Fariz

“(…) Il potere non è più infatti clerico-fascista, non è più repressivo. Non possiamo più usare contro di esso gli argomenti – a cui eravamo tanto abituati e quasi affezionati – che tanto abbiamo adoperato contro il potere clerico-fascista, contro il potere repressivo. Il nuovo potere consumistico e permissivo si è valso proprio delle nostre conquiste mentali di laici, di illuministi, di razionalisti, per costruire la propria impalcatura di falso laicismo, di falso illuminismo, di falsa razionalità. (…) Ha portato al limite massimo la sua unica possibile sacralità: la sacralità del consumo come rito, e, naturalmente, della merce come feticcio.”
― Pier Paolo Pasolini

“you will recognize happines
when you see it die”
― Georges Bataille, The Collected Poems of Georges Bataille

“Those who wish to seek out the cause of miracles and to understand the things of nature as philosophers, and not to stare at them in astonishment like fools, are soon considered heretical and impious, and proclaimed as such by those whom the mob adores as the interpreters of nature and the gods. For these men know that, once ignorance is put aside, that wonderment would be taken away, which is the only means by which their authority is preserved.”
― Baruch De Spinoza, Ethics

“Irony and cynicism were just what the U.S. hypocrisy of the fifties and sixties called for. That’s what made the early postmodernists great artists. The great thing about irony is that it splits things apart, gets up above them so we can see the flaws and hypocrisies and duplicates. The virtuous always triumph? Ward Cleaver is the prototypical fifties father? "Sure." Sarcasm, parody, absurdism and irony are great ways to strip off stuff’s mask and show the unpleasant reality behind it. The problem is that once the rules of art are debunked, and once the unpleasant realities the irony diagnoses are revealed and diagnosed, "then" what do we do? Irony’s useful for debunking illusions, but most of the illusion-debunking in the U.S. has now been done and redone. Once everybody knows that equality of opportunity is bunk and Mike Brady’s bunk and Just Say No is bunk, now what do we do? All we seem to want to do is keep ridiculing the stuff. Postmodern irony and cynicism’s become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy. Few artists dare to try to talk about ways of working toward redeeming what’s wrong, because they’ll look sentimental and naive to all the weary ironists. Irony’s gone from liberating to enslaving. There’s some great essay somewhere that has a line about irony being the song of the prisoner who’s come to love his cage.”
― David Foster Wallace