“This is exactly what's so pernicious about the morality of debt: the way that financial imperatives constantly try to reduce us all, despite ourselves, to the equivalent of pillagers, eyeing the world simply for what can be turned into money - and then tell us that it's only those who are willing to see the world as pillagers who deserve access to the resources required to pursue anything in life other than money. It introduces moral perversions on almost every level.”
― Debt: The First 5,000 Years
― Debt: The First 5,000 Years
“[A] religious text has depth. The reader of Kafka's texts, however, can feel no such confidence in even the partial recuperation of deeper meaning. As Adorno notes, it is characteristic of Kafka's texts that "words, [and] metaphors in particular, detach themselves and achieve a certain autonomy." The experience of reading Kafka in this sense is the very opposite to theological interpretation: it defeats the religious hope that one might pierce the surface of these autonomous words to reach a level of ultimate meaning. Not without cause does Adorno call Kafka "the parabolist of impenetrability".”
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“Again and again we are asked to choose between freedom and security when in truth there is no security without freedom. In both dictatorships and democracies, the agencies of "national security", acting secretively and unaccountably, have regularly violated both our freedom and our security, practicing every known form of repression, corruption, and deceit.”
― Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism
― Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism
“Ecology's implications for capitalism are too horrendous for the capitalist to contemplate.”
― Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism
― Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism
“If God really existed, as Cécile thought, he could have provided more clues about his opinions. God was a very poor communicator, such amateurism would not be allowed in a professional context.”
― Anéantir
― Anéantir
Isaac’s 2025 Year in Books
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