"When we have knowledge, don't we lose everything but our knowledge?" she asked pathetically. "If I know about the flower, don't I lose the flower and have only the knowledge? Aren't we exchanging the substance for the shadow, aren't we forfeiting life for this dead quality of knowledge? And what does it mean to me after all? What does all this knowing mean to me? It means nothing."
"You are merely making words," he said; "knowledge means everything to you. Even your animalism, you want it in your head. you don't want to be an animal, you want to observe your own animal functions, to get a mental thrill out of them. It is all purely secondary – and more decadent than the most hide-bound intellectualism. What is it but the worst and last form of intellectualism, this love of yours for passion and the animal instincts? Passion and the instincts – you want them hard enough, but through your head, in your consciousness. It all takes place in your head, under that skull of yours. Only you won't be conscious of what actually is: you want the lie that will match the rest of your furniture."

D.H. Lawrence, Women In Love, (Penguin Books, 1976) p. 45

Originally published in 1921

För övrigt avskyr jag samhället, ty det vilar ej på fritt fördrag, det är en vävnad av lögn - och jag flyr det med nöje!

August Strindberg, Röda Rummet (Norstedts Pocket, 2007) p. 17
Originally published in 1879

Nu kan jag analysera den mycket omatalade konstnärsdriften, eftersom jag själv varit ute för den. Den vilar ytterst på en bred bas av frihetsbegär, frihet från nyttigt arbete; därför har också en tysk filosof definierat det sköna = det onyttiga; ty om ett konstverk vill vara nyttigt, röjer en avsikt eller tendens är det fult; vidare vilar driften på högmod; människan vill i konsten leka Gud, icke som om hon skulle kunna göra något nytt (det kan hon inte!), utan göra om, förbättra, arrangera. Hon börjar icke med att beundra förebilderna d.v.s. naturen, utan hon börjar med kritik. Man ser allt så bristfälligt och vill göra det bättre. Detta högmod som driver och denna frihet från syndafallets förbannelse, arbetet, gör att artisten känner sig stå över andra människor, vilket han på visst sätt gör, men han får också behov att ständigt påminnas härom, ty eljes kommer han lätt underfund med sig själv - det vill säga han finner intigheten i sin verksamhet och det oberättigade i sin flykt från det nyttiga. Detta ständiga behov av erkännande av sitt onyttiga arbete gör honom fåfäng, orolig, och ofta djupt olycklig - blir han sig själv klar, upphör ofta hans produktionsförmåga och han går under, ty att återvända i oket när han en gång smakat friheten, det kan endast den religiöse.

August Strindberg, Röda Rummet (Norstedts Pocket, 2007) pp. 275-276
Originally published in 1879

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