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‘The lover is the reader par excellence. He spends his time reading signs -- he does nothing else. He is truly a prey to signs.’

-- Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse (1977), p. 134

‘The Real sets fire to everything. But it is a cold fire.’

-- Lacan, Le Séminaire, Livre XXIII, Le sinthome. 2005, p. 121

‘Of what use is a philosopher who doesn’t hurt anybody’s feelings?’

-- Diogenes, Fragment no. 10, trans. Guy Davenport (1976), p. 40

One must have a mind of winter To regard the frost and the boughs Of the pine-trees crusted with snow; And have been cold a long time To behold the junipers shagged with ice, The spruces rough in the distant glitter Of the January sun; and not to think Of any misery in the sound of the wind, In the sound of a few leaves, Which is the sound of the land Full of the same wind That is blowing in the same bare place For the listener, who listens in the snow, And, nothing himself, beholds Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

-- Wallace Stevens, ‘The Snow Man’ (1921)

‘Infinitely close, and infinitely distant.’

— Pierre Bourdieu, ‘My Feelings about Sartre’ (1993), p. 210

'Today, the chains of love have given way to the hell of freedom.'

-- Byung-Chul Han, In the Swarm (2017), p. 26

‘As a digital reflector, the smartphone serves to renew the mirror stage after infancy. It opens up a narcissistic space — a sphere of the imaginary — in which one encloses oneself. The other does not speak via the smartphone.’

— Byung-Chul Han, In the Swarm (2017), p. 22

‘The critic is one who glimpses destiny in forms.’

— György Lukács, ‘On the Nature and Form of the Essay,’ trans. Anna Bostock in Soul and Form (2010), p. 23

'Suddenly as thus they rode from infinite to infinite, suddenly as thus they tilted over abysmal worlds, a mighty cry arose -- that systems more mysterious, worlds more billowy, other heights and other depths, were dawning, were nearing, were at hand. Then the man sighed, stopped, shuddered, and wept. His overladen heart uttered itself in tears; and he said, “Angel, I will go no further. For the spirit of man aches under this infinity. Insufferable is the glory of God's house. Let me lie down in the grave, that I may find rest from the persecutions of the Infinite; for end, I see, there is none.” And from all the listening stars that shone around issued one choral chant -- “Even so it is: Angel, thou knowest that it is: end there is none that ever yet we heard of.” “End is there none?” the Angel solemnly declared. “And is this the sorrow that kills you?” But no voice answered, that he might answer himself. Then the Angel threw up his glorious hands to the heaven of heavens, saying, “End is there none to the Universe of God? Lo! also THERE IS NO BEGINNING.''’

-- final paragraph from Thomas De Quincey’s ‘Systems of Heavens’ (1846)

'As a character disorder, narcissism is the very opposite of strong self-love. Self-absorption does not produce gratification, it produces injury to the self; erasing the line between self and other means that nothing new, nothing "other," ever enters the self; it is devoured and transformed until one thinks one can see oneself in the other — and then it becomes meaningless . . . The narcissist is not hungry for experiences, he is hungry for Experience. Looking always for an expression or reflection of oneself . . . one drowns in the self.'

-- Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (1992), pp. 324 - 5

‘Everything is in the poems, but at the risk of sounding like the poor wealthy man’s Allen Ginsberg I will write to you because I just heard that one of my fellow poets thinks that a poem of mine that can’t be got at one reading is because I was confused too. Now, come on. I don’t believe in god, so I don’t have to make elaborately sounded structures. I hate Vachel Lindsay, always have, I don’t even like rhythm, assonance, all that stuff. You just go on your nerve. If someone’s chasing you down the street with a knife you just run, you don’t turn around and shout, "Give it up! I was a track star for Mineola Prep."

That’s for the writing poems part. As for their reception, suppose you’re in love and someone’s mistreating (mal aimé) you, you don’t say, "Hey, you can’t hurt me this way, I care!" you just let all the different bodies fall where they may, and they always do ‘flay after a few months. But that’s not why you fell in love in the first place, just to hang onto life, so you have to take your chances and try to avoid being logical. Pain always produces logic, which is very bad for you.’

— Frank O’Hara, from Personism: A Manifesto (1959)

'We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us--'

-- from Keats's letter to J. H. Reynolds. 3 February 1818

‘The poet / Has only the formulations of midnight.’

-- Wallace Stevens, from ‘Reply to Papini’ (1950)

'The way through the world / Is more difficult to find than the way beyond it.'

-- Wallace Stevens, from 'Reply to Papini' (1950)

‘To philosophize with open eyes is to philosophize in the dark. Only the blind can look straight at the sun.’

-- Louis Althusser, The Spectre of Hegel: Early Writings, translated by G. M. Goshgarian (1997), p. 85

JR:

There is something about the way you put together—compose—your sentences, a deliberate effort to create moments of silence, of stillness, full stops, as though there would be rest marks in a musical score, or an end of bar that forces the reader to go back and start from the beginning.

SC:

Yes, I've been criticized for the way I write, sometimes, as digressive. And I had to put up with that until I realized—but that's what thinking is! You're [the reader critical of digression] asking me to give a logical proof in which everything follows from everything—that's great stuff [laughs], but it's not what I do. In the days in which I started philosophy, the stars of philosophy departments were logical positivists. They were the ones who were famous, and you wanted to please them. You felt you were cheating if you couldn't please them. I mean, what were you supposed to show them, that you don't care what follows from what? [Laughter] You do care what follows from what. But you don't want the argument to sound the way theirs does, and you don't want to be limited to the topics and to the emotions that those people are. I don't run away from the idea of philosophy as seductive. I want the sentences to be prose but intense prose, to show that, like life, thinking is not linear.

-- Joan Richardson interviews Stanley Cavell for Bookforum (2011)

‘Continuous present is one thing and beginning again and again is another thing. These are both things. And then there is using everything.

This brings us again to composition this the using everything. The using everything brings us to composition and to this composition. A continuous present and using everything and beginning again. In these two books there was elaboration of the complexities of using everything and of a continuous present and of beginning again and again and again.

In the first book there was a groping for a continuous present and for using everything by beginning again and again.

There was a groping for using everything and there was a groping for a continuous present and there was an inevitable beginning of beginning again and again and again.’

-- Gertrude Stein, ‘Composition as Explanation’ in Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein (1962), p. 518

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