and ask what it really was all about – the whole point, really, I think, was to enable the people in the workshops, including yourself, to somehow sort of strip away every scrap of purposefulness from certain selected moments. And the point of it was so that you would then be able to experience somehow just pure being… And I think I just simply object to that. I mean, I just don’t think I accept the idea that there should be moments in which you’re not trying to do anything. I think it’s our nature to do things. I think purposefulness is part of our ineradicable basic human structure. And to say that we ought to be able to live without it is like saying that a tree ought to be able to live without branches or roots; but actually, without branches or roots, it wouldn’t be a tree. I mean, it would just be a log.

Wallace Shawn, My Dinner With Andre (Saga Productions Inc., 1981)

The end of the world in the world

"The book I'm looking for," says the blurred figure, who holds out a volume similar to yours, "is the one that gives the sense of the world after the end of the world, the sense that the world is the end of everything that there is in the world, that the only thing there is in the world is the end of the world."

Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveller (Vintage Books, 1998) p. 243

The benign indifference of the world

For the first time in a very long time I thought of mother. I felt that I understood why at the end of her life she'd taken a 'fiancé' and why she'd pretended to start again. There at the home, where lives faded away, there too the evenings were a kind of melancholy truce. So close to death, mother must have felt liberated and ready to live her life again. No one, no one at all had any right to cry over her. And I too felt ready to live my life again. As if this great outburst of anger had purged all my ills, killed all my hopes, I looked up at the mass of signs and stars in the night sky and laid myself open for the first time to the benign indifference of the world. And finding it so much like myself, in fact so fraternal, I realized that I'd been happy, and that I was still happy.

Albert Camus, The Outsider (Penguin Modern Classics, 2000) p. 117

A solitary bee

The more I see of life the more I perceive that only through solitary communion with nature can one gain an idea of its richness and meaning. I know that in such contemplation lies my true personality, and yet I live in an age when on all sides I am told exactly the opposite and asked to believe that the social and cooperative activity of humanity is the one way through which life can be developed. Am I an exception, a herd-outcast? There are also solitary bees, and it is not claimed that they are biologically inferior. A planet of contemplators, each sunning himself before his doorstep like the mason-wasp; no one would help another, and no one would need help!

Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave (Hamish Hamilton, 1945) p. 19

The idea of life and afterlife in works of art should be regarded with an entirely unmetaphorical objectivity. Even in times of narrowly prejudiced thought there was an inkling that life was not limited to organic corporeality. But it cannot be a matter of extending its dominion under the feeble sceptre of the soul, as Fechner tried to do, or, conversely, of basing its definition on the even less conclusive factors of animality, such as sensation, which characterize life only occasionally. The concept of life is given its due only if everything that has a history of its own, and is not merely the setting for history, is credited with life. In the final analysis, the range of life must be determined by history rather than by nature, least of all by such tenuous factors as sensation and soul. The philosopher's task consists in comprehending all of natural life through the more encompassing life of history.

Walter Benjamin, 'The Task of the Translator' in Illuminations (Pimlico, 1999) p. 72

The difference between the hierarchical and the heterarchical city is the difference between being and becoming.

Lebbeus Woods, 'Anarchitecture: Architecture is a political act' in ANARCHITECTURE: Architecture is a Political Act (Academy Editions, 1992) p. 11

Events stream past us like these crowds and the face of each is seen only for a minute. What is urgent is not urgent for ever but only ephemerally. All work and all love, the search for wealth and fame, the search for truth, like itself, are made up of moments which pass and become nothing. Yet through this shaft of nothings we drive onward with that miraculous vitality that creates our precarious habitations in the past and the future. So we live; a spirit that broods and hovers over the continual death of time, the lost meaning, the unrecaptured moment, the unremembered face, until the final chop that ends all our moments and plunges that spirit back into the void from which it came.

Iris Murdoch, Under The Net (Penguin Books, 1960) p. 244