Gergana

“Attention regulated by visuality generates low attentiveness, especially when visual objects take a commodity form, that is, exist in abundance, compete with one another, are on view, and become easily interchangeable. ...Visual evaluation in a large market of bodies as images entails devaluation through low attentiveness.”
― Eva Illouz, El fin del amor: Una sociología de las relaciones negativas

“The reflexivity of the self, in conjunction with the influence of abstract systems, pervasively affects the body as well as psychic processes. The body is less and less an extrinsic ‘given’, functioning outside the internally referential systems of modernity, but becomes itself reflexively mobilized. What might appear as a
wholesale movement towards the narcissistic cultivation of bodily appearance is in fact an expression of a concern lying much
deeper actively to ‘construct’ and control the body.”
― Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age

“Human life is a balancing act between endeavouring to improve ourselves and accepting who we were.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, NEXUS: A Brief History of Infomation Networks from the Stone Age to AI (Volume.2) [Japanese Edition]

“Agonia: form the Greek agon, contest. The origin of agony is competition, struggle. To be in agony is to measure yourself against others, a Sisyphean task. Perhaps agony is the very definition of being in the world and playing by its rules.”
― Kassabova Kapka, Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe