Free yourself a bit from the boundaries of human time

If you free yourself from the conventional reaction to a quantity like a million years, you free yourself a bit from the boundaries of human time. And then in a way you do not live at all, but in another way you live forever.

 

John McPhee, Annals of the Former World (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000) p. 91

Becoming animal

'Becoming animal' does not mean imitating an animal. Again, it is not about given animal forms but about animal capacities and powers. To become animal is to be drawn into a zone of action or passion that one can have in common with an animal. It is a matter of unlearning physical and emotional habits and learning to take on new ones such that one enlarges the scope of one's relationships and responses to the world.

Christoph Cox, 'Of Humans, Animals and Monsters' in Animals (Whitechapel Gallery Ventures Ltd, 2016) p. 122

Becoming-animal exercises the ethical art of embracing the animal as gifted

In short, becoming-animal exercises the ethical art of embracing the animal as gifted. Through its indifferent hospitality man does not so much become an animal as disintegrate into the visual grounding of all actual beings.

Seung-Hoon Jeung, 'A Global Cinematic Zone of Animal and Technology' in Animals (Whitechapel Gallery Ventures Ltd, 2016) pp. 99-100

Man is the animal that must recognize itself as human to be human

In truth, Linnaeus's genius consists not so much in the resoluteness with which he places man among the primates as in the irony with which he does not record – as he does with other species – any specific identifying characteristic next to the generic name Homo, onlt the old philosophical adage: nosce te ipsum (know yourself). Even in the tenth edition,when the complete denomination becomes Homo sapiens, all evidence suggests that the new epithet doesnot represent a description, but that it is only a simplification of that adage, which, moreover, maintains its position next to the term Homo. It is worth reflecting on this taxonomic anomaly, which assigns not a given, but rather an imperative as a specific difference.

An analysis of the Introitus that opens the Systema leaves no doubts about the sense Linnaeus attributed to his maxim: man has no specific identity other than the ability to recognize himself. Yet to define the human not through any nota characteristica, but rather through his self-knowledge, means that man is the being which recognizes itself as such, that man is the animal that must recognize itself as human to be human.

[...]

Homo is a constitutively 'anthropomorphous' animal (that is, 'resembling man', according to the term that Linnaeus constantly uses until the tenth edition of the Systema), who must recognize himself in a non-man in order to be human.

In mediaeval iconography, the ape holds a mirror in which the man who sins must recognize himself as simia dei (ape of God). In Linnaeus'soptical machine, whoever refuses to recogninze himself in the ape, becomes one.

Giorgio Agamben, 'Taxonomies' in Animals (Whitechapel Gallery Ventures Ltd, 2016), pp. 82-83

To be hospitable to animals, plants and the gods

To say that a human being can offer hospitality only to another man, woman, or child is thus to make humanity an animal species like any other. "Isn't what is peculiar to humans instead their being able to be hospitable to animals, plants . .. and the gods?" says Derrida.

Anne Dufourmantelle, Of Hospitality (Stanford University Press, 2000) p. 140 

Only what is human can truly be foreign

Only what is human can truly be foreign.
The rest is mixed vegetation, subversive moles, and wind.

Wislawa Szymborska, 'Psalm' in View with a Grain of Sand (faber & faber, 1995) p. 100

We are permeable

How can we be so poor as to define ourselves as an ego tied in a sack of skin, or worse, as lumbering automatons pressed into service by gangsterish genes? We are the relationships we share, we are that process of relating, we are, whether we like it or not, permeable – physically, emotionally, spiritually, experientially – to our surroundings. I am the bluebirds and nuthatches that nest here each spring, and they, too, are me. Not metaphorically, but in all physical truth. I am no more than the bond between us. I am only so beautiful as the character of my relationships, only so rich as I enrich those around me, only so alive as I enliven those I greet.

Derrick Jensen, A Language Older Than Words (Chelsea Green Publishing Company, 2004) pp. 126-127

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

Prove that I have imagination

Prove that I have imagination as a human being. Prove that I'm not executing an algorithm. more to the point, prove that my idea that I'm not executing an algorithm isn't just the variety of algorithm that I've been programmed to execute.

Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology (Columbia University Press, 2016) p. 31

Alienation is a mode of enablement

The overall aim must therefore be picked out as an unrelenting project to unbind the necessities of this world and transform them into materials for the further construction of freedom. Such an image of emancipation can never be satisfied with or condensed into a static society, but will instead continually strain beyond any limitations. Freedom is a synthetic enterprise, not a natural gift.

Underlying this idea of emancipation is a vision of humanity as a transformative and constructible hypothesis: one that is built through theoretical and practical experimentation and elaboration. There is no authentic human essence to be realised, no harmonious unity to be returned to, no unalienated humanity obscured by false mediations, no organic wholeness to be achieved. Alienation is a mode of enablement, and humanity is an incomplete vector of transformation. What we are and what we can become are open-ended projects to be constructed in the course of time.

Nick Srnicek & Alex Williams, Inventing the Future (Verso, 2016) p. 82

Den njutningsfyllda glädjen över världens skapnad

Aldrig, aldrig ens under ögonblicken av den mest slösande, den mest besinningslösa lycka övergav dem det högsta, det mest överväldigande: den njutningsfyllda glädjen över världens skapnad, känslan av att själva gå in i tavlan, förnimmelsen av att höra in i hela bildens skönhet, i hela universum.

Endast i denna samhörighet med allt levde och andades de. Därför förblev de oberörda av det moderna daltandet med människan, av människoförgudandet och upphöjandes av människan över den övriga naturen. De till politik förvandlade falska principerna om samhällsutvecklingen var för dem ett ömkligt och obegripligt fuskverk.

Boris Pasternak, Doktor Zjivago (1958) p. 553

Människan bland andra människor det är just människans själ

Men hela tiden är det ett och samma oändligt likartade liv som uppfyller universum och som varje timme förnyas i otaliga föreningar och omvandlingar. Ni är rädd att ni inte ska uppstå från de döda, men ni uppstod redan när ni föddes, utan att ni lade märke till det.

Kommer ni att plågas? Kommer vävnaderna att känna av sitt sönderfall? Det vill med andra ord säga: hur kommer det att gå med ert medvetande? Men vad är medvetandet? Låt oss undersöka den saken. Att medvetet vilja somna innebär verklig sömnlöshet, att medvetet försöka känna sina egna matsmältningsorgan arbeta, det innebär en verklig störning a deras innervation. Medvetandet är ett gift, ett medel till självförgiftning av det subjekt som inriktar det på sig själv. Medvetandet är ett ljus som går i dagen, medvetandet lyser upp vägen framför oss så att vi inte ska snubbla. Medvetandet är de tända lyktorna på ett lokomotiv i rörelse. Rikta dess ljus inåt så inträffar en katastrof.

Hur går det med ert medvetande? Ert. Ert. Vad är ni? Däri ligger knuten. Låt oss reda ut den saken. Hur uppfattar ni er själv, vad är det för del av er som ni är medveten om? Är det njurarna, levern, blodkärlen? Nej, så långt ni kan erinra er har ni alltid bestämt er själv genom era verksamhetsyttringar utom er själv, i familjen, bland främmande människor eller genom era händers verk. Låt oss se närmare på detta. Människan bland andra människor det är just människans själ. Detta är vad ni är, det är i dettas ert medvetande har andats, det är därav det har närt sig, har berusat sig hela livet. Er själ, er odödlighet, ert liv finns hos andra. Än sen? Hos andra har ni varit, hos andra ska ni förbliva. Och vad gör det för skillnad för er, att detta sedan kommer att kallas minne. Detta är ni, sådan ni ingår i det varav framtiden skall bestå.

Boris Pasternak, Doktor Zjivago (1958) p. 75

Revolution är oförenlig med människan

Revolution är oförenlig med människans hjärnas funktionssätt. Det vill säga med människan. Vi klarar inte av att hantera revolutionens inneboende absolutism och plötslighet. Allt människan gör sker gradvis. Alla insikter hon gör, alla tankar, allt som händer och sägs ingår i processer, lager på lager av gjorda erfarenheter. Själva livet levs gradvis, per definition, och medvetandet är gjort sådant, per evolution.

Lena Andersson, Egenmäktigt Förfarande (Natur & Kultur, 2013) p. 50

They know the dawn will come

We Humans must labour to believe, as the other Creatures do not. They know the dawn will come. They can sense it – that ruffling of the half-light, the horizon bestirring itself.

Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood (Virago Press, 2010) p. 279

History has always existed, but not always in its historical form

Man, "the negative being who is solely to the extent that he suppresses Being," is one with time. Man's appropriation of his own nature is at the same time his grasp of the development of the universe. "History is itself a real part of natural history, of the transformation of nature into man" (Marx). Conversely, this "natural history" has no real existence other than through the process of human history, the only vantage point from which one can take in that historical totality (like the modern telescope whose power enables one to look back in time at the receding nebulas at the periphery of the universe). History has always existed, but not always in its historical form. The temporalization of humanity, brought about through the mediation of a society, amounts to a humanization of time. The unconscious movement of time becomes manifest and true within historical consciousness.

Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Soul Bay Press, 2012) p. 100

A machine is merely a supplementary limb

Man, he said, was a machinate mammal. The lower animals keep all their limbs at home in their own bodies, but many of man's are loose, and lie about detached, now here and now there, in various parts of the world – some being kept always handy for contingent use, and others being occasionally hundreds of miles away. A machine is merely a supplementary limb; this is the be all and end all of machinery. We do not use our own limbs other than as machines; and a leg is only a much better wooden leg than any one can manufacture.

Samuel Butler, Erewhon (Penguin Books, 1970) p. 223

Man's soul is a machine-made thing

Man's very soul is due to the machines; it is a machine-made thing: he thinks as he thinks, and feels as he feels, through the work that machines have wrought upon him, and their existence is quite as much as sine quâ non for his, as his for theirs. This fact precludes us from proposing the complete annihilation of machinery, but surely it indicates that we should destroy as many of them as we can possibly dispense with, lest they should tyrannise over us even more completely.

Samuel Butler, Erewhon (Penguin Books, 1970) p. 207

Sympathise with a potato

We find it difficult to sympathise with the emotions of a potato; so we do with those of an oyster. Neither of these things makes a noise on being boiled or opened, and noise appeals to us more strongly than anything else, because we make so much about our own sufferings. Since, then, they do not annoy us by any expression of pain we call them emotionless; and so quâ mankind they are; but mankind is not everybody.

Samuel Butler, Erewhon (Penguin Books, 1970) p. 201

We are all robbers

For property is robbery, but then, we are all robbers or would-be robbers together, and have found it essential to organise our thieving, as we have found it necessary to organise our lust and our revenge. Property, marriage, the law; as the bed to the river, to rule and convention to the instinct; and woe to him who tampers with the banks while the flood is flowing.

Samuel Butler, Erewhon (Penguin Books, 1970) p. 120

Fulfilment is a function of time

If you evade suffering you also evade the chance of joy. Pleasure you may get, or pleasures, but you will not be fulfilled. You will not know what it is to come home.
[...]
Fulfilment, Shevek thought, is a function of time. The search for pleasure is circular, repetitive, atemporal. The variety-seeking of the spectator, the thrill-hunter, the sexually promiscuous, always ends in the same place. It has an end. It comes to the end and has to start over. It is not a journey and return, but a closed cycle, a locked room, a cell.
Outside the locked room is the landscape of time, in which the spirit may, with luck and courage, construct the fragile, makeshift, improbable roads and cities of fidelity: a landscape inhabitable by human beings.
It is not until an act occurs within the landscape of the past and the future that it is a human act. Loyalty, which asserts the continuity of past and future, binding time into a whole, is the root of human strength; there is no good to be done without it.

Ursula Le Guin, The Dispossessed (Gollancz, 2002) pp. 275-276