Annie Ernaux: The Years

Yukio Mishima: The Temple of the Golden Pavilion

Other people must be destroyed. In order that I might truly face the sun, the world itself must be destroyed....


What transforms this world is — knowledge. Do you see what I mean? Nothing else can change anything in this world. Knowledge alone is capable of transforming the world, while at the same time leaving it exactly as it is. When you look at the world with knowledge, you realize that things are unchangeable and at the same time are constantly being transformed.


The special quality of hell is to see everything clearly down to the last detail.


Yet how strange a thing is the beauty of music! The brief beauty that the player brings into being transforms a given period of time into pure continuance; it is certain never to be repeated; like the existence of dayflies and other such short-lived creatures, beauty is a perfect abstraction and creation of life itself. Nothing is so similar to life as music.


The past does not only draw us back to the past. There are certain memories of the past that have strong steel springs and, when we who live in the present touch them, they are suddenly stretched taut and then they propel us into the future.


To see human beings in agony, to see them covered in blood and to hear their death groans, makes people humble. It makes their spirits delicate, bright, peaceful. It's never at such times that we become cruel or bloodthirsty. No, it's on a beautiful spring afternoon like this that people suddenly become cruel. It's at a moment like this, don't you think, while one's vaguely watching the sun as it peeps through the leaves of the trees above a well-mown lawn? Every possible nightmare in the world, every possible nightmare in history, has come into being like this.


For clearly it is impossible to touch eternity with one hand and life with the other.


Only knowledge can turn life's unbearableness into a weapon.

Christian Marazzi: The Violence of Financial Capitalism

Private-sector bailouts are essentially a communism of capital, where the state, i.e. the collectivity, caters to the needs of 'financial soviets,' i.e. banks, insurance companies, investment funds, and hedge funds, imposing a market dictatorship over society.

Jackie Wang: Carceral Capitalism

Our bodies are not closed loops. We hold each other and keep each other in time by marching, singing, embracing, breathing. We synchronize our tempos so we can find a rhythm through which the urge to live can be expressed, collectively. And in this way, we set the world into motion. In this way, poets become the timekeepers of the revolution.


For Afro-pessimists it is not the economic sphere that forms the ‘base’ from which the ‘superstructure’ of civil society, politics, and culture emerges, but antiblack violence that makes possible and is necessitated by global capitalism, freedom, civil society, and the interlocutors life of white (and nonblack)


Black Americans are what some might call ‘the canary in the coal mine’ insofar as they are the first to suffer the consequences of political and economic restructuring.


If the exploitation axis is characterized by the homogenizing wage relation... then the axis of expropriation relies on a logic of differentiation that reproduces racialized (as well as gendered) subjects.


The subprime crisis showed us that in the U.S., creditworthiness itself is racialized, as there was an a priori association of blackness with risk. This is consistent with the general moral construction of race, which is undergirded by the assumption that black Americans are immoral (read: criminal) and that they don’t contribute to society or make good in social promises (read: lazy and welfare-dependent).


I don’t know how time is experienced on the inside of prison; I only know how prison mangles time from the perspective of a family member on the outside, looking in. Nine years we sat waiting for my brother’s hearing, while his appeal sat unread on some courthouse clerk’s desk. Time moved on the outside while my brother’s situation remained static. We were teenagers when he got locked up, and now he’s balding. My life slowly ambles along while my brother’s life stands still.


When people identify with their victimization, it is important to critically consider whether they use this gesture as a tactical maneuver to construct themselves as innocent and exert power in a social space. That does not mean delegitimizing the claims made by survivors, but rather, rejecting the framework of innocence, examining each situation closely, and remaining cognizant of the multiple power struggles at play in different conflicts.