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“Human beings seem to have an almost unlimited capacity to deceive themselves, and to deceive themselves into taking their own lies for truth.”
― The Politics of Experience/The Bird of Paradise
― The Politics of Experience/The Bird of Paradise
“We all live under the constant threat of our own annihilation. Only by the most outrageous violation of ourselves have we achieved our capacity to live in relative adjustment to a civilization apparently driven to its own destruction.”
― The Politics of Experience/The Bird of Paradise
― The Politics of Experience/The Bird of Paradise
“Since the self, in maintaining its isolation and detachment does
not commit itself to a creative relationship with the other and is
preoccupied with the figures of phantasies, thought, memories, etc.
(imagos), which cannot be directly observable by or directly
expressed to others, anything (in a sense) is possible. Whatever
failures or successes come the way of the false-self system, the self
is able to remain uncommitted and undefined. In phantasy, the
self can be anyone, anywhere, do anything, have everything. It is
thus omnipotent and completely free - but only in phantasy. Once it
commits itself to any real project it suffers the agonies of humiliation
- not necessarily for any failure, but simply because it has to
subject itself to necessity and contingency. It is omnipotent and
free only in phantasy. The more this phantastic omnipotence and
freedom are indulged, the more weak, helpless, and fettered it
becomes in actuality. The illusion of omnipotence and freedom
can be sustained only within the magic circle of its own shut-upness
in phantasy. And in order that this attitude be not dissipated
by the slightest intrusion of reality, phantasy and reality have to
be kept apart.”
―
not commit itself to a creative relationship with the other and is
preoccupied with the figures of phantasies, thought, memories, etc.
(imagos), which cannot be directly observable by or directly
expressed to others, anything (in a sense) is possible. Whatever
failures or successes come the way of the false-self system, the self
is able to remain uncommitted and undefined. In phantasy, the
self can be anyone, anywhere, do anything, have everything. It is
thus omnipotent and completely free - but only in phantasy. Once it
commits itself to any real project it suffers the agonies of humiliation
- not necessarily for any failure, but simply because it has to
subject itself to necessity and contingency. It is omnipotent and
free only in phantasy. The more this phantastic omnipotence and
freedom are indulged, the more weak, helpless, and fettered it
becomes in actuality. The illusion of omnipotence and freedom
can be sustained only within the magic circle of its own shut-upness
in phantasy. And in order that this attitude be not dissipated
by the slightest intrusion of reality, phantasy and reality have to
be kept apart.”
―
“They are playing a game. They are playing at not playing a game. If I show them I see they are, I shall break the rules and they will punish me. I must play their game, of not seeing I see the game”
― Knots
― Knots
“The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s mind, is the condition of the normal man. Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal. Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years.”
― The Politics of Experience/The Bird of Paradise
― The Politics of Experience/The Bird of Paradise
Colleen’s 2025 Year in Books
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