But the notion of 'the end of history' also expresses a blockage of the historical imagination, and we need to see more clearly how that is so, and how it ends up seeming to offer only this particular concept as a viable alternative. It seems to me particularly significant that the emergence of late capitalism [...], along with the consequent collapse of the communist systems in the East, coincided with a generalized and planetary ecological disaster. It is not particularly the rise of the ecological movements I have in mind here [...]; rather, it is the end of a Promethean conception of production that seems to me significant, in the way that it makes it difficult for people today to continue to imagine development as a conquest of nature.

Fredric Jameson, The Cultural Turn (Verso, 1998) p. 91

The function of the sublime, the modern, of the one half of art, is taken over by Theory; but this also leaves room for the survival of art's other half, namely the Beautiful, which now invests the cultural realm at the moment in which the production of the modern has gradually dried up. This is the other face of postmodernity, the return of Beauty and the decorative, in the place of the older modern Sublime, the abandonment by art of the quest for the Absolute or of truth claims and its redefinition as a source of sheer pleasure and gratification (rather than, as in the modern, of jouissance). Both Theory and the Beautiful are constituent elements of that 'end of art' which was the postmodern.

Fredric Jameson, The Cultural Turn (Verso, 1998) p. 86

Imagine models floating above each other as in distinct dimensions: it is not their homologies that prove suggestive or fruitful, but rather the infinitesimal divergences, the imperceptible lack of fit between the levels – extrapolated out into a continuum whose stages range from the pre-choate and the quizzical gap, to the nagging tension and the sharpness of contradiction itself – genuine thinking always taking place within empty places, these voids that suddenly appear between the most powerful conceptual schemes. Thinking is thus not the concept, but the breakdown in the relationships between the individual concepts, isolated in their splendour like so many galactic systems, drifting apart in the empty mind of the world.

Fredric Jameson, The Cultural Turn (Verso, 1998) p. 76

One cannot, consequently, admit the crude separation of sciences and arts prescribed by modern Western culture. As we know, it has as its corollary the relegation of the arts and literature to the miserable function of distracting human beings from what hounds and harasses them all the time, i.e. the obsession of controlling time. [...] It must never be forgotten that if thinking indeed consists in receiving the event, it follows that no-one can claim to think without being ipso facto in a position of resistance to the procedures for controlling time.

To think is to question everything, including thought, and question, and the process. To question requires that something happen that reason has not yet known. In thinking, one accepts the occurrence for what it is: 'not yet' determined. One does not prejudge it, and there is no security. Peregrination in the desert. One cannot write without bearing witness to the abyss of time in its coming.

Jean-François Lyotard, The Inhuman (Polity Press, 1993) p. 74

Modernity is not, I think, a historical period, but a way of shaping a sequence of moments in such a way that it accepts a high rate of contingency.

Jean-François Lyotard, The Inhuman (Polity Press, 1993) p. 68

It scarcely seems that this generalized accessibility offered by the new cultural goods is strictly speaking a progress. The penetration of techno-scientific apparatus into the cultural field in no way signifies an increase of knowledge, sensibility, tolerance and liberty. Reinforcing this apparatus does not liberate the spirit, as the Aufklärung thought. Experience shows rather the reverse: a new barbarism, illiteracy and impoverishment of language, new poverty, merciless remodelling of opinion by the media, immiseration of the mind, obsolescence of the soul, as Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno repeatedly stressed.

Jean-François Lyotard, The Inhuman (Polity Press, 1993) p. 63

Postmodernity is not a new age, but the rewriting of some of the features claimed by modernity, and first of all modernity's claim to ground its legitimacy on the project of liberating humanity as a whole through science and technology.

Jean-François Lyotard, The Inhuman (Polity Press, 1993) p. 34

For it is of the essence of desire to desire also to free iself of itself, because desire is intolerable. So one believes one can put an end to desire, and one fulfils its end (this is the ambiguity of the word end, aim and cessation: the same ambiguity as with desire). One tries to remember, and this is probably a good way of forgetting again.

Jean-François Lyotard, The Inhuman (Polity Press, 1993) p. 29

The striking thing about this metaphysics of development is that it needs no finality. Development is not attached to an Idea, like that of the emancipation of reason and of human freedoms. It is reproduced by accelerating and extending itself according to its internal dynamic alone. [...] It has no necessity itself other than a cosmological chance.

It has thus no end, but it does have a limit, the expectation of the life of the sun. The anticipated explosion of this star is the only challenge objectively posed to development.

Jean-François Lyotard, The Inhuman (Polity Press, 1993) p. 7

Consensus does violence to the heterogeneity of language games. And invention is always born of dissension. Postmodern knowledge is not simply a tool of the authorities; it refines our sensitivity to differences and reinforces our ability to tolerate the incommensurable. Its principle is not the expert's homology, but the inventor's paralogy.

Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Manchester University Press, 1984) p. xxv

Moral law is an invention of mankind for the disenfranchisement of the powerful in favor of the weak. Historical law subverts it at every turn. A moral view can never be proven right or wrong by any ultimate test. A man falling dead in a duel is not thought thereby to be proven in error as to his views. His very involvement in such a trial gives evidence of a new and broader view. The willingness of the principals to forgo further argument as the triviality which it in fact is and to petition directly the chambers of the historical absolute clearly indicates of how little moment are the opinions and of what great moment the divergences thereof. For the argument is indeed trivial, but not so the separate wills thereby made manifest. Man's vanity may well approach the infinite in capacity but his knowledge remains imperfect and howevermuch he comes to value his judgements ultimately he must submit them before a higher court.

Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian (Picador, 2010) p. 263-264

The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a muddled field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.

The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man's mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.

Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian (Picador, 2010) p. 258-259

To believe in God is, therefore, to doubt his existence, his manifestness, his presence. In fact, faith is the spiritual impulse which reveals the profoundest uncertainty about the existence of God (but it is the same with all theological virtues: hope is the spiritual impulse which betrays the deepest despair at the real state of things and charity the spiritual impulse which betrays the deepest contempt for others).

Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End (Polity Press, 1994) p.92

It is generally thought that the obsession with survival is a logical consequence of life and the right to life. But, most of the time, the two things are contradictory. Life is not a question of rights, and what follows on from life is not survival, which is artificial, but death. it is only by paying the price of a failure to live, a failure to take pleasure, a failure to die that man is assured of survival.

Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End (Polity Press, 1994) p.87

The effects produced by the finite nature of the earth, for the first time contrasting violently with the infinity of our development, are such that our species is automatically switching over to collective suicide.

Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End (Polity Press, 1994) p.83