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@disceautdiscede
We cannot discover who we are through introspection, but only by emptying ourselves out in the sense of being wholeheartedly engaged--being at stake, being at risk--in what we do and how we are recognized by others.
-Martin Hagglund, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom
Actual free labor is not a matter of being free from constraints, but of being able to identify with the constraints to which you subject yourself.
-Martin Hagglund, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom
To lead a free life it is not sufficient that we are exempt from direct coercion and allowed to make choices. To lead a free life we must be able to recognize ourselves in what we do, to see our practical activities as expressions of our own commitments. [...] Freedom requires the ability to participate in decisions regarding the form of life we are leading and not just the liberty to make choices.
-Martin Hagglund, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom
Men like to keep women under their power by force. A clever woman can help a man to forget what he is, and both of them are the better for it. Unless he wakes of a sudden one morning in a cold sweat and remembers, the truth of himself sinking in and spreading its damage outwards like a bullet. No. I would rather be a woman. We understand our abjection before God, because we understand our abjection before man. And we get to laugh behind their backs.
-A.K. Blakemore, The Manningtree Witches
As long as we measure our social wealth in terms of labor time, technological development is bound to intensify exploitative methods for extracting relative surplus value from workers. Due to increased technological efficiency in the process of production, workers either become unemployed and part of an army of surplus labor whose presence can be used to keep down wages (as tends to happen in the Western world today), or they become subjected to extremely cruel working conditions that are designed to extract as much surplus value as possible from their labor (as tends to happen in the parts of the world where we now locate most of our manufacturing).
-Martin Hagglund, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom
The expanding commodification of natural resources and life-activities is not optional but necessary for capitalism to sustain itself. If we are committed to capitalism, we are committed to commodifying more and more aspects of our lives.
-Martin Hagglund, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom
Under capitalism, all questions of what we need, what we want, and what is durable, must be subordinated to the question of what is profitable.
-Martin Hagglund, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom
Speaking economically, we produce more lifetime than we need to "spend" on keeping ourselves alive. This is why we have free time, but it is also why we can be exploited...in the social form of wage labor, which converts our surplus of lifetime into surplus value for the sake of profit and the growth of capital.
-Martin Hagglund, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom
Spiritual freedom has always been the implicit condition of leading a life, but the modern idea of freedom makes it explicit. By the lights of a modern conception of freedom, we should not be defined once and for all by a given social role (family, profession, religion, nationality, ethnicity, gender). Rather, we should be free to transform the normative conception of ourselves and our institutions should reflect that freedom.
-Martin Hagglund, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom
The activity of trying to be myself...is the minimal form of my personhood. As long as I lead my life in any way at all, I am trying to have integrity, even if I fail. [...] When I fail to be the person I am trying to be...I am not simply negated but the subject of the negative experience of failing to be myself.
-Martin Hagglund, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom
I wonder if this is what all women eventually come to know - a choice each comes to make between obscuring her true self in exchange for the false regard of a good man, or allowing herself the freedom to be as she truly is and settling for a brute who couldn't care less if she is as broken, as coarse, as hopeless as he.
-A.K. Blakemore, The Manningtree Witches
Every time you care for someone who may be lost or leave you behind, every time you devote yourself to a cause whose fate is uncertain, you perform an act of secular faith. Through your passion, you apprehend that death is constitutive of life and yet you do not renounce your commitment to living on. You do not give in to death but seek to prolong the life of what you love. You see that death is senseless and yet you seek to make sense of life.
-Martin Hagglund, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom
Accordingly, the more you devote yourself to something...the more you put yourself in peril. By committing yourself to a person, a political struggle, or a way of life, you become dependent on something whose continued existence is objectively uncertain. Yet Kierkegaard maintains that it is only through such an existential commitment that you can become a self.
-Martin Hagglund, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom
If you focus only on the distant past...it is relatively easy to gain a new appreciation of your life, since you can transform the past into an object of contemplation that no longer makes any direct demands on your engagement. [...] Your nostalgia, then, can come to shelter you from the demands of a life that still has to be lived.
-Martin Hagglund, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom
Anxiety is a condition of intelligibility for leading a free life and being passionately committed. As long as my life matters to me, I must be animated by the anxiety that my time is finite, since otherwise there would be no urgency in trying to be someone and trying to do something. Even if my project is to lead my life without psychological anxiety before death, that project is intelligible only because I am anxious not to waste my life on being anxious before death.
-Martin Hagglund, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom
The distention of time - how every moment trembles on the verge of the past and the future - thus appears in the light of secular passion. Distention is not only the negative condition of loss but also the positive condition of wonder. Only someone who is torn open by time can be moved and affected. Only someone who is finite can sense the miracle of being alive.
-Martin Hagglund, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom
...Unlike a religious conversion, a secular conversion does not aim to bring the struggle [of life] to an end. Rather, to own our lives is to acknowledge that struggle belongs to the very life we want to lead. If we want our lives to matter, we want to have something that we can lose.
-Martin Hagglund, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom