Brooks Brown

“it is our perpetual dissatisfaction with ourselves that causes us to approach the world as a space of possibility that has the power to awaken our attention and make us marvel at its vibrant details.”
― Mari Ruti, A World of Fragile Things: Psychoanalysis and the Art of Living

“we are tempted to erase the unsettling elements of the other's alterity-the ways in which the other does not coincide with our fantasies-because we imagine that, by so doing, we manage to stabilize our lives. Rather than allowing ourselves to be surprised by the other, rather than allowing the other to touch us in unforeseen and potentially enlivening ways, we resort to idealizations that seem to guarantee the reliability of our life-worlds. In this manner, we deprive ourselves of the kinds of transformations that can only ensue from a courageous encounter with the other's irreducible alterity.”
― Mari Ruti, A World of Fragile Things: Psychoanalysis and the Art of Living

“There are now very few significant interludes of human existence (with the colossal exception of sleep) that have not been penetrated and taken over as work time, consumption time, or marketing time.”
― Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep

“an entity is free when it can deploy its immanent potential without being impeded by any external obstacle.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism