Dans quelques années, quand je t'aurai oublié et que d'autres histoires comme celle-là, par la force encore de l'habitude, arriveront encore, je me souviendrai de toi comme de l'oubli de l'amour même. Je penserai à cette histoire comme à l'horreur de l'oubli ; je le sais déjà.

Marguerite Duras/Alain Resnais, Hiroshima, Mon Amour, 1959

Democracy is not a fixed political form of society, but rather [...] the deformation of society from itself through the act of material political manifestation. Democracy is a political process, the movement of democratization, which comes close to the idea of direct democracy [...]. On my view, democratization consists in the manifestation of dissensus, in demonstration as demos-stration, manifesting the presence of those who do not count. Democratization is politicization, it is the cultivation of what might be called politicities, zones of hegemonic struggle that work against the consensual idyll of the state. Such a disturbance of the state does not have to be teleologically linked to the construction of an archic nation-subject, but rather towards the cultivation of an anarchic multiplicity.

Simon Critchley, Infinitely Demanding; Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance (Verso, 2007) pp. 129-130

Love is what gives consistency to an ethical subject, which allows it to persevere with a process of truth.
Love binds itself to justice on the basis of hope. The hope is that justice will be done and the subjective maxim is [...] Beckett's 'Continuez!' That is, continue in your conviction and love your neighbour as yourself. That is, we might define hope as political love.

Simon Critchley, Infinitely Demanding; Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance (Verso, 2007) p. 44

Ethics cannot be based on any pre-given account of the subject, because the subject is not something that one is, but is rather something that one becomes. One can only speak of the subject in Badiou as a subject-in-becoming insofar as it shapes itself in relation to the demand apprehended in a situation.

Simon Critchley, Infinitely Demanding; Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance (Verso, 2007) p. 44

Philosophical activity, by which I mean the free movement of thought and critical reflection, is defined by militant resistance of nihilism. That is, philosophy is defined by the thinking through of the fact that the basis of meaning has become meaningless.

Simon Critchley, Infinitely Demanding; Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance (Verso, 2007) p. 2

My work is real, not illusionary or conceptual. It is about real stones, real time, real actions.

Richard Long, Richard Long Selected Statements and Interviews (Haunch of Venison, 2007) p. 16

Argumentet "Kanske jag drömmer" är meningslöst därför att jag i så fall också drömmer detta yttrande, ja, t.o.m. detta att dessa ord betyder något.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Om Visshet (Thales: 1992) p. 57
Originally published in 1969

For Hegel, the world in its historical dimension is the dialectical revelation of consciousness to itself. In his curious idiom, the end of history comes when Spirit achieves awareness of its identity as Spirit, not, that is to say, alienated from itself by ignorance of its proper nature, but united to itself through itself: by recognizing that it is in this one instance of the same substance as its object, since consciousness of consciousness is consciousness.

Arthur C. Danto, The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art (Columbia University Press, 2005) p. 15

On the one hand, there have started into life industrial and scientific forces which no epoch of former human history had ever suspected. On the other hand, there exist symptoms of decay, far surpassing the horrors recorded of the latter times of the Roman empire. In our days everything seems pregnant wth its contrary. Machinery, gifted with the wonderful power of shortening and fructifying human labour, we behold starving and overworking it. The newfangled sources of wealth, by some strange weird spell, are turned into sources of want. The victories of art seem bought by the loss of character. At the same time that mankind masters nature, man seems to become enslaved to other men or to his own infamy. Even the pure light of science seems unable to shine but on the dark background of ignorance. All our invention and progress seem to result in endowing material forces with intellectual life, and in stultifying human life into a material force. This antagonism between modern industry and science on the one hand, modern misery and dissolution on the other hand; this antagonism between the productive powers, and the social relations of our epoch is a fact, palpable, overwhelming, and not to be controverted.

Karl Marx, Speech at Anniversary of the People's Paper (1856)

I don't think it's relativism. To say that one needs art, or politics, that incorporate ambiguity and contradiction is not to say that one then stops recognizing and condemning things as evil. However, it might stop one being so utterly convinced of the certainty of one's own solutions. There needs to be a strong understanding of fallibility and how the very act of certainty or authoritativeness can bring disasters.

William Kentridge, William Kentridge (Phaidon Press Limited: 1999) p. 34

In the instant she depresses the shutter everything is changed. This sudden opening of the gate in the mechanism allows the photographer to slip through the gap to the space in front of the lens, the space that is seen. In doing so she impresses her governing role onto the scene, coating the subjects with something indefinable form her own presence. Her presence is, after all, hidden in the photograph but dominant in the moment of photographing. The act of photography is a metaphysical relation that differs entirely from the resultant photograph in that the photograph obscures the nature of the actual event.
The man puts the child down and the other runs off. The leaves of the potted plant sway up and down on long, cantilevered stems. They all exit. This end is always about to happen; the illusion of suspended time is wholly misleading.

M. Anthony Penwill, It Has To Be This Way (Matt's Gallery: 2009) pp. 31-32

Instead of culminating in hoped-for emancipation, the advances of technology and "Reason" made it that much easier to exploit the South of planet earth, blindly replace human labour by machines, and set up more and more sophisticated subjugation techniques, all through a general rationalisation of the production process. So the modern emancipation plan has been substituted by countless forms of melancholy.

Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (Les presses du réel: 2002) p. 12

What does it mean to say that something is a drawing – as opposed to a fundamentally different form, such as a photograph? First of all, arriving at the image is a process, not a frozen instant. Drawing for me is about fluidity. There may be a vague sense of what you're going to draw, but things occur during the process that may modify, consolidate or shed doubts on what you know. So drawing is a testing of ideas; a slow-motion version of thought. It does not arrive instantly like a photograph. The uncertain and imprecise way of constructing a drawing is sometimes a model of how to construct meaning. What ends in clarity does not begin that way.

William Kentridge, William Kentridge (Phaidon: 1999) p. 8

De gamla som redan är döda skall man inte ta på allvar, då gör man dem orätt. Vi odödliga tycker inte om att bli tagna på allvar, vi älskar skämtet. Allvaret, min gosse, är en sak som hör hemma i tiden; det uppstår, så mycket vill jag tala om för dig, när man överskattar tiden. [...] Men i evigheten, ser du, finns ingen tid; evigheten är blott ett ögonblick och varar just lagom länge för ett skämt.

Herman Hesse, Stäppvargen (Albert Bonniers Förlag: 2003) p. 77
Originally published in 1955

There is always hope, but that must be combined with irony, and more important, skepticism. The context of knowledge is changing constantly.

Anselm Kiefer, "Heaven Is An Idea" in Anselm Kiefer, Heaven and Earth (Prestel: 2005) p. 166