Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Quote of the Generation I

from Tarnac 9 via Chor

This book is signed in the name of an imaginary collective. Its editors are not its authors. They were content merely to introduce a little order into the common-places of our time, collecting some of the murmurings around barroom tables and behind closed bedroom doors. They’ve done nothing more than lay down a few necessary truths, whose universal repression fills psychiatric hospitals with patients, and eyes with pain. They’ve made themselves scribes of the situation. It’s the privileged feature of radical circumstances that a rigorous application of logic leads to revolution. It’s enough just to say what is before our eyes and not to shrink from the conclusions.


"As an attempted solution, the pressure to ensure that nothing happens, together with police surveillance of the territory, will only intensify."

"The impasse of the present, everywhere in evidence, is everywhere denied."

"There will be no end of psychologists, sociologists, and literary hacks applying themselves to the case, each with a specialized jargon from which the conclusions are especially absent."

"“I AM WHAT I AM.” This is marketing’s latest offering to the world, the final stage in the development of advertising, far beyond all the exhortations to be different, to be oneself and drink Pepsi. Decades of concepts in order to get where we are, to arrive at pure tautology. I = I."

"Our feeling of inconsistency is simply the consequence of this foolish belief in the permanence of the self and of the little care we give to what makes us what we are."

"Intelligence doesn’t mean knowing how to adapt – or if that is a kind of intelligence, it’s the intelligence of slaves."

"And to whom do the children of this era belong, to television or their parents?"

"...we get down on all fours to climb the ladders of hierarchy, but privately flatter ourselves that we don’t really give a shit."

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