Gilles Châtelet > Quotes

“[..] neoproletariat caste, the future cybercattle of neurocracy, joyous sophisticate of the always-incomplete chain of predation, primed by silos of soya, stocks of onions, pork bellies…and completed by the global apotheosis of the Great Futures Market of neurolivestock, more volatile (and more profitable) than all the livestock of the Great Plains. Neurolivestock certainly enjoy an existence more comfortable than serfs or millworkers, but they do not easily escape their destiny as the self-regulating raw material of a market as predictable and as homogeneous as a perfect gas, a matter counted in atoms of distress, stripped of all powers of negotiation, renting out their mental space, brain by brain.”
― Gilles Châtelet, To Live and Think Like Pigs: The Incitement of Envy and Boredom in Market Democracies

“It is not quite correct that a higher rate of participation is always favourable for democracy…. A growth in the rate of participation can indicate a weakening of social cohesion which will lead democracy to its death; inversely, the widespread opinion that ‘voting can’t change much’, by diminishing participation, can contribute to the stability of the regime.”
― Gilles Châtelet, To Live and Think Like Pigs: The Incitement of Envy and Boredom in Market Democracies

“Money? It’s the oh-so-simple miracle that allows you to take home veal in your shopping bag…’, the Trader-Knights repeat, forgetting that behind the head of veal or the pork cutlet there is a futures market in livestock and pork bellies, and that behind that market looms the futures market of exchange rates, interest rates and so many other levels all the way down to absolute volatility, all utterly inaccessible to those bit-part players in the great comedy of trading, the small individual shareholders.”
― Gilles Châtelet, To Live and Think Like Pigs: The Incitement of Envy and Boredom in Market Democracies

“In a state of perfect competition, there is no longer any competition, and the promise of a ‘purely informational’ world of thermostat-citizens is a phantasm just as puerile as the perpetual motion machine!”
― Gilles Châtelet, To Live and Think Like Pigs: The Incitement of Envy and Boredom in Market Democracies

“Bergson shows firstly that any theory of knowledge that wishes to be consequent will have to start out by destroying the type of superstition that leads us to imagine that there could be no order at all.”
― Gilles Châtelet, To Live and Think Like Pigs: The Incitement of Envy and Boredom in Market Democracies

“Help me to trans form myself into a perfect great alembic and into a perfect great centrifage-perfect like all these financial markets that taunt me and which, unlike me, do not have mouths to feed, to care for and to educate." Everyone agrees on the remedy. 'Above all, modernity is a diet: keep on slimming down! Tell your poor that they are not exploited but are losers, klutzes, and that some civil societies are far less lenient. . . bird societies, for example:The highest branches are reserved for the strongest, who shit as they wish upon occupants of lower branches .Imagine those a t the bottom who harvest the whole lot !There is even a bit of social mobility: some individuals on the second branch manage to hoist themselves up to the first, and so on. Quite a lesson for this bunch of klutzes !”
― Gilles Châtelet, To Live and Think Like Pigs: The Incitement of Envy and Boredom in Market Democracies

“Resplendent in the Sunday best of human rights and free will, our tapeworm-citizens flatter themselves with having driven out ‘barbarism’, with having finally attained the ideal of the weak, the slave morality of which Nietzsche says that it ‘first has to have an opposing, external world, it needs, physiologically speaking, external stimuli in order to act at all,—its action is basically a reaction’.”
― Gilles Châtelet, To Live and Think Like Pigs: The Incitement of Envy and Boredom in Market Democracies