“I am only astonished that, while so many women have intelligent things to say and so many men are still unknown, a publisher cared to print such a little book, and at such a price. That confirms what Schopenhauer reveals to us, among other truths: philosophy is a matter of death. A philosopher living and thinking life is a priori suspect in our philosophical culture.”
― Between East and West: From Singularity to Community
― Between East and West: From Singularity to Community
“Demanding yet denying the human condition makes for an explosive contradiction. And explode it does, as you and I know. And we live in an age of conflagration: it only needs the rising birth rate to worsen the food shortage, it only needs the newly born to fear living a little more than dying, and for the torrent of violence to sweep away all the barriers. In Algeria and Angola, Europeans are massacred on sight. This is the age of the boomerang, the third stage of violence: it flies right back at us, it strikes us and, once again, we have no idea what hit us.”
― The Wretched of the Earth
― The Wretched of the Earth
“An image of thought called philosophy has been formed historically and it effectively stops people from thinking.”
― Dialogues II
― Dialogues II
“Death is the real inspiring genius or Musagetes of philosophy, and for this reason Socrates defined philosophy as thanatou mélétè (preparation for death; Plato, Phaedo, 81a). Indeed, without death there would hardly have been any philosophizing.”
― Between East and West: From Singularity to Community
― Between East and West: From Singularity to Community
“I started to investigate and unearth an old faith which for thousands of years we philosophers used to build on as the safest of all foundations—which we built on again and again although every previous structure fell in: I began to undermine our faith in morals . But ye do not understand me?—”
― The Dawn of Day
― The Dawn of Day
James’s 2024 Year in Books
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