As far as I am concerned, I resign from humanity. I no longer want to be, nor can still be, a man. What should I do? Work for a social and political system, make a girl miserable? Hunt for weaknesses in philosophical systems, fight for moral and aesthetic ideals? It’s all too little. I renounce my humanity even though I may find myself alone. But am I not already alone in this world from which I no longer expect anything?
— Emil Cioran, On the Heights of Despair
“There are books of the same chemical composition as dynamite. The only difference is that a piece of dynamite explodes once, whereas a book explodes a thousand times.”
-Yevgeny Zamyatin, A Soviet Heretic: Essays by Yevgeny Zamyatin
(Image: State of Being (1820 edition Goethe books), 2012 by
Chiharu Shiot)
Steel paintings by Miya Ando | More posts
An unhealthy society is one which creates mutual hostility [and] distrust, which transforms man into an instrument of use and exploitation for others, which deprives him of a sense of self, except inasmuch as he submits to others or becomes an automaton…Yet many psychiatrists and psychologists refuse to entertain the idea that society as a whole may be lacking in sanity. They hold that the problem of mental health in a society is only that of the number of ‘unadjusted’ individuals, and not of a possible unadjustment of the culture itself.
—
Erich Fromm, The Sane Society (1955)(via atiron)
Symptom-Sea-Body (PW— N° 40), Koji Enokura, 1972.
(via bianne-k)
[In the political realm] peace is nothing more than the regulation of the psycho-political economy of awe and reverential fear, of using the threat of terror in order to bind citizens to the circuit of their subjection.That is to say, politics is essentially about the management of fear, an economy of fear, continually adjusting the level of fear to produce the right level of affect in the citizenry.
— Simon Critchley, “Crypto-Schmittianism.” in: State of Nature 2. Winter 2006.
The leading student of business propaganda, Australian social scientist Alex Carey, argues persuasively that “the 20th century has been characterized by three developments of great political importance: the growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy.
— Noam Chomsky, World Orders: Old and New
