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Confine yourselves, o humans, to the quia;
had you been able to see all, there would
have been no need for Mary to give birth.

We are from the start illogical and therefore unfair beings, and this we can know: it is one of the greatest and most insoluble disharmonies of existence.

Faced with that truth which seems a lie, a man
should always close his lips as long as he can--
to tell it shames him, even though he's blameless;
but here I can't be still; and by the lines
of this my Comedy, reader, I swear--

Orientalism produced not only a fair amount of exact positive knowledge about the Orient but also a kind of second-order knowledge--lurking in such places as the 'Oriental' tale, the mythology of the mysterious East, notions of Asian inscrutability--with a life of its own, what V. G. Kiernan has aptly called 'Europe's collective day-dream of the Orient.'

from Plato to Montaigne, Aristotle to Kant, Cicero to Hegel, the great philosophical and canonical discourses on friendship will have explicitly tied the friend-brother to virtue and justice, to moral reason and political reason. The principal question would rightly concern the hegemony of a philosophical canon in this domain: how has it prevailed?

Without an enemy, I go mad, I can no longer think, I become powerless to think myself, to pronounce ‘cogito, ergo sum’. For that I must have an evil genius, a spiritus malignas, a deceitful spirit. Did not Schmitt allude to this in his cell? Without this absolute hostility, the ‘I’ loses reason, and the possibility of being posed, of posing or of opposing the object in front of it;

Hindsight reveals several important things about our social lives as city children in a city that, for all intents and purposes, no longer exists.

The more likely reality is that schizophrenia, like Alzheimer’s, is an illness not of accrual but of replacement and deletion.

Like the others, they were country people, but how soon country people forget. When they fall in love with a city, it is forever.

Above all, far from being satisfied with the opposition on which Schmitt relies so heavily, the Republic indeed prescribes its erasure.

But what turned me on wasn't this. It was the porousness, the fungibility of our bodies--what was mine was suddenly his, just as what belonged to him could be all mine now.

Once you’ve tasted pure, unadulterated love, it’s like a part of your heart’s been irradiated, burned out, in a sense. Particularly when that love, for the whatever reason, is suddenly severed. For the person involved, that sort of love is both the supreme happiness and a curse.

There is little room for laughter in Heidegger.

A follower of the Dalai Lama who had been imprisoned by the Chinese for decades was asked if he had ever been afraid in jail, and he said his fear was that he would lose compassion for his captors. Parents often think that they’ve captured something small and vulnerable, but the parents I’ve profiled have been captured, locked up with their children’s [condition], and the quest is never to lose compassion.

‘All right. I have an idea. We need to arrest everyone who believes that, tie rocks around their waist, and throw them in the ocean. What would be the name for my idea?’

[…]

‘Anti-communism. The idea that we need to get rid of all the Reds.’

[Her] understanding of ideology was very simplistic, but her convictions were firm, as most people’s are. This was the law of ideology.

Emptiness began to creep into people’s hearts, and [she] made money from that phenomenon. This was the law of capitalism.

When working through ways of solving a puzzle, there are no mistakes. Each unsuccessful solution gets you closer to one that works.

The word ‘moderation’ didn’t apply to her. Love was only love when it burned hot like fire, and hate was only hate when it was frostier than a sheet of ice.

Secrets like these become inner toxins—realities that you are not allowed to acknowledge to yourself or to others but that nevertheless become the template of your life.

She imagines in writing, and only in writing

Like many trauma survivors, she told one story with words and another with actions, in which she kept replaying various aspects of her trauma.

She cannot express her feelings vocally, only pianistically.

His longing for variety in vaginas is not always consistent with his pecuniary desires and possibilities.

You can capture any woman if you exploit her awareness of her own physical inadequacies.

Strictly speaking, there are no holidays for art; art pursues you everywhere, and that’s just fine with the artist.

The mastery of meaning, a veritable semiurgism, is a divine attribute, once this meaning is defined as the discharge, the emanation, the spiritual effluvium overflowing from the signified toward the signifier: the author is a god (his place of origin is the signified); as for the critic, he is the priest whose task is to decipher the writing of the god.

it is the same story, because it is the same design, the same sequence: tension, seizure or possession, explosion, fatigue, conclusion. To read into this scene at the theater a solitary orgasm, to substitute an erotic story for the euphemistic version, this operation of reading is based not on a lexicon of symbols but on a systematic cohesion, a congruence of relationships.

By the late 1940s Bowlby had become persona non grata in the British psychoanalytic community, as a result of his radical claim that children's disturbed behavior was a response to actual life experiences--to neglect, brutality, and separation--rather than a product of infantile sexual fantasies

And yet the locus of an epoch's codes forms a
kind of scientific vulgate which it will eventually be valuable to describe: what do we know "naturally" about art?-"it is a constraint"; about youth?-"it is turbulent," etc. If we collect all such knowledge, all such vulgarisms, we create a monster, and this monster is ideology. As a fragment of ideology, the cultural code inverts its class origin [.]

Beauty, as we have seen, cannot be induced through catechesis other than from some great cultural model (written or pictorial): it is stated, not described. Contrariwise, ugliness can be abundantly described: it alone is 'realistic,' confronting the referent without an intermediate code (whence the notion that realism, in art, is concerned solely with ugliness).