“To enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself. If you flatter yourself that you are all over comfortable, and have been so a long time, then you cannot be said to be comfortable any more. For this reason a sleeping apartment should never be furnished with a fire, which is one of the luxurious discomforts of the rich. For the height of this sort of deliciousness is to have nothing but the blanket between you and your snugness and the cold of the outer air. Then there you lie like the one warm spark in the heart of an arctic crystal.”
― Moby-Dick or, The Whale
― Moby-Dick or, The Whale
“Suffering is the decay of the heart; all that we have loved becomes the 'forbidden' when we have not understood it all...”
― Nightwood
― Nightwood
“Thought as such… is an act of negation, of resistance to that which is forced upon it; this is what thought has inherited from its archetype, the relation between labor and material. Today, when ideologues tend more than ever to encourage thought to be positive, they cleverly note that positivity runs precisely counter to thought, and that it takes friendly persuasion by social authority to accustom thought to positivity.”
― Negative Dialectics
― Negative Dialectics
“For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.”
― The German Ideology / Theses on Feuerbach / Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy
― The German Ideology / Theses on Feuerbach / Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy
Marxism
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Reading works by and about Karl Marx/Friedrich Engels.
Marx's Capital Volumes I, II, III (Study Group - 2020 and beyond)
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We see symptoms of crises all around us, from the immediate "public health" pandemic of COVID19 to repeated "financial" crises to escalating "environm ...more
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