The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become.
We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come.
necessity, weight, and value art three concepts inextricably bound: only necessity is heavy, and only what is heavy has value
People are going deaf because music is played louder and louder. But because they’re going deaf, it has to be played louder still
She said that conflict, drama, and tragedy didn’t mean a thing; there was nothing inherently valuable in them , nothing deserving of respect or admiration
beauty is a world betrayed. The only way we can encounter it is if its persecutors have overlooked it somewhere. Beautu hides behind the scenes of the May Day parade. If we want to find it, we must demolish the scenery.
in a society run by terror, no statements whatsoever can be taken seriously. They are all forced, and it is the duty of every honest man to ignore them
The brotherhood of man on earth will be possible only on a base of kitsch.
But the people who struggle against what we call totalitarian regimes cannot function with queries and doubts. They, too, need certainties and simple truths to make the multitudes understand, to provoke collective tears.
Before we are forgotten, we will be turned into kitsch.
We can never establish with certainty what part of our relations with others is the result of our emotions - love, antipathy, charity, or malice - and what part is predetermined by the constant power play among individuals.
And therein lies the whole of man’s plight. Human time does not turn in a circle; it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition
The sadness meant: we are at the last station. The happiness meant: we are together. The sadness was form, the happiness content. Happiness filled the space fo sadness.
Lo spirito di Tamerlano - questo nomade che si costruí una capitale in cui non volle mai vivere e una grande tomba vuota solo per impressionare i suoi discendenti - mi pare sia tutto nell’anonimo tumulo di mattoni e fango, in una cripta che restó per secoli inaccessibile ai visitatori.
Amid suffering, ruin, and death, I had above all known love and the indestructible human capacity to survive and to pursue happiness.
First and foremost, depression is creative fatigue and exhausted ability. The complaint of the depressive individual “Nothing is possible” can only occur in a society that things “Nothing is impossible”.
However, the disappearance of domination does not entail freedom. Instead, it makes freedom and constraint coincide. Thus, the achievement-subject gives itself over to compulsive freedom - that is, to the free constraint of maximizing achievement.
We owe the cultural achievements of humanity - which include philosophy - to deep, contemplative attention. Culture presumes an environment in which deep attention is possible. Increasingly, such immersive reflection is being displaced by an entirely different form of attention: hyperattention.
The late-modern animal laborans does not give up its individuality or ego in order to merge, through the work it perform, with the anonymous life process of the species.
If one abandoned one’s individuality and dissolved into the life process of the species entirely, one would at least have the serenity of an animal.
In this society of compulsion, everyone carries a work camp inside.
Learning to see means “getting your eyes used to calm, to patience, to letting things come to you” - that is, making yourself capable of deep and contemplative attention, casting a long and slow gaze.
Today it is yielding more and more to offense or annoyance, “having a beef” which proves incapable of effecting decisive change.
As its flipside, the society of achievement and activeness is generating excessive tiredness and exhaustion. These psychic conditions characterize a world that is poor in negativity and in turn dominated by excess positivity. They are not immunological reactions presupposing the negativity of the immunologically Other. Rather, they are caused by a too-much of positivity. The excessiveness of performance enhancement leads to psychic infarctions.
Deep tiredness loosens the strictures of identity. Things flicker, twinkle, and vibrate at the edges.
The modal verb that determines achievement society is not the Freudian Should, but Can.
The dialectic of freedomn means developing new constraints, Freedom from the Other switches into narcissistic self-relation, which occasions many of the psychic disturbances affecting today’s achievement-subject. The absence of relation to the Other causes a crisis of gratification.
If one suffers from a narcissistic disorder, one sinks into oneself. When reference to the Other goes missing, no stable self-image can form.
In positive terms, such a human being without character is flexible, able to assume any form, play any role, or perform any function. This shapelessness - or, alternatively, flexibility - creates a high degree of economic efficiency.
Depression - which often culminates in burnout - follows from overexcited, overdriven, excessive self-reference that has assumed destructive traits.
In virtual spaces, the ego can practically move independent of the “reality principle”
The late-modern achievement-subject is subject to no one. In fact, it is no longer a subject in the etymological sense. It positivizes itself; indeed, it liberates itself into a project.
The mania for health emerges when life has become as flat as a coin and stripped of all narrative content, all value.