Only unreason can be thought as eternal

It is perfectly possible to conceive of a time determined by the governance of fixed laws disappearing in something other than itself – it would disappear in another time governed by alternative laws. But only the time that harbours the capacity to destroy every determinate reality, while obeying no determinate law – the time capable of destroying, without reason or law, both worlds and things – can be thought as an absolute. Only unreason can be thought as eternal, because only unreason can be thought as at once anhypothetical and absolute. Accordingly, we can say that it is possible to demonstrate the absolute necessity of everything's non-necessity. In other words, it is possible to establish, through indirect demonstration, the absolute necessity of the contingency of everything.

Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude (Continuum, 2008) p. 62

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

Everything could collapse

Everything could actually collapse: from trees to stars, from stars to laws, from physical laws to logical laws; and this not by virtue of some superior law whereby everything is destined to perish, but by virtue of the absence of any superior law capable of preserving anything, no matter what, from perishing.

Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude (Continuum, 2008) p. 53

The meaning of scientific statements

How are we to grasp the meaning of scientific statements bearing explicitly upon manifestation of the world that is posited as anterior to the emergence of thought and even of life – posited, that is, as anterior to every form of human relation to the world? Or, to put it more precisely: how are we to think the meaning of a discourse which construes the relation to the world – that of thinking and/or living – as a fact inscribed in a temporality within which this relation is just one event among others, inscribed in an order of succession in which it is merely a stage, rather than an origin?

Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude (Continuum, 2008) pp. 9-10

The peak mentality

Why do we need to identify certain things as peaks? Why isn't the fabric more important than peaks? It should be. Why can't the fabric of our so-called common life be the peak [of human achievement]? Why do we have to go to churches to have a peak experience, to a great temple in Greece – I am against this trivial peak-thinking, this peak-mentality in art or in architecture.

Lebbeus Woods, 'Round Table Discussion: Positions In Art' in Positions in Art (MAK, 1994) p. 148

A society of laborers without labor

Freedom from labor itself is not new; it once belonged among the most firmly established privileges of the few. In this instance, it seems as though scientific progress and technical development had been only taken advantage of to achieve something about which all former ages dreamed but which none had been able to realize.
However, this is so only in appearance. The modern age has carried with it a theoretical glorification of labor and has resulted in a factual transformation of the whole of society into a laboring society. the fulfilment of the wish, therefor, like the fulfilment of wishes in fairy tales, comes at a moment when it can only be self-defeating. It is a society of laborers which is about to be liberated from the fetters of labor, and this society does no longer know of those higher and more meaningful activities for the sake of which this freedom would deserve to be won. Within this society, which is egalitarian because this is labor's way of making men live together, there is no class left, no aristocracy of either a political or spiritual nature from which a restoration of the other capacities of man could start anew. Even presidents, kings, and prime ministers think of their offices in terms of a job necessary for the life of society, and among the intellectuals, only solitary individuals are left who consider what they are doing in terms of work and not in terms of making a living. What we are confronted with is the prospect of a society of laborers without labor, that is, without the only activity left to them. Surely, nothing could be worse.

Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (University of Chicago Press, 1998) pp. 4-5

Knowledge and thought have parted company for good

But it could be that we, who are earth-bound creatures and have begun to act as though we were dwellers of the universe, will forever be unable to understand, that is to think and speak about the things which nevertheless we are able to do. In this case, it would be as though our brain, which constitutes the physical, material condition of our thoughts, were unable to follow what we do, so that from now on we would indeed need artificial machines to do our thinking and speaking. If it should turn out to be true that knowledge (in the modern sense of know-how) and thought have parted company for good, then we would indeed become the helpless slaves, not so much of our machines as of our know-how, thoughtless creatures at the mercy of every gadget which is technically possible, no matter how murderous it is.

Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (University of Chicago Press, 1998) p. 3

The geologic now of the Anthropocene

The problematic of globalization allows us to read climate change only as a crisis of capitalist management. While there is no denying that climate change has profoundly to do with the history of capital, a critique that is only a critique of capital is not sufficient for addressing questions relating to human history once the crisis of climate change has been acknowledged and the Anthropocene has begun to loom on the horizon of our present. The geologic now of the Anthropocene has become entangled with the now of human history.

Dipesh Chakrabarty, 'The Climate of History' in Critical Inquiry, 35, Winter 2009, p. 212

Augmenting reality

Far from producing only weakened images of reality – shadows, as in the Platonic treatment of the eikõn in painting or writing – literary works depict reality by augmenting it with meanings that themselves depend upon the virtues of abbreviation, saturation, and culmination, so strikingly illustrated by emplotment.

Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative (The University of Chicago Press, 1984) p. 80

The history of the defeated and the lost

We tell stories because in the last analysis human lives need and merit being narrated. This remark takes on its full force when we refer to the necessity to save the history of the defeated and the lost. The whole history of suffering cries out for vengeance and calls for narrative.

Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative (The University of Chicago Press, 1984) p. 75

Narrative and time

Time becomes human to the extent that it is articulated through a narrative mode, and narrative attains its full meaning when it becomes a condition of temporal existence.

Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative (The University of Chicago Press, 1984) p. 52

The extension of expectation and memory

It is in the soul, hence as an impression, that expectation and memory possess extension. But the impression is in the soul only inasmuch as the mind acts, that is, expects, attends, and remembers.

Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative (The University of Chicago Press, 1984) p. 19

Time is a distention of the soul

Since I measure the movement of a body by time and not the other way around – since a long time can only be measured by a short time – and since no physical movement offers a fixed unit of measurement for comparison, the movement of the stars being assumed to be variable – it remains that the extension of time is a distention of the soul.

Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative (The University of Chicago Press, 1984) pp. 15-16