QUOTES FROM THE BACK COVERS OF LEFT CURVE:
For most issues of Left Curve we select a quote to print on the back cover with
the intention of provoking critical reflection about our lives and the world.
"Better a mended sock then a torn one, not so with self-consciousness." - Hegel (Left Curve no. 32)
“We have to organize a new trend in politics beyond the law of places and the centralization of power… a form of action where the political existence of everybody is not separated from its being, a point where we exist in so intense a fashion that we forget our internal division. Doing so we become a new subject. Not an individual, but a part of a new subject.” — Alain Badiou (Left Curve no. 31)
"...until a completely new politics--that is, a politics no longer founded on the exceptio of bare life--is at hand, every theory and praxis will remain imprisoned and immobile, and the 'beautiful day' of life will be given citizenship only either through blood and death or in the perfect senselessness to which the society of the spectacle condemns it." -- Giorgio Agamben (Left Curve no. 30)
"The only dream worth having... is to dream that you will live while you're alive and die only when you're dead... which means exactly what?'... To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget."--Arundhati Roy (Left Curve no. 29)
"We need to (re)build a new symbolic awareness that emanates from the intricate, never quite known, vital movement of reality itself as embodied in the daily pain and joys of people everywhere: A construction arising from points of singularities that haven't been absorbed and annihilated by the cyborg global market of pure exchange: people, groups, cultures that continue to draw nourishment from humanities' historical quest for universal harmony, something that may eventually replace the ruling suicidal death-machine." -- from "Notes on Art and Resistance to Global Power" -- author unknown, though we could just as easily have written it ourselves. (Left Curve no. 28)
"The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling - their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability. Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them. Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing." - Arundhati Roy (Left Curve no. 27
"We have to resist the new hierarchies which will be imposed, we have to explode them. But is there really still the possibility of struggling in a world made like this, or would it not perhaps be worth deserting, in every sense? Desert with knowledge, desert in the army, desert in intellectual labor-power. That is what should be our starting point. Friends of mine are saying: 'against the art of war, the art of desertion.'" - Antonio Negri (LC no. 26)
"... because (the dominant culture) is a culture without meaning, just made of codes, it is extremely versatile, and can include anything, literally anything, and transform it into a bit of the hypertext, thus ultimately changing the meaning once it is incorporated into the new semantic system. This is why cultural autonomy is so difficult, except by breaking the mirror and escaping from the hypertext. But the price to pay is either marginality, or the long march to reconstruct general meaning from individual experience." - Manual Castells (LC no.24)
"We are engaged in the struggle of memory against oblivion; the market buys up our past and our present and runs it through the shredder to make way for municipal parking, industrial parks, commercial space." - Subcommandante Marcos (LC no.23)
"We live in a technological society that creates many illusions of reality... it's the most irresponsible behaving entity that ever lived on this planet. This civilization is not about responsibility, it's about guilt, sin, blame and aggressive bad behavior. That is that shadow world... The real world is about fulfilling our responsibility to life." - John Trudell (LC no. 22)
"...The system's mythology requires only the not-yet-ready, the virtual, the next purchase. This produces in the spectator, not, as claimed a sense of freedom (the so-called freedom of choice) but a profound isolation. - John Berger (LC no. 21)
"Spiritual servitude consists in confusing the necessary with the good." - Simone Weil (LC no. 20)
"Infinite responsibility, therefore, no rest allowed for any form of good conscience." - Derrida (LC no. 19)
"That the world is out of joint is shown everywhere in the fact that however a problem is solved, the solution is false." - Adorno (LC no. 18)
"...No pain has been or shall be able to tempt me into giving false
testimony about life as I recognize it." - Nietzsche (LC no.17)
"Human history is simply the history of the servitude which makes men
- oppressors and oppressed alike - the plaything of the instruments of domination
they themselves have manufactured, and thus reduces living humanity to being
the chattel of inanimate chattels." - Simone Weil (LC no.16)
"My practicality consists in this, in the knowledge that if you beat
your head against the wall it is your head which breaks and not the wall...
that is my strength, my only strength." - Gramsci (LC no.15)
"Thus is order insured: some have to play the game because they cannot
otherwise live, and those who could live otherwise are kept out because they
do not want to play the game." - Adorno (LC no.13)
"...Total socialization objectively hatches its opposite, and there is no telling yet whether it will be a disaster or a liberation." - Adorno (LC no. 12)
"...Only if I expected truth can I suffer lies as evil... only the dead
know no evil and pain." - Hegel (LC no.11)
"Personal fulfillment can only be possible if the highest commands of
the species are accepted as the duty of the individual." - Lukács
(LC no.8)
"It is solely by risking life that freedom is gained." - Hegel
(LC no.6)
Comments welcomed! Feel free to share your favorite quotes with us. If we get
enough good ones, we'll post a regular selection on our site - giving credit
where credit is due, of course. Send to: editor@leftcurve.org