Life does not consist of choices

"You say that if you had to choose between being a professor at a university and being a farm labourer, you would choose to be a professor. But life does not consist of choices. That is where you keep going wrong. Pablo did not start out as some disincarnate soul given a choice between being king of Spain and being the village idiot. He came to earth, and when he opened his human eyes and looked around, behold, he was in San Juan Obispo, and he was the lowest of the low. Life as a set of problems to be solved; life as a set of choices to be made: what a bizarre way of seeing things!"

J.M. Coetzee, 'The Old Woman and the Cats' in Cripplewood (Yale University Press, 2013) pp. 24-25

Invisibility isn't a quality of the object

"There are no invisible objects of perception," she replies. "Invisibility isn't a quality of the object. It is a quality, a capacity, an incapacity, of the observer. I call the soul invisible if I can't see it. That says something about me. It says nothing about the soul."

J.M. Coetzee, 'The Old Woman and the Cats' in Cripplewood (Yale University Press, 2013) p.10

When we speak of time

When we speak of time in the everyday sense, what we are referring to is a remarkable interplay of stability and change. In time, the objects of sense do not seem motionless and fixed, but are displayed as encrusted with shifting features. Nonetheless, experience does not decay in each instant into an untethered kaleidoscope of discontinuous sensations; instead, there seem to be sensual objects of greater or lesser durability. Time is the name for this tension between sensual objects and their sensual qualities. When we speak instead of space, everyone will recall the old quarrel between Leibniz and Clarke over whether space is an absolute container or simply a matter of relations between things. But in fact it is neither: for space is not just the site of relation, but rather of relation and non-relation. Sitting at the moment in Cairo, I am not entirely without relation to the Japanese city of Osaka, since in principle I could travel there on any given day. But this relation can never be total, since I do not currently touch the city, and even when I travel to stand in the exact center of Osaka I will not exhaust its reality. Whatever sensual profile the city displays to me, even if from close range, this profile will differ from the real Osaka that forever withdraws into the shadows of being. This interplay of relation and non-relation is precisely what we mean when we speak of space, and in this respect Heidegger's tool-analysis is actually about space, not about time as he wrongly contends. Space is the tension between concealed real objects and the sensual qualities associated with them.

Graham Harman, The Quadruple Object (Zero Books, 2011) p. 100

The thing as portrayed by the natural sciences

If we weigh and measure a thing, describe its physical properties, or note its objective position in space-time, these qualities hold good for the thing only insofar as it relates to us or to something else. In short, the thing as portrayed by the natural sciences is the thing made dependent on our knowledge, and not in its untamed, subterranean reality.

Graham Harman, The Quadruple Object (Zero Books, 2011) pp. 53-54

Something sandy or stony in the human soul

All relations are on exactly the same footing. This does not entail a projection of human properties onto the non-human world, but rather the reverse: what it says is that the crude prehensions made by minerals and dirt are no less relations than are the sophisticated mental activity of humans. Instead of placing souls into sand and stones we find something sandy or stony in the human soul.

Graham Harman, The Quadruple Object (Zero Books, 2011) p. 46

The feeling that one is living a lie is still a truth

There's a truth beneath every gesture, every practice, every relationship, and every situation. We usually just avoid it, manage it, which produces the madness of so many in our era. In reality, everything involves everything else. The feeling that one is living a lie is still a truth.

The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection (semiotext(e), 2009) p. 97

The logic of insurrection

To no longer wait is, in one way or another, to enter into the logic of insurrection. It is once again to hear the slight but always present trembling of terror in the voices of our leaders. Because governing has never been anything other than postponing by a thousand subterfuges the moment when the crowd will string you up, and every act of government is nothing but a way of not losing control of the population.

The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection (semiotext(e), 2009) p. 96

An entity in its death throes sacrifices itself as a content in order to survive as a form

The West is a civilization that has survived all the prophecies of its collapse with a singular stratagem. Just as the bourgeoisie had to deny itself as a class in order to permit the bourgeoisification of society as a whole, from the worker to the baron; just as capital had to sacrifice itself as a wage relation in order to impose itself as a social relation – becoming cultural capital and health capital in addition to finance capital; just as Christianity had to sacrifice itself as a religion in order to survive as an affective structure – as a vague injunction to humility, compassion, and weakness; so the West has sacrificed itself as a particular civilization in order to impose itself as a universal culture. The operation can be summarized like this: an entity in its death throes sacrifices itself as a content in order to survive as a form.

The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection (semiotext(e), 2009) p. 91

Outrun its own collapse

The world would not be moving so fast if it didn't have to constantly outrun its own collapse.

The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection (semiotext(e), 2009) p. 60

Urban space is the means of confrontation

Urban space is more than just the theater of confrontation, it is also the means. This echoes the advice of Blanqui who recommended (in this case for the party of insurrection) that the future insurgents of Paris take over the houses on the barricaded streets to protect their positions, that they should bore holes in the walls to allow passage between houses, break down the ground floor stairwells and poke holes in the ceilings to defend themselves against potential attackers, rip out the doors and use them to barricade the windows, and turn each floor into a gun turret.

The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection (semiotext(e), 2009) p. 58

To cover the planet with glass

The metropolis is this simultaneous death of city and country. It is the crossroads where all the petty bourgeois come together, in the middle of this middle class that stretches out indefinitely, as much a result of rural flight as of urban sprawl. To cover the planet with glass would fit perfectly the cynicism of contemporary architecture.

The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection (semiotext(e), 2009) p. 54

Living flesh weaving the flesh of the world

They want to make our self something sharply defined, separate, assessable in terms of qualities, controllable, when in fact we are creatures among creatures, singularities among similars, living flesh weaving the flesh of the world. Contrary to what has been repeated to us since childhood, intelligence doesn't mean knowing how to adapt  – or if that is a kind of intelligence, it's the intelligence of slaves.

The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection (semiotext(e), 2009) pp. 33-34

The freedom to uproot oneself

The freedom to uproot oneself has always been a phantasmic freedom. We can't rid ourselves of what binds us without at the same time losing the very thing to which our forces would be applied.

The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection (semiotext(e), 2009) p. 32

Crisis is a means of governing

Crisis is a means of governing. In a world that seems to hold together only through the infinite management of its own collapse.

The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection (semiotext(e), 2009) p. 14

Doomed by hope

"Men can imagine their own deaths, they can see them coming, and the mere thought of impending death acts like an aphrodisiac. A dog or a rabbit doesn't behave like that. Take birds – in a lean season they cut down on their eggs, or they won't mate at all. They put their energy into staying alive themselves until times get better. But human beings hope they can stick their souls into someone else, some new version of themselves, and live on forever."
"As a species we're doomed by hope, then?"
"You could call it hope. That, or desperation."
"But we're doomed without hope, as well," said Jimmy.
"Only as individuals," said Crake cheerfully.

Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake (Virago Press, 2004) p. 139