Notes Following A Program of Films: quotes

“He who writes, writes down himself first of all, for all to read.”

“The only eyes that see are the eyes of water, eyes that are blinded by our tears of compassion for the other.”

“The face of the future has traces of our past”

“Life becomes text starting out from my body. I am already text. History, love, violence, time, work, desire, inscribe it on my body, I go where the 'fundamental language' is spoken.”

“It is not only the Hindus in London that have lost their homeland: Londoners have also lost theirs... The current migration of peoples has shuffled history and geography”

“I like late in the day. I like the day to night transfer. I like the desaturation. It's like a high speed eternity.”

“I like smoking opps. I like sipping lean. I like getting high. I like when the car go like 200 hold on let me drive.”

“The classical tradition of Tamil poetry is an impersonal tradition. The use of epithetical names that for these poets no signature was more authentic than their own metaphors”

“Swaggy P is heaven-sent. I'm like a prophet of swag, so the name was heaven-sent.”

“He's said a bunch of times that he didn't become swaggy p until the playoffs with the clippers where he walked to the arena with a Versace shirt and played a game in the red foamposites”

“The silence had for me the force of eternal life; for on the plane of eternity without beginning and without end there is no such thing as speech.”

“At such times as this every man takes refuge in some firmly established habit, in his own particular passion. The drunkard stupefies himself with drink, the writer writes, the sculptor attacks the stone. Each relieves his mind of the burden by recourse to his own stimulant and it is at such times as this that the real artist is capable of producing a masterpiece.”

“One way of addressing this difficulty was to redefine the self through the model of the different grammatical positions which it is obliged to take up in language, which disallow the centrality and unity of the ‘I’ assumed by humanism. It is precisely this inscription of alterity within the self that can allow for a new relation to ethics: the self has to come to terms with the fact that it is also a second and a third person.”

“Language is not made for communication. It is made for something else, something, perhaps more important, but also more perilous. Language is, in fact, the principle obstacle to communication, which animals know perfectly well. They watch us sometimes, filled by a strange compassion for us, caught up as we are in language. They too, might have ventured into language, but preferred not to, knowing what might be lost.”

“Every day I hope the next day to be called upon by the authorities to create the opera of the creation.”

“...a true love letter, arriving like all love letters too late, like the love letter transformed into supreme book that the narrator was never to address to Albertine, a letter which had to wait for it to be too late twice over before it could begin to grow and grow until it attained the disproportion of a work of art.”

“What right do we have to select or interrupt a quotation...”

“...what remains untranslatable is at bottom the only thing to translate, the only thing translatable. What must be translated of that which is translatable can only be the untranslatable.”

“Any public piece of writing, any open text, is also offered like the exhibited surface, in no way private, of an open letter, and therefore of a postcard with its address incorporated in the message and hereafter open to doubt, and with its coded and at the same time stereotyped language, trivialized by the very code and number. Conversely, any postcard is a public document, deprived of all privacy and, moreover, in this way laying itself open to the law.”

“But how can one pass from the sky to the star, from the poem, unlimited fabric of space, to the pure and unique word where it must be assembled? Or from the beautiful, which is indeterminate, to the rigor of the perfection of the beautiful?”

“In a translation, we have the same work in a double language; in the fiction of Borges, we have two works in the identity of one single language and, in this identity that is not one, the fascinating mirage of the duplicity of possibilities.”

“Thus, the world, if it could be exactly translated and copied in a book, would lose aIl beginning and all end and would become that spherical, finite, and limitless volume that all men write and in which they are written: it would no longer be the world; it would be, it will be, the world corrupted into the infinite sum of its possibilities.”

“I felt, on the last page, that my story was a symbol of the man I had been as I was writing it, and that in order to write that story I had had to be that man, and that in order to be that man I had had to write that story, and so on, ad infinitum.”

“It is once again like the desert, and speech also is desert-like, this voice that needs the desert to cry out and that endlessly awakens in us the terror, understanding, and memory of the desert.”

“The desert is still not time, or space, but a space without place and a time without production. There one can only wander, and the time that passes leaves nothing behind; it is a time without past, without present, time of a promise that is real only in the emptiness of the sky and the sterility of a bare land where man is never there but always outside. The desert is this outside, where one cannot remain, since to be there is to be always already outside, and prophetic speech is that speech in which the bare relation with the Outside could be expressed...”

“This does not mean that gossip cannot be interesting; on the contrary, to the extent that it entertains a nontrivial relation to truth that eludes the problem of verification and falsification and claims to be closer to truth than factual adequation, gossip is certainly a form of art. The peculiarity of its epistemological status lies in the fact that in itself it accounts for the possibility of an error that does not entirely undermine the definition of truth. Intelligent gossip therefore interests us independently of its verifiable character. That said, to treat gossip as though it were information is truly an unforgivable apaideusia [lack of refinement].”

“Does anyone know how a day turns into a life?”

“For the edges of a secret are more secret than the secret itself.”

“When something doesn't work, when you just can't get something right, no matter how hard you try. You can't get through a thought or turn a corner. I now call that an accident, if indeed it doesn't work”

“You can’t say that the Romans invented globalization, because it already existed under Alexander’s empire, but they brought it to a point of perfection that lasted for five centuries. It’s like McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, shopping malls, and Apple Stores today: wherever you go, you find the same thing. Of course, there are grouches who deplore this cultural and political imperialism, but all in all most people are happy to live in a pacified world where you can move around freely, where you’re never out of your element, where wars are fought by professional soldiers on the distant borders of the Empire and have no more repercussions on people’s lives than the festivities and celebrations that mark their victories.”

“Indeed, in their diverse rootings and uprootings, theories are constantly translated, appropriated, contested, grafted.”

“In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police take the place of pirates.”

“Geography [is] the eye and the light of history... maps enable us to contemplate at home and right before our eyes things that are furthest away”

“All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.”

“I'm on South Street with all my chains on. Reach for this bitch you gon get rained on.”

“Because, no matter how "fictional" the account of these writers, or how much it was a product of invention, the act of imagination is bound up with memory.”

“She just want to party / Diamonds on me dancing / Codeine double cup”

“It's by the grace of God that we're able to do these things”

“'Be still and hear me,' she began. I am a courier. I am only a courier. But I come with news of destruction. I come to declare his end. If it need be termed surrender then let it be so, for he has surrendered in word, not will. He has said, "My fall will be great but at least useful." The Emperor has fallen and he rests his weight upon your mind and mine. And with this I am electric. I am electric'. This single, emblematic instant tells an entire story; it tells of Napoleon's dream of the imperial Republic, his authority and pride, and his final flight from the disaster at La Belle Alliance.”

“I'm Still Bout it Bout it”

“If you can't dodge the rain my nigga you gon soak then”

“Autobiography can be a mourning for the perpetual loss of the name — one’s proper word-thing...”

“Cops ask me what’s my name — I told them IDK (I don't know my name!)”
“The cops ask me what’s my name — I told them plead the 5th / Cops ask me what’s my name — I told them eat a dick”

“The work is the death mask of its conception.”

“Hit em with the flame, it go bang, then it’s bye bye gang”

“We don't cry no fucking rivers, it's body for body.”

“We are on the edge of disaster without being able to situate it in the future: it is rather always already past, and yet we are on the edge or under the threat, all formulations which would imply the future — that which is yet to come — if the disaster were not that which does not come, that which has put a stop to every arrival. To think the disaster (if this is possible, and it is not possible inasmuch as we suspect that the disaster is thought) is to have no longer any future in which to think it.”

“Would writing be to become, in the book, legible for everyone and indecipherable for oneself?”

“There is no explosion except a book.”(Mallarme)

“The disaster, unexperienced. It is what escapes the very possibility of experience — it is the limit of writing. This must be repeated: the disaster de-scribes. Which does not mean that the disaster, as the force of writing, is excluded from it, is beyond the pale of writing or extratextual.”

“By producing a work, I renounce the idea of my producing and formulating myself; I fulfill myself in something exterior and inscribe myself in the anonymous continuity of humanity.”

“To want to write: what an absurdity. Writing is the decay of the will, just as it is the loss of power, and the fall of the regular fall of the beat, the disaster again.”

“One would have thus to turn toward some language that never has been written — a language never inscribed but that is always to be prescribed — in order that this incomprehensible word be understood in its disastrous heaviness and in its way of summoning us to turn toward the disaster without either understanding it or bearing it.”

“Passive: the un-story, that which escapes quotation and which memory does not recall — forgetfulness as thought. That which, in other words, cannot be forgotten because it has already fallen outside memory.”

“Silence cannot be kept; it is indifferent with respect to the work of art which would claim to respect it — it demands a wait which has nothing to await, a language which, presupposing itself as the totality of discourse, would spend itself all at once, disjoin and fragment endlessly.”

“When we hear the word that has always been uttered already, the (mute) language of beginning over again, then we approach the night which is without darkness.”

“When all is said, what remains to be said is the disaster. Ruin of words, demise writing, faintness faintly murmuring: what remains without remains (the fragmentary).”

“... the patience of the unrecountable era. This is the era destined to the intermittence of a language unburdened of words and dispossessed, the silent halt of that to which without obligation one must nonetheless answer. And such is the responsibility of writing — writing which distinguishes itself by deleting from itself all distinguishing marks, which is to say perhaps, ultimately, by effacing itself (right away and at lenght: this takes all of time), for it seems to leave indelible or indiscernible traces.”

“Fragment: beyond fracturing, or bursting, the patience of pure impatience, the little by little suddenly.”

“In Plato's cave, there is no word to designate death, and no dream or image to intimate its unspeakableness.”

“We cannot recall our dreams, they cannot come back to us. If a dream comes — but what sort of coming is a dream's? Through what night does it make its way? If it comes to us, it does so only by way of forgetfulness, a forgetfulness which is not only censorship or simply repression. We dream without memory, in such a way that the dream of any particular night is no doubt a fragment of a response to an immemorial dying, barred by desire's repetitiousness.
There is no stop, there is no interval between dreaming and waking.”

“If the book could for a first time really begin, it would, for one last time, long since have ended.”

“A rose blossoming into a bud.”

“The new, because it cannot take its place in history, is also that which is most ancient: an unhistorical occurrence to which we are called upon to answer as if it were the impossible, the invisible — that which has always long since disappeared beneath ruins.”

“If quotations, in their fragmenting force, destroy in advance the texts from which they are not only severed but which they exalt till these texts become nothing but severence, then the fragment without a text, or any context, is radically unquotable.”

“Why did all afflictions — finite, infinite, personal, impersonal, current, timeless — imply and ceaselessly recall the historically dated affliction, which is nevertheless without any date, of a country already so reduced that it seemed almost effaced from the map and whose history nonetheless exceeded the history of the world? Why?”

“He writes — does he write? — not because the books of others leave him unsatisfied (on the contrary, they all please him), but because they are books and because by writing one does not get enough.”

“... we can only let fragmentary writing write if langauge, having exhausted its power of negation, its force of affirmation, retains or sustains Knowledge at rest. This is writing that is outside language: it is nothing else, perhaps, but the end (without end) of knowledge, the end of myths, the erosion of utopia, the rigor of taut patience.”

“The unknown name, alien to naming:
The holocuast, the absolute event of history — which is a date in history — that utter-burn where all history took fire, where the movement of Meaning was swallowed up, where the gift, which knows nothing of forgiving or of consent, shattered without giving place to anything that can be affirmed, that can be denied — gift of very passivity, gift of what cannot be given. How can it be preserved, even by thought? How can thought be made the keepr of the holocaust where al was lost, including guardian thought?
In the mortal intensity, the fleeing silence of the countless cry.”

“Writing, without placing itself above art, supposes that one not prefer art, but efface art as writing effaces itself.”

“Fragments are written as unfinished separations. Their incompletion, their insufficiency, the disappointment at work in them, is their aimless drift, the indiction that, neither unifiable nor consistent, they accomodate a certain array of marks — the marks with which thought (in decline and declining itself) represents the furtive groupings that fictively open and close the absence of totality.”

“The demand, the extreme demand of the fragmentary is at first obeyed lazily, as though it were a matter of stopping at fragments, sketches, studies: preparations or rejected versions of what is not yet a work. That this demand traverses, overturns, ruins the work beecause the work (totality, perfection, achivement) is the unity which is satisifed with itself — this is what F. Schlegel sensed, but it is also what finally escaped him, though in such a way that one cannot reproach him with this misunderstanding which he helped and still helps us to discern in the very movement whereby we share it with him. The fragmentary imperative, linked to the disaster. That there is, however, practically nothing disastrous in this disaster: this is surely what we must learn to think, without, perhaps, ever knowing it.”

“... for fragmentation is the pulling to pieces (the tearing) of that which never has preexisted (really or ideally) as a whole, nor can it ever be reassembled in any future presence whatever. Fragmentation is the spacing, the separation effected by a temporalization which can only be understood — fallaciously — as the absence of time.”

“To have a system, this is what is fatal for the mind; not to have one, this too is fatal. Whence the necessity to observe, while abandoning, the two requirements at once.” (Fr. Schlegel.)

“What Schlegel says of philosophy is true for writing: you can only become a writer, you can never be one; no sooner are you, than you are no longer, a writer.”

“To write one's autobiography, in order either to confess or to engage in self-analysis, or in order to expose onself, like a work of art, to the gaze of all, is perhaps to seek to survive, but through a perpetual suicide — a death which is total inasmuch as fragmentary.
To write (of) oneself is to cease to be, in order to confide in a guest — the other, the reader — entrusting yourself to him who will henceforth have as an obligation, and indeed as a life, nothing but your inexistence.”

“To write is no longer to situate death in the future — the death which is always already past; to write is to accept that one has to die without making death present and without making oneself present to it. To write is to know that death has taken place even though it has not been experienced, and to recognize it in the forgetfulness that it leaves — in the traces which, effacing themselves, call upon one to exclude oneself from the cosmic order and to abide where the disaster makes the real impossible and desire undesirable.”

“Forgetfulness is a practice, the practice of writing that prophesies because it is enacted by the utter renunciation of everything: to announce is perhaps to renounce.”

“Concentration camps, annihilation camps, emblems wherein the invisible has made itself visible forever. All the distinctive features of a civilization are revealed or laid bare... work has ceased to be his way of living and has become his way of dying. Work, death: equivalents. And the workplace is everywhere; worktime is all the time.”

“We read books on Auschwitz. The wish of all, in the camps, the last wish: know what has happened, do not forget, and at the same time never will you know.”

“No, forgetfulness would not be emptiness, but neither negative nor positive: the passive demand that neither welcomes nor withdraws the past, but designating there what was never taken place (just as it indicates in the yet to come that which will never be able to find its place in any present), refers us to nonhistorical forms of time, to the other of all tenses, to their eternal or eternally provisional indecision, bereft of destiny, without presence.
Forgetfulness would efface that which never was inscribed: it would bar the unwritten which thus seems to have left a trace that must be obliterated.”

“Whence the precaution of not overemphasizing the too-well-known phrase: "language, the house of being". Even in Plato, the myth of the cave is also the myth of the shelter: to foresake what shelters, to turn away, to unshelter oneself, is not only one of the major peripeties of knowledge; more importantly, it is the condition of a "verring round of the whole being," as Plato says — a turning point which puts us face to face with the emand of the turning point. That one or another way of translating should engage thought to this degree may be surprising; one might complain of this and conclude that philosophy is just a matter of words.”

“As soon as we write, we carry these problems around with us, thinking without thinking about them. The least word, as Humboldt said, already presupposes the whole of language, the entire grammar of a langauge.
And finally, the learned delirium of etymology bears a relation to an historical vertigo. The entire history of a language opens up under the pressure of certain words and is by this genealogy either mystified or demystified. We think and speak dependent upon a past of which we demand an account, or which supports us, not without honor, in its forgottenness. The writer who plays with, or invents etymologies, or, more surreptitiously, appeals to etymology as a guarantee of his thought, is less dubious than exaggeratedly confident about the creative force of the language he speaks. He has in mind the vitality of language, popular inventiveness or the intimacy of a dialect: always he thinks of langauge as a dwelling; always it is a habitable language — language, our shelter. And right away we feel rooted, and so we pull at this root with an uprooting force which the demand of writing wields, just as it tends to tear us from everything natural — for the etymological series reconstitutes the becoming of langauge as a kind of historical nature.”

“Only he who one day has abandoned everything and has been abandoned by everything, for whom everything has capsized and who sees himself alone with the infinite, has come to the very bottom of himself and recognized all the profundity of life. This is a great step which Plato compared to death.”

“To write is to be entirely distrustful of writing, while entrusting oneself to it entirely.”

“There is no origin, if origin presupposes an original presence. Always past, long since past already, something that has passed without being present — such is the immemorial which gives us forgetfulness saying: every beginning is a beginning over.”

“I remain persuaded that the zeal of etymology is linked to a certain naturalism — that it is a kind of a quest for an original secret held by a first, lost language, clues of which would subsist among the multiple tongues that now exist, permitting its reconstruction. This handily justifies the writing imperative, making it seem that through writing man possesses a personal secret which he could disclose innocently, without any other's knowing. But if there is a secret, it is in the infinite relation of the one to the other which the drift of meaning hides, because in it the ones eems to preserve his necessity even in death.”

“A book: a book among others, or a reference to the unique, the last and essential Liber, or, more exactly, the great Book which is always one among others, any book at all, already without importance or beyond important things. "Explosion," a book: this means that the book is not the laborious assemblage of a totality finally obtained, but has for its being the noisy, silent bursting which without the book would not take place (would not affirm itself). But it also means that since the book intself belongs to burst being — to being violently exceeded and thrust out of itself — the book gives no sign of itself save its own explosive violnce, the force with which it expels itself, the thuderous refusal of the plausible: the outside in its becoming, which is that of bursting.”

“... to the fragmentary without fragments, to the remainder: that which is left to be written and which, like the disaster, has always preceded, and ruined, all beginnings, including the beginning of writing and of language.”

“To keep the secret is evidently to tell it as a nonsecret, inasmuch as it is not tellable.”

“I only sip that SHHHHH”

“It is language that is "cryptic": not only as a totality that is exceeded and untheorizable, but inasmuch as it contains pockets, cavernous places where words become things, where the inside is out and thus inaccessible to any cryptanalysis whatever — for deciphering is required to keep the secret secret. The code no longer suffices. The translation is infinite. And yet we have to find the key word that opens and does not open. At that juncture something gets away safely, something which frees loss and refuses the gift of it. "I" can only save an inner serlf by placing it in 'me', separate from myself, outside.”

“To keep a secret — to refrain from saying some particular thing — presupposes that one could say it. This is nothign remarkable: it is merely a rather unpleasant kind of restraint. — Even so, it does relate to the question of the secret in general: to the fact (it is no fact) of wondering whether the secret is not linked to there being still something left to say when all is said... The secret escapes; it is never circumsribed; it makes itself boundless What is hidden in it is the necessity of being hidden. — there is nothing secret, anywhere; this is what the secret always says. — All the while not saying it. For, with the words 'there is' and 'nothing,' the enigma continues to rule, preventing installation and repose. — The stratagem of the secret is either to show itself, to make itself so visible that it isn't seen (to disappear, that is, as a secret), or to hint that the secret is only secret where there is no secret, or no appearance of any secret...”

“The written word: in it we no longer live. Not that it announces: "Yesterday it was over." But it is our discord, the gift of the word which is precarious.”

“Let us share eternity in order to make it transitory.”

“What remains to be said.”

“Shining solitude, the void of the sky, a deferred death: disaster.”

“One can only make vague guesses about what theory might be like from those who are characterized by the development of their identity online. Perhaps it is distinguished by the instantaneous concurrence of writing, reading, thinking, and publicizing? Since Nietzsche, we know that profound contemporaneity can only be produced at the price of untimeliness. To conform at all costs to the needs and expectations of the present creates dependency of thought. Only when there is no compulsion to be up to date is it possible to identify differences in the here and now. Flusser typed his interventionary theorems for dialog-oriented telecommunication on a mechanical typewriter.”

“Today this social class is teeming with progressive men, and nobody jumps at the opprtunity more avidly than they to latch onto the latest trend. They are always au courant, up to speed. Nobody changes ideologies, clothes, form of intercourse, and habits faster than the petit bourgeois. He is the new Proteus, adaptive to the point of loss of identity. Perpetually fleeing from what is outmoded, he rushes along in pursuit of himself.”