"Today’s milestone is human madness. Politics is a part of it, particularly in its lethal outbursts. Politics is not, as it was for Hannah Arendt, the field where human freedom is unfurled. The modern world, the world of world war, the Third World, the underground world of death that acts upon us, do not have the civilized splendor of the Greek city state. The modern political domain is massively, in totalitarian fashion, social, leveling, exhausting. Hence madness is a space of antisocial, apolitical, and paradoxically free individuation" — Julia Kristeva (Black Sun)
"When the starry sky, a vista of open seas, or a stained-glass window shedding purple beams fascinate me, there is a cluster of meaning, of colors, of words, of caresses, there are light touches, scents, sighs, cadences that arise, shroud me, carry me away, and sweep me beyond the things I see, hear, or think, The "sublime" object dissolves in the raptures of a bottomless memory. It is such a memory, which, from stopping point to stopping point, remembrance to remembrance, love to love, transfers that object to the refulgent point of the dazzlement in which I stray in order to be." — Julia Kristeva (Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection)
"Admittedly more a summary of a system of thought than a witty epigram, per se, but here is Julia Kristeva from her "Hannah Arendt: Life Is A Narrative" on the political philosophy of Hannah Arendt -
"Throughout the life of narrative seen as a 'quest' for shareable meaning, it is therefore not a total and totalizing work that Arendt seeks. But neither does she seek the creation of a political space that would be in itself a 'work of art.' To see the essence of politics as a welcoming phenomenality, a locus of pure appearance that has been freed from the schema of domination, seems to represent an aestheticization that does not correspond to Arendt's thought. The aestheticizing reification of politics that we can see in National Socialism does not reveal the non-political essence of the political, as was once said, but its death. For Arendt, if political life is separate from its story, which demonstrates to all (dokei moi) its conflicts, it is to the extent that political life resists its own aestheticization, sees itself as an activity (praxis) that cannot be reduced to a simple product (poiesis), and allows itself to be shared by the irreducible plurality of those who are living." — Julia Kristeva
I think … that we have not yet become human. Or, I might say, in a different way, that the category of the human is in the process of becoming. What constitutes the human is a site of contestation. there are clashing cultural interpretations about what the human ought to be, and that every time you assert human rights, you are also adding to the meaning of what the human is. Butler, Judith
Like such miraculously resilient characters of the Saturday morning cartoons. Hegel's protagonists always reassemble themselves, prepare a new scene, enter the stage armed with a new set of ontological insights—and fail again. Butler, Judith.
I think that there are very often provocative encounters that take place in human rights negotiations where different notions of the human have to yield. They have to yield to new notions of the human. And they have to yield to new notions that are promoted in the name of a more expansive, or more universal notion of what the human is. I think currently, we're seeing the US government make an argument that the Guantanomo Bay detainees, Arab-Americans, and Arab immigrants or residents, who have been detained illegally since September 11th, that they are not entitled to certain kind of civil liberties, or that they don't fall under the rubric of international human rights. And I think implicitly we're being told that these humans are not humans in the ordinary sense. Or that they are 'suspected' to not be human in the ordinary sense. Butler, Judith.
I signed a petition framed in these terms … in which 3700 American Jews opposed the Israeli occupation, though in my view it was not nearly strong enough: it did not call for the end of Zionism, or for the reallocation of arable land, for rethinking the Jewish right of return or for the fair distribution of water and medicine to Palestinians, and it did not call for the reorganisation of the Israeli state on a more radically egalitarian basis. Butler, Judith.
[There's] an ordinary sense of the human that is sometimes defined by a racial or racist episteme, which has a certain view of what qualifies as a human, who are subjects entitled to certain rights. And so when another so-called human comes along who doesn't fit that, there are authorities, such as the US government, that do not consider these people subjects entitled to human rights — these rights, which we nevertheless deemed universal! So they just commit this extraordinary contradictory act, by which they claim the universality of human rights in one breath, and then they insist on the exceptions to this universality in another. And we have to ask, under what conditions, do certain members of certain populations get targeted as exceptions to that universal. And as long as that continues to happen, we have not yet achieved the human. Butler, Judith.
We can transpose this into broader questions of identity when people say that there's a certain kind of essential "Americanness," what it is to be an American, what it is to be patriotic, what it is to belong, what the norms are to which you must conform if you are to appear in public, right now, as a patriotic American. Many people in the media have sought to conform to those norms to suppress dissent, to expunge criticism of US policy from the mainstream media, to selectively report on the deaths of Afghanistan, to selectively report on the Mid-East — although some of it is breaking up right now. Many of these self-censoring practices are about trying to produce the US reporter as a kind of foot soldier in the Bush army, and there were several reporters who did define themselves as such, especially after the very tragic murder of Daniel Pearle, the Wall Street Journal reporter. Butler, Judith.
The very fact that we live with others whose values are not the same of our own, or who set a limit to what we can know, or who are opaque to us, or who are strange, or are partially understood, that just means we live with a kind of humility, that means we are decentered. And that is to say, who I am is not the center of this world. I live in a world in which I am constantly decentered with the differences of others. Butler, Judith.
[The] place of critique and dissent in democracy and in radical democratic culture is always going to be agonistic, it's always going to be conflictual. And I worry that very unified and conformist, monolithicnotions of what it is to be American at this moment and not only suppressed dissent and conflict, on the one hand, but they also tend to produce certain kinds of images of what Americans look like and what they ought to be like. With the racial profiling practice and the request to be "on alert." And what are we supposed to be "on alert" for? We're supposed to be looking at people who might look vaguely Arab-American and watch their movements. It's kind of patrolling the phantismatic Arab, on the streets and in the cities of the US. Butler, Judith.
I have to find of cultural translation, modes of encounter, modes democratic participation, which actually work to foster understanding, without mandating unity. And it also means that when I take responsibility it is not a grandiose act, it's not a narcissistic act, in which I am responsible for the entirety of the world. No, I place myself in a vividly decentered way in a world with others, who are their own centers, and which I must understand to live socially, to live democratically, to live in a polity, is always to in some sense be displaced by the subject. It is partially what it is to live in a culturally diverse, democratic culture. But if one finds that the modes of communication and deliberation that allow for that to exist in its complexities, then I think we have the chance to take a kind of collective responsibility. But one cannot take collective responsibility alone. It is something taken with others. Butler, Judith.
I have recently learned that your organization is compiling dossiers on professors at U.S. academic institutions who oppose the Israeli occupation and its brutality, actively support Palestinian rights of self-determination as well as a more informed and intelligent view of Islam than is currently represented in the U.S. media. I would be enormously honored to be counted among those who actively hold these positions and would like to be included in the list of those who are struggling for justice during these times. Butler, Judith (Email sent to Campuswatch).
I am much more open about categories of gender, and my feminism has been about women's safety from violence, increased literacy, decreased poverty and more equality. I was never against the category of men.
Butler, Judith. "As a Jew I was taught it was ethically imperative to speak up." in: Haaretz. February 24, 2010.
As a Jew, I was taught it was ethically imperative to speak up.
Butler, Judith. "As a Jew I was taught it was ethically imperative to speak up." in: Haaretz. February 24, 2010.
It seemed that if you were subjugated, there were also forms of agency that were available to you, and you were not just a victim, or you were not only oppressed, but oppression could become the condition of your agency.
Butler, Judith. "As a Jew I was taught it was ethically imperative to speak up." in: Haaretz. February 24, 2010.
If … we distinguish between anti-semitism and forms of protest against the Israeli state … , then we stand a chance of understanding that world Jewry does not see itself as one with Israel in its present form and practice, and that Jews in Israel do not necessarily see themselves as one with the state. In other words, the possibility of a substantive Jewish peace movement depends on our observing a productive and critical distance from the state of Israel.
Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. Verso. May 6, 2004. Hardcover, 160 pages, Language English, ISBN: 1844670058.
There was a brief moment after 9/11 when Colin Powell said “we should not rush to satisfy the desire for revenge.” It was a great moment, an extraordinary moment, because what he was actually asking people to do was to stay with a sense of grief, mournfulness, and vulnerability.
Butler, Judith. "Interview with Judith Butler." in: The Believer. May 2003.
If we think that to criticise Israeli violence, or to call for economic pressure to be put on the Israeli state to change its policies, is to be 'effectively anti-semitic', we will fail to voice our opposition for fear of being named as part of an anti-semitic enterprise. No label could be worse for a Jew, who knows that, ethically and politically, the position with which it would be unbearable to identify is that of the anti-semite.
Butler, Judith. ”No, it's not anti-semitic.” in: London Review of Books. Vol. 25, No. 16, August 21, 2003. (English).
A challenge to the right of Israel to exist can be construed as a challenge to the existence of the Jewish people only if one believes that Israel alone keeps the Jewish people alive or that all Jews invest their sense of perpetuity in the state of Israel in its current or traditional forms.
Butler, Judith. ”No, it's not anti-semitic.” in: London Review of Books. Vol. 25, No. 16, August 21, 2003. (English).
Indeed, even if one believed that criticisms of Israel are by and large heard as anti-semitic (by Jews, anti-semites, or people who could be described as neither), it would become the responsibility of all of us to change the conditions of reception so that the public might begin to distinguish between criticism of Israel and a hatred of Jews.
Butler, Judith. ”No, it's not anti-semitic.” in: London Review of Books. Vol. 25, No. 16, August 21, 2003. (English).
For a criticism of Israel to be taken as a challenge to the survival of the Jews, we would have to assume not only that 'Israel' cannot change in response to legitimate criticism, but that a more radically democratic Israel would be bad for Jews. This would be to suppose that criticism is not a Jewish value, which clearly flies in the face not only of long traditions of Talmudic disputation, but of all the religious and cultural sources that have been part of Jewish life for centuries.
Butler, Judith. ”No, it's not anti-semitic.” in: London Review of Books. Vol. 25, No. 16, August 21, 2003. (English).
It seems, though, that historically we have now reached a position in which Jews cannot legitimately be understood always and only as presumptive victims.
Butler, Judith. ”No, it's not anti-semitic.” in: London Review of Books. Vol. 25, No. 16, August 21, 2003. (English).
No political ethics can start from the assumption that Jews monopolise the position of victim. 'Victim' is a quickly transposable term: it can shift from minute to minute, from the Jew killed by suicide bombers on a bus to the Palestinian child killed by Israeli gunfire. The public sphere needs to be one in which both kinds of violence are challenged insistently and in the name of justice.
Butler, Judith. ”No, it's not anti-semitic.” in: London Review of Books. Vol. 25, No. 16, August 21, 2003. (English).
The argument that all Jews have a heartfelt investment in the state of Israel is untrue. Some have a heartfelt investment in corned beef sandwiches or in certain Talmudic tales, religious rituals and liturgy, in memories of their grandmother, the taste of borscht or the sounds of the old Yiddish theatre. Others have an investment in historical and cultural archives from Eastern Europe or from the Holocaust, or in forms of labour activism, civil rights struggles and social justice that are thoroughly secular, and exist in relative independence from the question of Israel.
Butler, Judith. ”No, it's not anti-semitic.” in: London Review of Books. Vol. 25, No. 16, August 21, 2003. (English).
What is ironic is that … equating Zionism with Jewishness, … is adopting the very tactic favoured by anti-semites.
Butler, Judith. ”No, it's not anti-semitic.” in: London Review of Books. Vol. 25, No. 16, August 21, 2003. (English).
… It is important to distinguish between anti-semitic speech which, say, produces a hostile and threatening environment for Jewish students — racist speech which any university administrator would be obliged to oppose and regulate — and speech which makes a student uncomfortable because it opposes a particular state or set of state policies that he or she may defend. The latter is a political debate, and if we say that the case of Israel is different, that any criticism of it is considered as an attack on Israelis, or Jews in general, then we have singled out this political allegiance from all other allegiances that are open to public debate. We have engaged in the most outrageous form of 'effective' censorship.
Butler, Judith. ”No, it's not anti-semitic.” in: London Review of Books. Vol. 25, No. 16, August 21, 2003. (English).
Indeed, if the charge of anti-semitism is used to defend Israel at all costs, then its power when used against those who do discriminate against Jews — who do violence to synagogues in Europe, wave Nazi flags or support anti-semitic organisations — is radically diluted. Many critics of Israel now dismiss all claims of anti-semitism as 'trumped up', having been exposed to their use as a way of censoring political speech.
Butler, Judith. ”No, it's not anti-semitic.” in: London Review of Books. Vol. 25, No. 16, August 21, 2003. (English).
If one can't voice an objection to violence done by Israel without attracting a charge of anti-semitism, then that charge works to circumscribe the publicly acceptable domain of speech, and to immunise Israeli violence against criticism. One is threatened with the label 'anti-semitic' in the same way that one is threatened with being called a 'traitor' if one opposes the most recent US war. Such threats aim to define the limits of the public sphere by setting limits on the speakable. The world of public discourse would then be one from which critical perspectives would be excluded, and the public would come to understand itself as one that does not speak out in the face of obvious and illegitimate violence.
Butler, Judith. ”No, it's not anti-semitic.” in: London Review of Books. Vol. 25, No. 16, August 21, 2003. (English).
I think politically it is the bankrupcy of the politics of identity and the showing that we have to think coalitionally to get things done. That it doesn't matter with whom we sleep with. The queer movement was anti institutional with a critique to normalization: that you don't have to get normal to become legitimate.
Butler, Judith and Regina Michalik (Interviewer). ”The Desire for Philosophy. Interview with Judith Butler.” in: Lola Press. May 2001. (English).
My understanding of queer is a term that desires that you don't have to present an identity card before entering a meeting. Heterosexuals can join the queer movement. Bisexuals can join the queer movement. Queer is not being lesbian. Queer is not being gay. It is an argument against lesbian specificity: that if I am a lesbian I have to desire in a certain way. Or if I am a gay I have to desire in a certain way. Queer is an argument against certain normativity, what a proper lesbian or gay identity is.
Butler, Judith and Regina Michalik (Interviewer). ”The Desire for Philosophy. Interview with Judith Butler.” in: Lola Press. May 2001. (English).
Sexual harassment law is very important. But I think it would be a mistake if the sexual harassment law movement is the only way in which feminism is known in the media.
Butler, Judith and Regina Michalik (Interviewer). ”The Desire for Philosophy. Interview with Judith Butler.” in: Lola Press. May 2001. (English).
It is almost always the notion that America knows what human rights are despite its own racist culture — and they really export this. The others have to be grateful for this exportation. I think it has to deal with cultural translation: how we come across what it means to learn not just another language, but another political idiom, how people organize, how they function politically, how they make their claims.
Butler, Judith and Regina Michalik (Interviewer). ”The Desire for Philosophy. Interview with Judith Butler.” in: Lola Press. May 2001. (English).
I am a nice Jewish girl from the Midwest who has quite a good education. My family was from Hungary and from Russia. And they maintained ties to Europe. And many of my family lived here through the 30ths and died in the War. My grandmother was always very clear that I should go back to Europe to study and so I came to study in Heidelberg in 1979. My mother and her generation were worried whether I should go to Germany and that could be difficult being Jewish. But my grandmother said: "Yes, you go to Germany. Jews always went to study in Prague, in Berlin, yes, you go!"
Butler, Judith and Regina Michalik (Interviewer). ”The Desire for Philosophy. Interview with Judith Butler.” in: Lola Press. May 2001. (English).
I have always been very worried about hops of feminism who are highly regulative or repressive towards. I am against normativities and for sexual freedom. I always hated this saying that feminism is the theory and lesbianism must be the practice.
Butler, Judith and Regina Michalik (Interviewer). ”The Desire for Philosophy. Interview with Judith Butler.” in: Lola Press. May 2001. (English).
I wanted to work out how a norm actually materialises a body, how we might understand the materiality of the body to be not only invested with a norm, but in some sense animated by a norm, or contoured by a norm.
Butler, Judith and Regina Michalik (Interviewer). ”The Desire for Philosophy. Interview with Judith Butler.” in: Lola Press. May 2001. (English).
I am living in Northern California. I live in heaven. But even I had to be denied by the social service agency that considered me as they had no category for me when I adopted my son. They said: 'You look like a great parent. But we don't have a category for lesbians to adopt. So we can't accept you.' And the judge had to overturn the denial. So in my case I was lucky. But I could have been in another part of California where the judge says no.
Butler, Judith and Regina Michalik (Interviewer). ”The Desire for Philosophy. Interview with Judith Butler.” in: Lola Press. May 2001. (English).
I never expected my work to be read by very many people. I am dense, I am abstract, I am esoteric. Why should I become popular? But politically it is important that people ask the question 'what is possible' and believe in possibility. Because without the motion of possibility there is no motion forward. The idea that people might live their gender in a different way, or they might live their sexuality in a different way, that there might be room for a livable sustainable pleasurable happy politically informed life out of the closet.
Butler, Judith and Regina Michalik (Interviewer). ”The Desire for Philosophy. Interview with Judith Butler.” in: Lola Press. May 2001. (English).
My thesis' on social construction seems to be very frightening to people: the idea that sex is culturally constructed. They seem to fear that I am evacuating any notion of the real, that I make people think that their bodies are not real or that sexual differences are not real. They believe that I am too charismatic and that I am seducing the young.
Butler, Judith and Regina Michalik (Interviewer). ”The Desire for Philosophy. Interview with Judith Butler.” in: Lola Press. May 2001. (English).
In the last few years, a small, culturally conservative academic journal has gained public attention by showcasing difficult sentences written by intellectuals in the academy … the whole exercise hints at a serious question about the relation of language and politics: why are some of the most trenchant social criticisms often expressed through difficult and demanding language?
Butler, Judith. ”A 'Bad Writer' Bites Back.” in: New York Times. March 20, 1999. p. A27. (English).
… Race and class are rendered distinct analytically only to produce the realization that the analysis of the one cannot proceed without the other. A different dynamic it seems to me is at work in the critique of new sexuality studies.
Butler, Judith (Conference.) "Left Conservatism, II." in: Theory & Event. Vol.2, Issue 2, 1998.
[There] is no political position that follows necessarily from anti-foundationalism, nor does it necessary destroy a politics. Its relationship to political formations strikes me as very different. It cannot be a foundation. This is an important point. If anti-foundationalism is what secured a politics, it would be taking the place of a foundation. If it is that which destroys a politics, it would still be in the place of that which ought to be a foundation. In other words, the whole debate concerning the politics of anti-foundationalism takes place within a foundationalist imaginary, which I think is the problem.
Butler, Judith (Conference.) "Left Conservatism, II." in: Theory & Event. Vol.2, Issue 2, 1998.
[Is] one's material livelihood not at issue in those instances in which lesbians and gays are rigorously excluded from state sanctioned notions of the family [not that I think we should all be included], but certainly when they are stopped at the border, deemed inadmissible to citizenship, selectively denied the status of freedom of speech, and freedom of assembly, denied the [questionable] benefit of being a member of the military who might speak his or her desire, deauthorized by the law to make emergency medical decisions about one's dying lover, to receive the property of own's dead lover, to have received from the hospital the body of one's dead lover?
Butler, Judith (Conference.) "Left Conservatism, II." in: Theory & Event. Vol.2, Issue 2, 1998.
A serious misunderstanding has taken place. Calling the foundational status of a term into question does not censor the use of the term. It seems to me that to call something into question, to call into question its foundational status, is the beginning of the reinvigoration of that term. What can such terms mean, given that there is no consensus on their meaning? How can they be mobilized, given that there is no way that they can be grounded or justified in any kind of permanent way. What is the task for politics when it invariably must use terms, must use the language of universality, for instance, precisely when the conventional usages of the term do not include the radical democratic uses of the term one has in mind for the term?
Butler, Judith (Conference.) "Left Conservatism, II." in: Theory & Event. Vol.2, Issue 2, 1998.
If we were to say there is a certain point at which intellectual interrogation of a category must stop because we must use it, what have we done? We have, at that moment, premised our politics on anti-intellectualism. We've paralyzed ourselves at that moment, because we make use of a category that we cannot possibly believe in, that we cannot possibly discuss, that we may not radically interrogate. That kind of self-censoriousness is a terrible, terrible move.
Butler, Judith (Conference.) "Left Conservatism, II." in: Theory & Event. Vol.2, Issue 2, 1998.
[The] cultural Leftism has somehow abandoned the project of Marxism, and … it fails to address questions of economic equity and redistribution, and it fails to situate culture in terms of a systematic understanding of social and economic modes of production, … the cultural focus of Left politics has splintered the Left into identitarian sects, and … we have lost a set of common ideals and goals, a sense of a common history, common set of values, language and we've lost objective and universal modes of rationality.
Butler, Judith (Conference.) "Left Conservatism, II." in: Theory & Event. Vol.2, Issue 2, 1998.
[The] state produces hate speech, and by this I do not mean that the state is accountable for the various slurs, epithets, and forms of invective that currently circulate throughout the population; I mean only that the category cannot exist without the state's ratification, and this power of the state's judicial language to establish and maintain the domain of what will be publically speakable suggests that the state plays much more than a limiting function in such decisions; in fact, the state actively produces the domain of publically acceptable speech, demarcating the line between the domains of the speakable and the unspeakable, and retaining the power to make and sustain that consequential line of demarcation.
Butler, Judith. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. Routledge. February 1997. Hardcover, Language English, ISBN: 0415915872.
The inflated and efficacious utterance attributed to hate speech in some of the politicized contexts discussed above is itself modeled on the speech of a sovereign state, understood as a sovereign speech act, a speech act with the power to do what it says. This sovereign power is attributed to hate speech when it is said to deprive us of rights and liberties. The power attributed to hate speech is a power of absolute and efficacious agency--performativity and transitivity at once (it does what it says and it does what it says it will do to the one addressed by the speech). This power of legal language is that to which we refer when we call upon the state to effect the regulation of offensive speech. The problem, then, is not that the force of the sovereign performative is wrong, but when used by citizens it is wrong, and when the state intervenes with its citizens, the force of the performative is, in these contexts, right.
Butler, Judith. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. Routledge. February 1997. Hardcover, Language English, ISBN: 0415915872.
The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.
Butler, Judith. ”Further Reflections on Conversations of Our Time.” in: Diacritics. Vol. 27, No. 1, pp. 13-15, Spring 1997. (English).
I think that every sexual position is fundamentally comic.
Butler, Judith, Peter Osborne and Lynne Segal (Interviewers). "Gender as Performance: An Interview with Judith Butler." in: Radical Philosophy. 1994.
I would say that I'm a feminist theorist before I'm a queer theorist or a gay and lesbian theorist.
Butler, Judith, Peter Osborne and Lynne Segal (Interviewers). "Gender as Performance: An Interview with Judith Butler." in: Radical Philosophy. 1994.
Some people would say that we need a ground from which to act. We need a shared collective ground for collective action. I think we need to pursue the moments of degrounding, when we're standing in two different places at once; or we don't know exactly where we're standing; or when we've produced an aesthetic practice that shakes the ground. That's where resistance to recuperation happens. It's like a breaking through to a new set of paradigms.
Butler, Judith, Peter Osborne and Lynne Segal (Interviewers). "Gender as Performance: An Interview with Judith Butler." in: Radical Philosophy. 1994.
When the woman in the audience at my talk said "I survived lesbian feminism and still desire women", I thought that was a really great line, because one of the problems has been the normative requirement that has emerged within some lesbian-feminist communities to come up with a radically specific lesbian sexuality.
Butler, Judith, Peter Osborne and Lynne Segal (Interviewers). "Gender as Performance: An Interview with Judith Butler." in: Radical Philosophy. 1994.
Lesbians make themselves into a more frail political community by insisting on the radical irreducibility of their desire. I don't think any of us have irreducibly distinct desires.
Butler, Judith, Peter Osborne and Lynne Segal (Interviewers). "Gender as Performance: An Interview with Judith Butler." in: Radical Philosophy. 1994.
It is important to understand performativity — which is distinct from performance — through the more limited notion of resignification. I'm still thinking about subversive repetition, which is a category in Gender Trouble, but in the place of something like parody I would now emphasise the complex ways in which resignification works in political discourse.
Butler, Judith, Peter Osborne and Lynne Segal (Interviewers). "Gender as Performance: An Interview with Judith Butler." in: Radical Philosophy. 1994.
It is important to distinguish performance from performativity: the former presumes a subject, but the latter contests the very notion of the subject. The place where I try to clarify this is toward the beginning of my essay "Critically Queer", in Bodies that Matter, I begin with the Foucauldian premise that power works in part through discourse and it works in part to produce and destabilise subjects. But then, when one starts to think carefully about how discourse might be said to produce a subject, it's clear that one's already talking about a certain figure or trope of production. It is at this point that it's useful to turn to the notion of performativity, and performative speech acts in particular — understood as those speech acts that bring into being that which they name. This is the moment in which discourse becomes productive in a fairly specific way. So what I'm trying to do is think about the performativity as that aspect of discourse that has the capacity to produce what it names. Then I take a further step, through the Derridean rewriting of Austin, and suggest that this production actually always happens through a certain kind of repetition and recitation. So if you want the ontology of this, I guess performativity is the vehicle through which ontological effects are established. Performativity is the discursive mode by which ontological effects are installed. Something like that.
Butler, Judith, Peter Osborne and Lynne Segal (Interviewers). "Gender as Performance: An Interview with Judith Butler." in: Radical Philosophy. 1994.
People then go on to think that if gender is performative it must be radically free. And it has seemed to many that the materiality of the body is vacated or ignored or negated here — disavowed, even. … So what became important to me in writing Bodies that Matter was to go back to the category of sex, and to the problem of materiality, and to ask how it is that sex itself might be construed as a norm.
Butler, Judith, Peter Osborne and Lynne Segal (Interviewers). "Gender as Performance: An Interview with Judith Butler." in: Radical Philosophy. 1994.
There's a very specific notion of gender involved in compulsory heterosexuality: a certain view of gender coherence whereby what a person feels, how a person acts, and how a person expresses herself sexually is the articulation and consummation of a gender. It's a particular causality and identity that gets established as gender coherence which is linked to compulsory heterosexuality. It's not any gender, or all gender, it's that specific kind of coherent gender.
Butler, Judith, Peter Osborne and Lynne Segal (Interviewers). "Gender as Performance: An Interview with Judith Butler." in: Radical Philosophy. 1994.
One of the problems with homosexuality is that it does represent psychosis to some people. Many people feel that who they are as egos in the world, whatever imaginary centres they have, would be radically dissolved were they to engage in homosexual relations. They would rather die than engage in homosexual relations. For these people homosexuality represents the prospect of the psychotic dissolution of the subject. How are we to distinguish that phobic abjection of homosexuality from what Zizek calls the real — where the real is that which stands outside the symbolic pact and which threatens the subject within the symbolic pact with psychosis?
Butler, Judith, Peter Osborne and Lynne Segal (Interviewers). "Gender as Performance: An Interview with Judith Butler." in: Radical Philosophy. 1994.
What's needed is a dynamic and more diffuse conception of power, one which is committed to the difficulty of cultural translation as well as the need to rearticulate "universality" in non-imperialist directions. This is difficult work and it's no longer viable to seek recourse to simple and paralysing models of structural oppression. But even her, in opposing a dominant conception of power in feminism, I am still "in" or "of" feminism. And it's this paradox that has to be worked, for there can be no pure opposition to power, only a recrafting of its terms from resources invariably impure.
Butler, Judith, Peter Osborne and Lynne Segal (Interviewers). "Gender as Performance: An Interview with Judith Butler." in: Radical Philosophy. 1994.
… [The] theory of performativity was originally a theory of gender, about how gender is performed, how gender is enunciated and articulated and how it's done in relationship to certain kinds of norms. Performativity, in the work which I elaborated most fully, probably has to do with becoming a man or becoming a woman, or becoming something else, where the norms of man or woman are hegemonic and one has to negotiate them, either through replicating them and resignifying them or by crossing them or confusing them, or vacating them, or posing them many different relations.
Butler, Judith, Peter Osborne and Lynne Segal (Interviewers). "Gender as Performance: An Interview with Judith Butler." in: Radical Philosophy. 1994.
What's interesting is that this voluntarist interpretation, this desire for a kind of radical theatrical remaking of the body, is obviously out there in the public sphere. There's a desire for a fully phantasmatic transfiguration of the body. But no, I don't think that drag is a paradigm for the subversion of gender. I don't think that if we were all more dragged out gender life would become more expansive and less restrictive. There are restrictions in drag. In fact, I argued … that drag has its own melancholia.
Butler, Judith, Peter Osborne and Lynne Segal (Interviewers). "Gender as Performance: An Interview with Judith Butler." in: Radical Philosophy. 1994.
I oppose the notion that the media is monolithic. It's neither monolithic nor does it act only and always to domesticate. Sometimes it ends up producing images that it has no control over. This kind of unpredictable effect can emerge right out of the centre of a conservative media without an awareness that it is happening. There are ways of exploiting the dominant media. The politics of aesthetic representation has an extremely important place.
Butler, Judith, Peter Osborne and Lynne Segal (Interviewers). "Gender as Performance: An Interview with Judith Butler." in: Radical Philosophy. 1994.
What is at stake is less a theory of cultural construction than a consideration of the scenography and topography of construction. This scenography is orchestrated by and as a matrix of power that remains disarticulated if we presume constructedness and materiality as necessarily oppositional notions.
Butler, Judith. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of 'Sex'. Routledge. London, New York, October 1993. Paperback, 288 pages, Language English, ISBN: 0415903661.
Indeed it may be only by risking the incoherence of identity that connection is possible.
Butler, Judith. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of 'Sex'. Routledge. London, New York, October 1993. Paperback, 288 pages, Language English, ISBN: 0415903661.
Perhaps the promise of phallus is always dissatisfying in some way.
Butler, Judith and Sarah Salih (Co-Editor). "The Lesbian Phallus and the Morphological Imaginary" (1993), later published in: The Judith Butler Reader 2004.
Gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original; in fact, it is a kind of imitation that produces the very notion of the original as an effect and consequence of the imitation itself.
Butler, Judith and Dian Fuss (Editor)."Imitation and Gender Insubordination" in: Inside/Out. 1991.
There is no original or primary gender a drag imitates, but gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original.
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge. November 15, 1989. Paperback, 192 pages, Language English, ISBN: 0415900433.
There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender…Identity is performatively constituted by the very 'expressions' that are said to be its results.
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge. November 15, 1989. Paperback, 192 pages, Language English, ISBN: 0415900433.
Gender is not something that one is, it is something one does, an act… a "doing" rather than a "being".
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge. November 15, 1989. Paperback, 192 pages, Language English, ISBN: 0415900433.
There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very "expressions" that are said to be its results.
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge. November 15, 1989. Paperback, 192 pages, Language English, ISBN: 0415900433.
Sigmund Freud (German pronunciation: [ˈziːɡmʊnt ˈfʁɔʏt]), born Sigismund Schlomo Freud (6 May 1856 – 23 September 1939), was an Austrian neurologist who founded the discipline of psychoanalysis. Freud is best known for his theories of the unconscious mind and the mechanism of repression, and for creating the clinical method of psychoanalysis for investigating the mind and treating psychopathology through dialogue between a patient (or "analysand") and a psychoanalyst. Freud established sexual drives as the primary motivational forces of human life, developed therapeutic techniques such as the use of free association, discovered the phenomenon of transference in the therapeutic relationship and established its central role in the analytic process; he interpreted dreams as sources of insight into unconscious desires. He was an early neurological researcher into, among other things, cerebral palsy, aphasia and microscopic neuroanatomy, and a prolific essayist, drawing on psychoanalysis to contribute to the history, interpretation and critique of culture.
"Sometimes people hold a core belief that is very strong. When they are
presented with evidence that works against that belief, the new
evidence cannot be accepted. It would create a feeling that is
extremely uncomfortable, called cognitive dissonance. And because it
is so important to protect the core belief, they will rationalize,
ignore and even deny anything that doesn't fit in with the core belief."
— Frantz Fanon (Black Skin, White Masks)
"Each generation must discover its mission, fulfill it or betray it, in relative opacity."
— Frantz Fanon (The Wretched of the Earth)
"I am black; I am in total fusion with the world, in sympathetic affinity with the earth, losing my id in the heart of the cosmos -- and the white man, however intelligent he may be, is incapable of understanding Louis Armstrong or songs from the Congo. I am black, not because of a curse, but because my skin has been able to capture all the cosmic effluvia. I am truly a drop of sun under the earth."
— Frantz Fanon (Black Skin, White Masks)
"To speak a language is to take on a world, a culture."
— Frantz Fanon
tags: linguistics, politics, psychology
"For a colonized people the most essential value, because the most concrete, is first and foremost the land: the land which will bring them bread and, above all, dignity."
— Frantz Fanon (The Wretched of the Earth)
"O my body, make of me always a man who questions!"
— Frantz Fanon (Black Skin, White Masks)
"And it is clear that in the colonial countries the peasants alone are revolutionary, for they have nothing to lose and everything to gain. The starving peasant, outside the class system is the first among the exploited to discover that only violence pays. For him there is no compromise, no possible coming to terms; colonization and decolonization a simply a question of relative strength."
— Frantz Fanon (The Wretched of the Earth)
"The basic confrontation which seemed to be colonialism versus anti-colonialism, indeed capitalism versus socialism, is already losing its importance. What matters today, the issue which blocks the horizon, is the need for a redistribution of wealth. Humanity will have to address this question, no matter how devastating the consequences may be."
— Frantz Fanon (The Wretched of the Earth)
"Violence is man re-creating himself. "
— Frantz Fanon
"Two centuries ago, a former European colony decided to catch up with Europe. It succeeded so well that the United States of America became a monster, in which the taints, the sickness and the inhumanity of Europe have grown to appalling dimensions"
— Frantz Fanon
"When a bachelor of philosophy from the Antilles refuses to apply for certification as a teacher on the grounds of his color I say that philosophy has never saved anyone. When someone else strives and strains to prove to me that black men are as intelligent as white men I say that intelligence has never saved anyone: and that is true, for, if philosophy and intelligence are invoked to proclaim the equality of men, they have also been employed to justify the extermination of men."
— Frantz Fanon
tags:
"Imperialism leaves behind germs of rot which we must clinically detect and remove from our land but from our minds as well."
— Frantz Fanon
"One avoids Creolisms. Some families completely forbid Creole and mothers ridicule their children for speaking it."
— Frantz Fanon (Black Skin, White Masks)
"Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it.
"
— Frantz Fanon
"Today I believe in the possibility of love; that is why I endeavor to trace its imperfections, its perversions."
— Frantz Fanon (Black Skin, White Masks)
"Mastery of language affords remarkable power."
— Frantz Fanon
"To speak...means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization."
— Frantz Fanon
"[T]he unpreparedness of the educated classes, the lack of practical links between them and the mass of the people, their laziness, and, let it be said, their cowardice at the decisive moment of the struggle will give rise to tragic mishaps."
— Frantz Fanon (The Wretched of the Earth)
"To speak pidgin to a Negro makes him angry, because he himself is a pidgin-nigger-talker. But, I will be told, there is no wish, no intention to anger him. I grant this; but it is just this absence of wish, this lack of interest, this indifference, this automatic manner of classifying him, imprisoning him, primitivizing him, decivilizing him, that makes him angry.
If a man who speaks pidgin to a man of color or an Arab does not see anything wrong or evil in such behavior, it is because he has never stopped to think."
— Frantz Fanon (Black Skin, White Masks)
"ô mon corps, fait toujours de moi un homme qui s'interroge."
— Frantz Fanon (Black Skin, White Masks)
"I, the man of color, want only this: That the tool never possess the man. That the enslavement of man by man cease forever. That is, of one by another. That it be possible for me to discover and to love man, wherever he may be."
— Frantz Fanon (Black Skin, White Masks)
"I am too intelligent, too demanding, and too resourceful for anyone to be able to take charge of me entirely. No one knows me or loves me completely. I have only myself "
— Simone de Beauvoir
"One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman."
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Second Sex)
"In itself, homosexuality is as limiting as heterosexuality: the ideal should be to be capable of loving a woman or a man; either, a human being, without feeling fear, restraint, or obligation."
— Simone de Beauvoir
"It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our lives that we must draw our strength to live and our reasons for living."
— Simone de Beauvoir
"She was ready to deny the existence of space and time rather than admit that love might not be eternal."
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Mandarins)
"Few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework, with its endless repetition: the clean becomes soiled, the soiled is made clean, over and over, day after day."
— Simone de Beauvoir
"One's life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others."
— Simone de Beauvoir
"A man attaches himself to woman -- not to enjoy her, but to enjoy himself. "
— Simone de Beauvoir
"If you live long enough, you'll see that every victory turns into a defeat."
— Simone de Beauvoir
"I tore myself away from the safe comfort of certainties through my love for truth - and truth rewarded me."
— Simone de Beauvoir
"When I was a child, when I was an adolescent, books saved me from despair: that convinced me that culture was the highest of values[...]."
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Woman Destroyed)
"I am incapable of conceiving infinity and yet I do not accept finity."
— Simone de Beauvoir
"All oppression creates a state of war. And this is no exception."
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Second Sex)
"(What an odd thing a diary is: the things you omit are more important than those you put in.)"
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Woman Destroyed)
"One's life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, and compassion"
— Simone de Beauvoir
"There was once a man who lost his shadow. I forget what happened to him, but it was dreadful. As for me, I've lost my own image. I did not look at it often; but it was there, in the background, just as Maurice had drawn it for me. A straightforward, genuine, "authentic" woman, with out mean-mindedness, uncompromising, but at the same time understanding, indulgent, sensitive, deeply feeling, intensely aware of things and of people, passionately devoted to those she loved and creating happiness for them. A fine life, serene, full, "harmonious." It is dark: I cannot see myself anymore. And what do the others see? Maybe something hideous."
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Woman Destroyed)
"The body is not a thing, it is a situation: it is our grasp on the world and our sketch of our project"
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Second Sex)
"People seem to think that if you keep your head empty you automatically fill your balls."
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Mandarins)
"Capabilities are clearly manifested only when they have been realized."
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Second Sex)
"That's what I consider true generosity: You give your all, and yet you always feel as if it costs you nothing."
— Simone de Beauvoir
"Sex pleasure in women is a kind of magic spell; it demands complete abandon; if words or movements oppose the magic of caresses, the spell is broken."
— Simone de Beauvoir
"She would never change, but one day at the touch of a fingertip she would fall to dust."
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Mandarins)
"Some things I loved have vanished. A great many others have been given to me"
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Woman Destroyed)
"On ne nait pas femme, on le devient."
— Simone de Beauvoir (Le deuxième sexe II)
"On the day when it will be possible for woman to love not in her weakness but in her strength, not to escape herself but to find herself, not to abase herself but to assert herself--on that day love will become for her, as for man, a source of life and not of mortal danger."
— Simone de Beauvoir
"No one is more arrogant toward women, more aggressive or scornful, than the man who is anxious about his virility.
"
— Simone de Beauvoir
"My life was hurrying, racing tragically toward its end. And yet at the same time it was dripping so slowly, so very slowly now, hour by hour, minute by minute. One always has to wait until the sugar melts, the memory dies, the wound scars over, the sun sets, the unhappiness lifts and fades away."
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Woman Destroyed)
"Even if one is neither vain nor self-obsessed, it is so extraordinary to be oneself - exactly oneself and no one else - and so unique, that it seems natural that one should also be unique for someone else."
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Woman Destroyed)
"There is not a single line in this diary that does not call for a correction or a denial...Yes: throughout these pages I meant what I was writing and I meant the opposite; reading them again I feel completely lost...I was lying to myself. How I lied to myself!"
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Woman Destroyed)
"Tragedies are all right for a while: you are concerned, you are curious, you feel good. And then it gets repetitive, it doesn't advance, it grows dreadfully boring: it is so very boring, even for me."
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Woman Destroyed)
"I wish that every human life might be pure transparent freedom."
— Simone de Beauvoir
"Oppression tries to defend itself by its utility."
— Simone de Beauvoir
"Regardless of the staggering dimensions of the world about us, the density of our ignorance, the risks of catastrophes to come, and our individual weakness within the immense collectivity, the fact remains that we are absolutely free today if we choose to will our existence in its finiteness, a finiteness which is open on the infinite. And in fact, any man who has known real loves, real revolts, real desires, and real will knows quite well that he has no need of any outside guarantee to be sure of his goals; their certitude comes from his own drive."
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Ethics Of Ambiguity)
"Youth and what the Italians so prettily call stamina. The vigor, the fire, that enables you to love and create. When you've lost that, you've lost everything."
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Woman Destroyed)
"I realized that even if we went on talking till Judgment Day, I would still find the time all too short."
— Simone de Beauvoir
"The past is not a peaceful landscape lying there behind me, a country in which I can stroll wherever I please, and will gradually show me all its secret hills and dales. As I was moving forward, so it was crumbling. Most of the wreckage that can be seen is colourless, distorted, frozen: its meaning escapes me... all that's left is a skeleton. I shall never find my plans again, my hopes and fears - I shall not find myself."
— Simone de Beauvoir (Old Age)
"The word love has by no means the same sense for both sexes, and this is one cause of the serious misunderstandings that divide them."
— Simone de Beauvoir
"One is not born a genius, one becomes a genius; and the feminine situation has up to the present rendered this becoming practically impossible."
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Second Sex)
"Fathers never have exactly the daughters they want because they invent a notion a them that the daughters have to conform to."
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Woman Destroyed)
"My worst mistake has been not grasping that time goes by. It was going by and there I was, set in the attitude of the ideal wife of an ideal husband. Instead of bringing our sexual relationship to life again I brooded happily over memories of our former nights together."
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Woman Destroyed)
"She offered her mouth to him, as if enchanted. A Persian princess, a little Indian, a fox, a morning glory, a lovely wisteria--it always pleased them when you told them they looked like something, like something else."
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Mandarins)
"A life is such a strange object, at one moment translucent, at another utterly opaque, an object I make with my own hands, an object imposed on me, an object for which the world provides the raw material and then steals it from me again, pulverized by events, scattered, broken, scored yet retaining its unity; how heavy it is and how inconsistent: this contradiction breeds many misunderstandings."
— Simone de Beauvoir (After the War: Force of Circumstance, 1944-1952)
"Representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men; they describe it from their own point of view, which they confuse with absolute truth."
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Second Sex)
"The whole world was nothing but an exile with no hope of a return."
— Simone de Beauvoir
"Man is defined as a human being and a woman as a female — whenever she behaves as a human being she is said to imitate the male."
— Simone de Beauvoir
"That's what I consider true generosity. You give your all, and yet you always feel as if it costs you nothing."
— Simone de Beauvoir
""A day in which I don't write leaves a taste of ashes."
— Simone de Beauvoir
"--There you are. The sight of the changing world is miraculous and heartbreaking, both at the same time.
--But so it is for me too. The heartbreaking side of growing old is not in the things around one but in oneself."
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Woman Destroyed)
"She was not to look beyond herself for the meaning of her life."
— Simone de Beauvoir
"There is only one solution if old age is not to be an absurd parody of our former life, and that is to go on pursuing ends that give our existence a meaning."
— Simone de Beauvoir
"Because we are separated everything separates us, even our efforts to join each other."
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Mandarins)
"Insects were scurrying about in the shade cast by the grass, and the lawn was a huge monotonous forest of thousands of little green blades, all equal, all alike, hiding the world from each other. Anguished, she thought, "I don't want to be just another blade of grass."
— Simone de Beauvoir (All Men Are Mortal)
"On the evenings when my parents held parties, the drawing-room mirrors multiplied to infinity the scintillations of a crystal chandelier. Mama would take her seat at the grand piano to accompany a lady dressed in a cloud of tulle who played the violin and a cousin who performed on a cello. I would crack between my teeth the candied shell of an artificial fruit, and a burst of light would illuminate my palate with a taste of blackcurrant or pineapple: all the colours, all the lights were mine, the gauzy scarves, the diamonds, the laces; I held the whole party in my mouth."
— Simone de Beauvoir (Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter)
"The way I approached a question, my habit of mind, the way I looked at things, what I took for granted - all this was myself and it did not seem to me that I could alter it."
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Woman Destroyed)
"Women's mutual understanding comes from the fact that they identify themselves with each other; but for the same reason each is against the others."
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Second Sex)
"Today, however, we are having a hard time living because we are so bent on outwitting death."
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Ethics Of Ambiguity)
"A freedom which is interested only in denying freedom must be denied. And it is not true that the recognition of the freedom of others limits my own freedom: to be free is not to have the power to do anything you like; it is to be able to surpass the given toward an open future; the existence of others as a freedom defines my situation and is even the condition of my own freedom. I am oppressed if I am thrown into prison, but not if I am kept from throwing my neighbor into prison."
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Ethics Of Ambiguity)
"Les livres que j'aimais devinrent une Bible où je puisais des conseils et des secours. "
— Simone de Beauvoir (Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter)
"Life is occupied in both perpetuating itself and in surpassing itself; if all it does is maintain itself, then living is only not dying."
— Simone de Beauvoir
"To protest in the name of morality against 'excesses' or 'abuses' is an error which hints on active complicity. There are no 'abuses' or 'excesses' here, simpily an all-pervasive system."
— Simone de Beauvoir (La Force Des Choses, Tome II)
"What would Prince Charming have for occupation if he had not to awaken the Sleeping beauty?"
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Second Sex)
"...which we welcomed precisely because it happened to suit our convenience."
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Prime of Life: The Autobiography of Simone de Beauvoir)
"Representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men; they describe it from their own point of view, which they confuse with the absolute truth."
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Second Sex)
"Je crois que je comprends bien comment ca peut te faire. Nous avons essayée de batir notre amour par-delà les instants, mais seuls les instants sont surs. Pour le reste on a besoin de foi; et la foi, est-ce courage ou paresse?"
— Simone de Beauvoir (She Came to Stay)
"He reflected. 'I know a lot of different kids of people; what I want is to show each of them how the others really are. You hear so many lies! "
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Mandarins)
" 'In a way, literature is true than life,' he said to himself. 'On paper, you say exactly and completely what you feel. How easy it is to break things off on paper! You hate, you shout, you kill, you commit suicide; you carry things to the very end. And that's why it's false. But it's damned satisfying. In life, you're constantly denying yourself, and others are always contradicting you. On paper, I make time stand still and I impose my convictions on the whole world; they become the only reality.' "
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Mandarins)
"Les cas extrêmes nous attachaient, au même titre que les névroses et les psychoses : on y retrouvait exagérées, épurées, dotées d'un saisissant relief les attitudes et les passions des gens qu'on appelle normaux."
— Simone de Beauvoir (La Force De l'Age)
"Das Glück besteht darin, zu leben wie alle Welt und doch wie kein anderer zu sein."
— Simone de Beauvoir
"Self-consciousness is not knowledge but a story one tells about oneself."
— Simone de Beauvoir
"Er erzählte mir Geschichten, und vor allem ging er mit mir spazieren. Er zeigte mir Straßen und Plätze, Quais und Kanäle, die Friedhöfe, die Hafenplätze und Lagerhäuser, die unsicheren Viertel, die Kneipen - so viele Ecken von Paris, die ich nicht kannte."
— Simone de Beauvoir
"The body is the instrument of our hold on the world."
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Second Sex)
"It must feel wonderfully strange when, like Manette, one stands there, the only witness to a vanished world."
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Woman Destroyed)
"The younger and healthier a woman is and the more her new and glossy body seems destined for eternal freshness, the less useful is artifice; but the carnal weakness of this prey that man takes and its ominous deterioration always have to be hidden from him...In any case, the more traits and proportions of a woman seem contrived, the more she delighted the heart of man because she seemed to escape the metamorphosis of natural things. The result is this strange paradox that by desiring to grasp nature, but transfigured, in woman, man destines her to artifice."
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Second Sex)
"There's something tragic about you. Your feeling for the absolute. You were made to believe in God and spend your life in a convent.'
There are too many with that vocation. God would have had to love only me."
— Simone de Beauvoir (All Men Are Mortal)
"He formed his sentences hesitantly and then threw them at me with such force that I felt as if I were receiving a present each time"
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Mandarins)
"Ready-made phrases and the ritual of etiquette were unknown to him; his thoughtfulness was pure improvisation, and it resembled the little inventions affection inspires."
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Mandarins)
"Art, literature, and philosophy are attempts to found the world anew on a human freedom: that of the creator; to foster such an aim, one must first unequivocally posit oneself as a freedom. The restrictions that education and custom impose on a woman limit her grasp of the universe...Indeed, for one to become a creator, it is not enough to be cultivated, that is, to make going to shows and meeting people part of one's life; culture must be apprehended through the free movement of a transcendence; the spirit with all its riches must project itself in an empty sky that is its to fill; but if a thousand fine bonds tie it to the earth, its surge is broken. The girl today can certainly go out alone, stroll in the Tuileries; but I have already said how hostile the street is: eyes everywhere, hands waiting: if she wanders absentmindedly, her thoughts elsewhere, if she lights a cigarette in a cafe, if she goes to the cinema alone, an unpleasant incident can quickly occur; she must inspire respect by the way she dresses and behaves: this concern rivets her to the ground and self. "Her wings are clipped." At eighteen, T.E. Lawrence went on a grand tour through France by bicycle; a young girl would never be permitted to take on such an adventure...Yet such experiences have an inestimable impact: this is how an individual in the headiness of freedom and discovery learns to look at the entire world as his fief...[The girl] may feel alone within the world: she never stands up in front of it, unique and sovereign."
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Second Sex)
"Every war, every revolution, demands the sacrifice of a generation, of a collectivity, by those who undertake it."
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Ethics Of Ambiguity)
"The misfortune is that although everyone must come to [death], each experiences the adventure in solitude. We never left Maman during those last days... and yet we were profoundly separated from her."
— Simone de Beauvoir (A Very Easy Death)
"As long as there have been men and they have lived, they have all felt this tragic ambiguity of their condition, but as long as there have been philosophers and they have thought, most of them have tried to mask it."
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Ethics Of Ambiguity)
"...مرگ عزیز، مرگی که زیبایی گلها از اوست، شیرینی جوانی از اوست، مرگی که به کاروکردار انسان، به سخاوت و بیباکی و جانفشانی و از خودگذشتهگی او معنا میدهد، مرگی که همهی ارزش زندهگی بسته به اوست..."
— Simone de Beauvoir (همه میمیرند)
"For twenty years it seemed to me that I had been taking part in a game, and that one day, at the stroke of midnight, I would return to the land of shadows. ...In a little while, the hands would be pointing to midnight; they would point to midnight tomorrow and the next day, and I would still be here."
— Simone de Beauvoir
The only genuine source of Marx quotes on the internet, in which every quote is sourced by a link to the oroginal context.
If we have chosen the position in life in which we can most of all work for mankind, no burdens can bow us down, because they are sacrifices for the benefit of all; then we shall experience no petty, limited, selfish joy, but our happiness will belong to millions, our deeds will live on quietly but perpetually at work, and over our ashes will be shed the hot tears of noble people.
History calls those men the greatest who have ennobled themselves by working for the common good; experience acclaims as happiest the man who has made the greatest number of people happy.
As Prometheus, having stolen fire from heaven, begins to build houses and to settle upon the earth, so philosophy, expanded to be the whole world, turns against the world of appearance. The same now with the philosophy of Hegel.
Real talers have the same existence that the imagined gods have. Has a real taler any existence except in the imagination, if only in the general or rather common imagination of man? Bring paper money into a country where this use of paper is unknown, and everyone will laugh at your subjective imagination.
What is genuine is proved in the fire, what is false we shall not miss in our ranks. The opponents must grant us that youth has never before flocked to our colours in such numbers, ... in the end, one will be found among us who will prove that the sword of enthusiasm is just as good as the sword of genius.
The representation of private interests ... abolishes all natural and spiritual distinctions by enthroning in their stead the immoral, irrational and soulless abstraction of a particular material object and a particular consciousness which is slavishly subordinated to this object.
In the year 1842-43, as editor of the Rheinische Zeitung, I first found myself in the embarrassing position of having to discuss what is known as material interests. ... the debates on free trade and protective tariffs caused me in the first instance to turn my attention to economic questions. ... When the publishers of the Rheinische Zeitung conceived the illusion that by a more compliant policy on the part of the paper it might be possible to secure the abrogation of the death sentence passed upon it, I eagerly grasped the opportunity to withdraw from the public stage to my study.
Political economy came into being as a natural result of the expansion of trade, and with its appearance elementary, unscientific huckstering was replaced by a developed system of licensed fraud, an entire science of enrichment.
This is a kind of mutual reconciliation society... Actual extremes cannot be mediated with each other precisely because they are actual extremes. But neither are they in need of mediation, because they are opposed in essence.
We develop new principles for the world out of the world’s own principles. We do not say to the world: Cease your struggles, they are foolish; we will give you the true slogan of struggle. We merely show the world what it is really fighting for, and consciousness is something that it has to acquire, even if it does not want to.
But, if constructing the future and settling everything for all times are not our affair, it is all the more clear what we have to accomplish at present: I am referring to ruthless criticism of all that exists, ruthless both in the sense of not being afraid of the results it arrives at and in the sense of being just as little afraid of conflict with the powers that be.
The weapon of criticism cannot, of course, replace criticism of the weapon, material force must be overthrown by material force; but
theory also becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses.
Theory is capable of gripping the masses as soon as it demonstrates ad hominem, and it demonstrates ad hominem as soon as it becomes radical. To be radical is to grasp the root of the matter. But, for man, the root is man himself.
Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions.
It is the opium of the people.
The state is based on this contradiction. It is based on the contradiction between public and private life, between universal and particular interests. For this reason, the state must confine itself to formal, negative activities
When communist artisans associate with one another, theory, propaganda, etc., is their first end. But at the same time, as a result of this association, they acquire a new need — the need for society — and what appears as a means becomes an end. ... the brotherhood of man is no mere phrase with them, but a fact of life, and the nobility of man shines upon us from their work-hardened bodies.
Do I obey economic laws if I extract money by offering my body for sale,... — Then the political economist replies to me: You do not transgress my laws; but see what Cousin Ethics and Cousin Religion have to say about it. My political economic ethics and religion have nothing to reproach you with, but — But whom am I now to believe, political economy or ethics? — The ethics of political economy is acquisition, work, thrift, sobriety — but political economy promises to satisfy my needs. ... It stems from the very nature of estrangement that each sphere applies to me a different and opposite yardstick — ethics one and political economy another; for each is a specific estrangement of man and focuses attention on a particular field of estranged essential activity, and each stands in an estranged relation to the other.
The only intelligible language in which we converse with one another consists of our objects in their relation to each other. We would not understand a human language and it would remain without effect. By one side it would be recognised and felt as being a request, an entreaty, and therefore a humiliation
Political Economy regards the proletarian ... like a horse, he must receive enough to enable him to work. It does not consider him, during the time when he is not working, as a human being. It leaves this to criminal law, doctors, religion, statistical tables, politics, and the beadle.
The entire movement of history, as simply communism’s actual act of genesis — the birth act of its empirical existence — is, therefore, for its thinking consciousness the comprehended and known process of its becoming.
But also when I am active scientifically, etc. – an activity which I can seldom perform in direct community with others – then my activity is social, because I perform it as a man. Not only is the material of my activity given to me as a social product (as is even the language in which the thinker is active): my own existence is social activity, and therefore that which I make of myself, I make of myself for society and with the consciousness of myself as a social being.
Natural science will in time incorporate into itself the science of man, just as the science of man will incorporate into itself natural science: there will be one science.
Natural science has invaded and transformed human life all the more practically through the medium of industry; and has prepared human emancipation, although its immediate effect had to be the furthering of the dehumanisation of man. Industry is the actual, historical relationship of nature, .... <The nature which develops in human history — the genesis of human society — is man’s real nature; hence nature as it develops through industry, even though in an estranged form, is true anthropological nature.>
In general it is always empirical businessmen we are talking about when we refer to political economists, (who represent) their scientific creed and form of existence.
Under private property ... Each tries to establish over the other an alien power, so as thereby to find satisfaction of his own selfish need. The increase in the quantity of objects is therefore accompanied by an extension of the realm of the alien powers to which man is subjected, and every new product represents a new potentiality of mutual swindling and mutual plundering.
Man is directly a natural being. As a natural being and as a living natural being he is on the one hand endowed with natural powers, vital powers — he is an active natural being. These forces exist in him as tendencies and abilities — as instincts. On the other hand, as a natural, corporeal, sensuous objective being he is a suffering, conditioned and limited creature, like animals and plants. ... A being which does not have its nature outside itself is not a natural being, and plays no part in the system of nature. A being which has no object outside itself is not an objective being.
A few days in my old man’s factory have sufficed to bring me face to face with this beastliness, which I had rather overlooked. ..., it is impossible to carry on communist propaganda on a large scale and at the same time engage in huckstering and industry.
Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.
The premises from which we begin are not arbitrary ones, not dogmas, but real premises from which abstraction can only be made in the imagination. They are the real individuals, their activity and the material conditions under which they live, both those which they find already existing and those produced by their activity. These premises can thus be verified in a purely empirical way.
Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness, thus no longer retain the semblance of independence. They have no history, no development; but men, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with this their real existence, their thinking and the products of their thinking.
We know only a single science, the science of history. One can look at history from two sides and divide it into the history of nature and the history of men. The two sides are, however, inseparable; the history of nature and the history of men are dependent on each other so long as men exist. The history of nature, called natural science, does not concern us here; but we will have to examine the history of men, since almost the whole ideology amounts either to a distorted conception of this history or to a complete abstraction from it. Ideology is itself only one of the aspects of this history.
In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.
The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas.
For each new class which puts itself in the place of one ruling before it, is compelled, merely in order to carry through its aim, to represent its interest as the common interest of all the members of society, that is, expressed in ideal form: it has to give its ideas the form of universality, and represent them as the only rational, universally valid ones.
Both for the production on a mass scale of this communist consciousness, and ... the alteration of men on a mass scale is, necessary, ... a revolution; this revolution is necessary, therefore, not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew.
The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals. Thus the first fact to be established is the physical organisation of these individuals and their consequent relation to the rest of nature....Men can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion or anything else you like. They themselves begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence, a step which is conditioned by their physical organisation. By producing their means of subsistence men are indirectly producing their actual material life
The materialist doctrine concerning the changing of circumstances and upbringing forgets that circumstances are changed by men and that it is essential to educate the educator himself. This doctrine must, therefore, divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to society.
One of the most difficult tasks confronting philosophers is to descend from the world of thought to the actual world. Language is the immediate actuality of thought. Just as philosophers have given thought an independent existence, so they were bound to make language into an independent realm.
History does nothing, it ‘possesses no immense wealth’, it ‘wages no battles’. It is man, real, living man who does all that, who possesses and fights; ‘history’ is not, as it were, a person apart, using man as a means to achieve its own aims; history is nothing but the activity of man pursuing his aims..
The productive forces are the result of man’s practical energy, but that energy is in turn circumscribed by the conditions in which man is placed by the productive forces already acquired, by the form of society which exists before him, which he does not create, which is the product of the preceding generation.
Economists explain how production takes place in the above-mentioned relations, but what they do not explain is how these relations themselves are produced, that is, the historical movement which gave them birth. M. Proudhon, taking these relations for principles, categories, has merely to put into order these thoughts.
The working class, in the course of its development, will substitute for the old civil society an association which will exclude classes and their antagonism, and there will be no more political power properly so-called, since political power is precisely the official expression of antagonism in civil society.
But in the measure that history moves forward, and with it the struggle of the proletariat assumes clearer outlines, they no longer need to seek science in their minds; they have only to take note of what is happening before their eyes and to become its mouthpiece. So long as they look for science and merely make systems, so long as they are at the beginning of the struggle, they see in poverty nothing but poverty, without seeing in it the revolutionary, subversive side, which will overthrow the old society. From this moment, science, which is a product of the historical movement, has associated itself consciously with it, has ceased to be doctrinaire and has become revolutionary.
The slave frees himself when, of all the relations of private property, he abolishes only the relation of slavery and thereby becomes a proletarian; the proletarian can free himself only by abolishing private property in general.
What is Communism? Communism is the doctrine of the conditions of the liberation of the proletariat. What is the proletariat? The proletariat is that class in society which lives entirely from the sale of its labor and does not draw profit from any kind of capital; whose weal and woe, whose life and death, whose sole existence depends on the demand for labor....
A nation cannot become free and at the same time continue to oppress other nations. The liberation of Germany cannot therefore take place without the liberation of Poland from German oppression.
Under the freedom of trade the whole severity of the laws of political economy will be applied to the working classes. Is that to say that we are against Free Trade? No, we are for Free Trade, because by Free Trade all economical laws, with their most astounding contradictions, will act upon a larger scale, upon a greater extent of territory, upon the territory of the whole earth; and because from the uniting of all these contradictions into a single group, where they stand face to face, will result the struggle which will itself eventuate in the emancipation of the proletarians.
And this life activity [the worker] sells to another person in order to secure the necessary means of life. ... He works that he may keep alive. He does not count the labor itself as a part of his life; it is rather a sacrifice of his life. It is a commodity that he has auctioned off to another.
What is a Negro slave? A man of the black race. ... A Negro is a Negro. Only under certain conditions does he become a slave. A cotton-spinning machine is a machine for spinning cotton. Only under certain conditions does it become capital. Torn away from these conditions, it is as little capital as gold is itself money, or sugar is the price of sugar
A house may be large or small; as long as the neighboring houses are likewise small, it satisfies all social requirement for a residence. But let there arise next to the little house a palace, and the little house shrinks to a hut. The little house now makes it clear that its inmate has no social position at all to maintain.
What is free trade, what is free trade under the present condition of society? It is freedom of capital. When you have overthrown the few national barriers which still restrict the progress of capital, you will merely have given it complete freedom of action. ...
But, in general, the protective system of our day is conservative, while the free trade system is destructive. It breaks up old nationalities and pushes the antagonism of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie to the extreme point. In a word, the free trade system hastens the social revolution. It is in this revolutionary sense alone, gentlemen, that I vote in favor of free trade.
All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned ...
In bourgeois society, therefore, the past dominates the present; in Communist society, the present dominates the past. In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality.
In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.
The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.
Let the ruling classes tremble at a communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.
Working Men of All Countries, Unite!
We have no compassion and we ask no compassion from you. When our turn comes, we shall not make excuses for the terror. But the royal terrorists, the terrorists by the grace of God and the law, are in practice brutal, disdainful, and mean, in theory cowardly, secretive, and deceitful, and in both respects disreputable..
It will be the workers, with their courage, resolution and self-sacrifice, who will be chiefly responsible for achieving victory. The petty bourgeoisie will hesitate as long as possible and remain fearful, irresolute and inactive; but when victory is certain it will claim it for itself and will call upon the workers to behave in an orderly fashion, and it will exclude the proletariat from the fruits of victory. ... the rule of the bourgeois democrats, from the very first, will carry within it the seeds of its own destruction, and its subsequent displacement by the proletariat will be made considerably easier..
The revolution made progress, not by its immediate tragicomic achievements but by the creation of a powerful, united counter-revolution, an opponent in combat with whom the party of overthrow ripened into a really revolutionary party.
The worst thing that can befall a leader of an extreme party is to be compelled to take over a government in an epoch when the movement is not yet ripe for the domination of the class which he represents and for the realisation of the measures which that domination would imply ...
The democratic petty bourgeois, far from wanting to transform the whole society in the interests of the revolutionary proletarians, only aspire to make the existing society as tolerable for themselves as possible. ... The rule of capital is to be further counteracted, partly by a curtailment of the right of inheritance, and partly by the transference of as much employment as possible to the state. As far as the workers are concerned one thing, above all, is definite: they are to remain wage labourers as before. However, the democratic petty bourgeois want better wages and security for the workers; in short, they hope to bribe the workers ...
Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.
Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.
The tradition of all dead generations weighs like an nightmare on the brains of the living.
But the revolution is thoroughgoing. It is still traveling through purgatory. It does its work methodically. ... And when it has accomplished this second half of its preliminary work, Europe will leap from its seat and exult: Well burrowed, old mole!
And now as to myself, no credit is due to me for discovering the existence of classes in modern society or the struggle between them. Long before me bourgeois historians had described the historical development of this class struggle and bourgeois economists, the economic anatomy of classes. What I did that was new was to prove:
(1) that the existence of classes is only bound up with the particular, historical phases in the development of production,
(2) that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat,
(3) that this dictatorship itself only constitutes the transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society.
The Afghans are a brave, hardy, and independent race; they follow pastoral or agricultural occupations only ... With them, war is an excitement and relief from the monotonous occupation of industrial pursuits.
The human being is in the most literal sense a political animal not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society. Production by an isolated individual outside society ... is as much of an absurdity as is the development of language without individuals living together and talking to each other.
It seems to be correct to begin with the real and the concrete, with the real precondition, thus to begin, in economics, with e.g. the population, which is the foundation and the subject of the entire social act of production. However, on closer examination this proves false. The population is an abstraction if I leave out, for example, the classes of which it is composed. ... if I were to begin with the population, this would be a chaotic conception of the whole, and I would then, by means of further determination, move analytically towards ever more simple concepts, from the imagined concrete towards ever thinner abstractions until I had arrived at the simplest determinations. From there the journey would have to be retraced until I had finally arrived at the population again, but this time not as the chaotic conception of a whole, but as a rich totality of many determinations and relations.
Human anatomy contains a key to the anatomy of the ape.
Marx, The Grundrisse (1857)
In all forms of society there is one specific kind of production which predominates over the rest, ... a general illumination which bathes all the other colours and modifies their particularity.
Relations of personal dependence are the first social forms in which human productive capacity develops only to a slight extent and at isolated points. Personal independence founded on objective dependence is the second great form, in which a system of general social metabolism, of universal relations, of all-round needs and universal capacities is formed for the first time. Free individuality, based on the universal development of individuals and on their subordination of their communal, social productivity as their social wealth, is the third stage.
Capital and labour relate to each other here like money and commodity; the former is the general form of wealth, the other only the substance destined for immediate consumption. Capital’s ceaseless striving towards the general form of wealth drives labour beyond the limits of its natural paltriness, and thus creates the material elements for the development of the rich individuality which is as all-sided in its production as in its consumption, and whose labour also therefore appears no longer as labour, but as the full development of activity itself, in which natural necessity in its direct form has disappeared; because natural need has been replaced by historically produced need. This is why capital is productive; i.e. an essential relation for the development of the social productive forces. It ceases to exist as such only where the development of these productive forces themselves encounters its barrier in capital itself.
The pay of the common soldier is also reduced to a minimum — determined purely by the production costs necessary to procure him. But he exchanges the performance of his services not for capital, but for the revenue of the state.
In bourgeois society itself, all exchange of personal services for revenue — including labour for personal consumption, cooking, sewing etc., garden work etc., up to and including all of the unproductive classes, civil servants, physicians, lawyers, scholars etc. — belongs under this rubric, within this category. All menial servants etc. By means of their services — often coerced — all these workers, from the least to the highest, obtain for themselves a share of the surplus product, of the capitalist’s revenue.
But it does not occur to anyone to think that by means of the exchange of his revenue for such services, i.e. through private consumption, the capitalist posits himself as capitalist. Rather, he thereby spends the fruits of his capital. It does not change the nature of the relation that the proportions in which revenue is exchanged for this kind of living labour are themselves determined by the general laws of production.
For example, when the peasant takes a wandering tailor, of the kind that existed in times past, into his house, and gives him the material to make clothes with. ... The man who takes the cloth I supplied to him and makes me an article of clothing out of it gives me a use value. But instead of giving it directly in objective form, he gives it in the form of activity. I give him a completed use value; he completes another for me. The difference between previous, objectified labour and living, present labour here appears as a merely formal difference between the different tenses of labour, at one time in the perfect and at another in the present.
The separation of public works from the state, and their migration into the domain of the works undertaken by capital itself, indicates the degree to which the real community has constituted itself in the form of capital.
In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness.
The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.
At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or – this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms – with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure.
In studying such transformations it is always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic – in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out.
No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society. Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve, since closer examination will always show that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or at least in the course of formation.
There is in every social formation a particular branch of production which determines the position and importance of all the others, and the relations obtaining in this branch accordingly determine the relations of all other branches as well. It is as though light of a particular hue were cast upon everything, tingeing all other colours and modifying their specific features.
A philosopher produces ideas, a poet poems, a clergyman sermons, a professor compendia and so on. A criminal produces crimes. If we take a closer look at the connection between this latter branch of production and society as a whole, we shall rid ourselves of many prejudices. The criminal produces not only crimes but also criminal law, and with this also the professor who gives lectures on criminal law and in addition to this the inevitable compendium in which this same professor throws his lectures onto the general market as “commodities”.
I do not think I shall be able to deliver the manuscript of the first volume to Hamburg before October. ... I cannot go to Geneva. I consider that what I am doing through this work is far more important for the working class than anything I might be able to do personally at any Congress.
The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as "an immense accumulation of commodities," its unit being a single commodity. Our investigation must therefore begin with the analysis of a commodity.
Labour is ... not the only source of material wealth, ie of the use-values it produces. As William Petty says, labour is the father of material wealth, the earth is its mother.
The secret of the expression of value, namely, that all kinds of labour are equal and equivalent, because, and so far as they are human labour in general, cannot be deciphered, until the notion of human equality has already acquired the fixity of a popular prejudice. This, however, is possible only in a society in which the great mass of the produce of labour takes the form of commodities, in which, consequently, the dominant relation between man and man, is that of owners of commodities.
A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood. Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.
the existence of the things qua commodities, and the value-relation between the products of labour which stamps them as commodities, have absolutely no connection with their physical properties and with the material relations arising therefrom. There it is a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things. ... This I call the Fetishism ... of commodities.
Man’s reflections on the forms of social life, and consequently, also, his scientific analysis of those forms, take a course directly opposite to that of their actual historical development. He begins, post festum, with the results of the process of development ready to hand before him.
The categories of bourgeois economy consist of such like forms. They are forms of thought expressing with social validity the conditions and relations of a definite, historically determined mode of production, viz., the production of commodities. The whole mystery of commodities, all the magic and necromancy that surrounds the products of labour as long as they take the form of commodities, vanishes therefore, so soon as we come to other forms of production.
Political Economy has indeed analysed, however incompletely, value and its magnitude, and has discovered what lies beneath these forms. But it has never once asked the question why labour is represented by the value of its product and labour-time by the magnitude of that value. These formulae, which bear it stamped upon them in unmistakable letters that they belong to a state of society, in which the process of production has the mastery over man, instead of being controlled by him, such formulae appear to the bourgeois intellect to be as much a self-evident necessity imposed by Nature as productive labour itself.
It is with man as with commodities. Since he comes into the world neither with a looking glass in his hand, nor as a Fichtean philosopher, to whom ‘I am I’ is sufficient, man first sees and recognises himself in other men. Peter only establishes his own identity as a man by first comparing himself with Paul as being of like kind. And thereby Paul, just as he stands in his Pauline personality, becomes to Peter the type of the genus homo.
The price or money-form of commodities is, like their form of value generally, a form quite distinct from their palpable bodily form; it is, therefore, a purely ideal or mental form
Modern society, which, soon after its birth, pulled Plutus by the hair of his head from the bowels of the earth, greets gold as its Holy Grail, as the glittering incarnation of the very principle of its own life.
Capital is money: Capital is commodities. ... Because it is value, it has acquired the occult quality of being able to add value to itself. It brings forth living offspring, or, at the least, lays golden eggs.
Labour is, in the first place, a process in which both man and Nature participate, and in which man of his own accord starts, regulates, and controls the material re-actions between himself and Nature. He opposes himself to Nature as one of her own forces, ....
As capitalist, he is only capital personified. His soul is the soul of capital. But capital has one single life impulse, the tendency to create value and surplus-value, to make its constant factor, the means of production, absorb the greatest possible amount of surplus-labour. Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.
Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks. The time during which the labourer works, is the time during which the capitalist consumes the labour-power he has purchased of him.
In every stockjobbing swindle every one knows that some time or other the crash must come, but every one hopes that it may fall on the head of his neighbour, after he himself has caught the shower of gold and placed it in safety. Après moi le déluge! is the watchword of every capitalist and of every capitalist nation. Hence Capital is reckless of the health or length of life of the labourer, unless under compulsion from society. [Marx, Capital, Volume I, Chapter 10 (1867)
machinery has greatly increased the number of well-to-do idlers.
Capitalist production, therefore, develops technology, and the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth-the soil and the labourer.
a schoolmaster is a productive labourer when, in addition to belabouring the heads of his scholars, he works like a horse to enrich the school proprietor. That the latter has laid out his capital in a teaching factory, instead of in a sausage factory, does not alter the relation.
On the level plain, simple mounds look like hills; and the imbecile flatness of the present bourgeoisie is to be measured by the altitude of its great intellects..
That which comes directly face to face with the possessor of money on the market, is in fact not labour, but the labourer. What the latter sells is his labour-power. As soon as his labour actually begins, it has already ceased to belong to him; it can therefore no longer be sold by him. Labour is the substance, and the immanent measure of value, but has itself no value. ... That in their appearance things often represent themselves in inverted form is pretty well known in every science except Political Economy
A rise in the price of labour, as a consequence of accumulation of capital, only means, in fact, that the length and weight of the golden chain the wage-worker has already forged for himself, allow of a relaxation of the tension of it.
Centralization of the means of production and socialization of labor at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. Thus integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.
here individuals are dealt with only in so far as they are the personifications of economic categories, embodiments of particular class-relations and class-interests. My standpoint, from which the evolution of the economic formation of society is viewed as a process of natural history, can less than any other make the individual responsible for relations whose creature he socially remains, however much he may subjectively raise himself above them.
Is your wife also active in the German ladies' great emancipation campaign? I think that German women should begin by driving their husbands to self-emancipation.
Everyone who knows anything of history also knows that great social revolutions are impossible without the feminine ferment. Social progress may be measured precisely by the social position of the fair sex (plain ones included).
The English have at their disposal all necessary material preconditions for a social revolution. What they lack is the spirit of generalization and revolutionary passion. Only the General Council [of the International] can provide them with this, and thus accelerate a truly revolutionary movement here and, in consequence, everywhere.
Instead of deciding once in three or six years which member of the ruling class was to misrepresent the people in Parliament, universal suffrage was to serve the people, ....
In German: ‘Statt einmal in drei oder sechs Jahren zu entscheiden, welches Mitglied der herrschenden Klasse das Volk im Parlament ver- und zertreten soll ...
It is generally the fate of completely new historical creations to be mistaken for the counterparts of older, and even defunct, forms of social life, to which they may bear a certain likeness.
Marx, The Paris Commune (1871)
A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon — authoritarian means, if such there be at all; and if the victorious party does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionists. Would the Paris Commune have lasted a single day if it had not made use of this authority of the armed people against the bourgeois? Should we not, on the contrary, reproach it for not having used it freely enough?
My dialectic method is not only different from the Hegelian, but is its direct opposite. .... With him it is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell.
Political Economy can remain a science only so long as the class-struggle is latent or manifests itself only in isolated and sporadic phenomena. ... In France and in England the bourgeoisie had conquered political power. Thenceforth, the class-struggle, practically as well as theoretically, took on more and more outspoken and threatening forms. It sounded the knell of scientific bourgeois economy. It was thenceforth no longer a question, whether this theorem or that was true, but whether it was useful to capital or harmful, expedient or inexpedient, politically dangerous or not. In place of disinterested inquirers, there were hired prize fighters; in place of genuine scientific research, the bad conscience and the evil intent of apologetic.
Of course the method of presentation must differ in form from that of inquiry. The latter has to appropriate the material in detail, to analyse its different forms of development, to trace out their inner connexion. Only after this work is done, can the actual movement be adequately described. If this is done successfully, if the life of the subject-matter is ideally reflected as in a mirror, then it may appear as if we had before us a mere a priori construction.
... defects are inevitable in the first phase of communist society as it is when it has just emerged after prolonged birth pangs from capitalist society. Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby.
In a higher phase of communist society, ... — only then then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!
It is altogether self-evident that, to be able to fight at all, the working class must organize itself at home as a class and that its own country is the immediate arena of its struggle — insofar as its class struggle is national, not in substance, but, as the Communist Manifesto says, ‘in form’.
Between capitalist and communist society there lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.
Let us not, however, flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human victories over nature. For each such victory nature takes its revenge on us. Each victory, it is true, in the first place brings about the results we expected, but in the second and third places it has quite different, unforeseen effects which only too often cancel the first. The people who, in Mesopotamia, Greece, Asia Minor and elsewhere, destroyed the forests to obtain cultivable land, never dreamed that by removing along with the forests the collecting centres and reservoirs of moisture they were laying the basis for the present forlorn state of those countries. When the Italians of the Alps used up the pine forests on the southern slopes, so carefully cherished on the northern slopes, they had no inkling that by doing so they were cutting at the roots of the dairy industry in their region; they had still less inkling that they were thereby depriving their mountain springs of water for the greater part of the year, and making it possible for them to pour still more furious torrents on the plains during the rainy seasons. Those who spread the potato in Europe were not aware that with these farinaceous tubers they were at the same time spreading scrofula. Thus at every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside nature – but that we, with flesh, blood and brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst, and that all our mastery of it consists in the fact that we have the advantage over all other creatures of being able to learn its laws and apply them correctly.
Labour is the source of all wealth, the political economists assert. And it really is the source — next to nature, which supplies it with the material that it converts into wealth. But it is even infinitely more than this. It is the prime basic condition for all human existence, and this to such an extent that, in a sense, we have to say that labour created man himself.
When we consider and reflect upon nature at large or the history of mankind or our own intellectual activity, at first we see the picture of an endless entanglement of relations and reactions in which nothing remains what, where and as it was, but everything moves, changes, comes into being and passes away. This primitive, naive but intrinsically correct conception of the world is that of ancient Greek philosophy, and was first clearly formulated by Heraclitus: everything is and is not, for everything is fluid, is constantly changing, constantly coming into being and passing away.
But this conception, correctly as it expresses the general character of the picture of appearances as a whole, does not suffice to explain the details of which this picture is made up, and so long as we do not understand these, we have not a clear idea of the whole picture. In order to understand these details we must detach them from their natural or historical connection and examine each one separately, its nature, special causes, effects, etc.
Only sound common sense, respectable fellow that he is, in the homely realm of his own four walls, has very wonderful adventures directly he ventures out into the wide world of research.
all past history was the history of class struggles; that these warring classes of society are always the products of the modes of production and of exchange.
the principles are not the starting-point of the investigation, but its final result; they are not applied to nature and human history, but abstracted from them, it is not nature and the realm of man which conform to these principles, but the principles are only valid in so far as they are in conformity with nature and history. That is the only materialist conception of the matter.
Freedom does not consist in any dreamt-of independence from natural laws, but in the knowledge of these laws, and in the possibility this gives of systematically making them work towards definite ends.
The idea that political acts, grand performances of state, are decisive in history is as old as written history itself, and is the main reason why so little material has been preserved for us in regard to the really progressive evolution of the peoples which has taken place quietly, in the background, behind these noisy scenes on the stage.
Neither of us cares a straw for popularity. Let me cite one proof of this: such was my aversion to the personality cult that at the time of the International, when plagued by numerous moves – originating from various countries – to accord me public honour, I never allowed one of these to enter the domain of publicity, nor did I ever reply to them, save with an occasional snub. When Engels and I first joined the secret communist society, we did so only on condition that anything conducive to a superstitious belief in authority be eliminated from the Rules.
It is becoming equally imperative to bring the individual spheres of knowledge into the correct connection with one another. In doing so, however, natural science enters the field of theory and here the methods of empiricism will not work, here only theoretical thinking can be of assistance. But theoretical thinking is an innate quality only as regards natural capacity. This natural capacity must be developed, improved, and for its improvement there is as yet no other means than the study of previous philosophy.
Dialectics constitutes the most important form of thinking for present-day natural science, for it alone offers the analogue for, and thereby the method of explaining, the evolutionary processes occurring in nature, inter-connections in general, and transitions from one field of investigation to another.
The Greeks were not yet advanced enough to dissect, analyse nature — nature is still viewed as a whole, in general. The universal connection of natural phenomena is not proved in regard to particular; to the Greeks it is the result of direct contemplation. Herein lies the inadequacy of Greek philosophy, ... But herein also lies its superiority over all its subsequent metaphysical opponents. If in regard to the Greeks metaphysics was right in particulars, in regard to metaphysics the Greeks were right in general.
For nearly 40 years we have raised to prominence the idea of the class struggle as the immediate driving force of history, and particularly the class struggle between bourgeois and the proletariat as the great lever of the modern social revolution; ... At the founding of the International, we expressly formulated the battle cry: The emancipation of the working class must be the work of the working class itself.
Nature is the proof of dialectics, and it must be said for modern science that it has furnished this proof with very rich materials increasingly daily, and thus has shown that, in the last resort, Nature works dialectically and not metaphysically; that she does not move in the eternal oneness of a perpetually recurring circle, but goes through a real historical evolution.
The materialist conception of history starts from the proposition that the production of the means to support human life and, next to production, the exchange of things produced, is the basis of all social structure; that in every society that has appeared in history, the manner in which wealth is distributed and society divided into classes or orders is dependent upon what is produced, how it is produced, and how the products are exchanged. From this point of view, the final causes of all social changes and political revolutions are to be sought, not in men’s brains, not in men’s better insights into eternal truth and justice, but in changes in the modes of production and exchange.
The history of the decline of primitive communities (it would be a mistake to place them all on the same level; as in geological formations, these historical forms contain a whole series of primary, secondary, tertiary types, etc.) has still to be written. All we have seen so far are some rather meagre outlines. But in any event the research has advanced far enough to establish that: (1) the vitality of primitive communities was incomparably greater than that of Semitic, Greek, Roman, etc. societies, and, a fortiori, that of modern capitalist societies; (2) the causes of their decline stem from economic facts which prevented them from passing a certain stage of development
Not only can we manage very well without the interference of the capitalist class in the great industries of the country, but that their interference is becoming more and more a nuisance.
Just as Darwin discovered the law of development or organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history: the simple fact, hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of ideology, that mankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc.; that therefore the production of the immediate material means, and consequently the degree of economic development attained by a given people or during a given epoch, form the foundation upon which the state institutions, the legal conceptions, art, and even the ideas on religion, of the people concerned have been evolved, and in the light of which they must, therefore, be explained, instead of vice versa, as had hitherto been the case.
Engels, Speech at the Graveside of Karl Marx (1883)
What is known as ‘Marxism’ in France is, indeed, an altogether peculiar product — so much so that Marx once said to Lafargue: ‘Ce qu’il y a de certain c’est que moi, je ne suis pas Marxiste.’ [If anything is certain, it is that I myself am not a Marxist]
It is, therefore, from the history of nature and human society that the laws of dialectics are abstracted. For they are nothing but the most general laws of these two aspects of historical development, as well as of thought itself.
And indeed they can be reduced in the main to three:
The law of the transformation of quantity into quality and vice versa;
The law of the interpenetration of opposites;
The law of the negation of the negation.
Engels, Dialectics of Nature (1883)
Every individual capital forms, however, but an individualised fraction, a fraction endowed with individual life, as it were, of the aggregate social capital, just as every individual capitalist is but an individual element of the capitalist class.
It was Marx who had first discovered the great law of motion of history, the law according to which all historical struggles, whether they proceed in the political, religious, philosophical or some other ideological domain, are in fact only the more or less clear expression of struggles of social classes, and that the existence and thereby the collisions, too, between these classes are in turn conditioned by the degree of development of their economic position, by the mode of their production and of their exchange determined by it. This law, which has the same significance for history as the law of the transformation of energy has for natural science.
The economic facts, which have so far played no role or only a contemptible one in the writing of history, are, at least in the modern world, a decisive historical force; that they form the basis of the origination of the present-day class antagonisms; that these class antagonisms, in the countries where they have become fully developed, thanks to large-scale industry, hence especially in England, are in their turn the basis of the formation of political parties and of party struggles, and thus of all political history. Marx had not only arrived at the same view, but had already, in the Deutsche-Französische Jahrbücher (1844), generalized it to the effect that, speaking generally, it is not the state which conditions and regulates the civil society at all, but civil society which conditions and regulates the state, and, consequently, that policy and its history are to be explained from the economic relations and their development, and not vice versa.
Communism now no longer meant the concoction, by means of the imagination, of an ideal society as perfect as possible, but insight into the nature, the conditions and the consequent general aims of the struggle waged by the proletariat.
The doctrine of Hegel, taken as a whole, left plenty of room for giving shelter to the most diverse practical party views. And in the theoretical Germany of that time, two things above all were practical: religion and politics. Whoever placed the chief emphasis on the Hegelian system could be fairly conservative in both spheres; whoever regarded the dialectical method as the main thing could belong to the most extreme opposition, both in politics and religion.
The great basic question of all philosophy, especially of more recent philosophy, is that concerning the relation of thinking and being. ...
The answers which the philosophers gave to this question split them into two great camps. Those who asserted the primacy of spirit to nature and, therefore, in the last instance, assumed world creation in some form or other — and among the philosophers, Hegel, for example, this creation often becomes still more intricate and impossible than in Christianity — comprised the camp of idealism. The others, who regarded nature as primary, belong to the various schools of materialism.
That which is willed happens but rarely; in the majority of instances the numerous desired ends cross and conflict with one another, or these ends themselves are from the outset incapable of realisation, or the means of attaining them are insufficient. thus the conflicts of innumerable individual wills and individual actions in the domain of history produce a state of affairs entirely analogous to that prevailing in the realm of unconscious nature.
According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life. Other than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. Hence if somebody twists this into saying that the economic element is the only determining one, he transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, senseless phrase.
[Engels, Letter to J Bloch (1890)
To my mind, the so-called ‘socialist society’ is not anything immutable. Like all other social formations, it should be conceived in a state of constant flux and change. It’s crucial difference from the present order consists naturally in production organized on the basis of common ownership by the nation of all means of production. To begin this reorganization tomorrow, but performing it gradually, seems to me quite feasible. That our workers are capable of it is borne out by their many producer and consumer cooperatives which, whenever they’re not deliberately ruined by the police, are equally well and far more honestly run than the bourgeois stock companies.
The day when we are in the majority, what the French army did instinctively in not firing on the people will be repeated in our country quite consciously. Yes, whatever the frightened bourgeois say, we are able to calculate the moment when we shall have the majority of the people behind us; our ideas are making headway everywhere, as much among teachers, doctors, lawyers, etc. as among the workers. If we had to start wielding power tomorrow, we should need engineers, chemists, agronomists. Well, it is my conviction that we would have a good many of them behind us already. In five or ten years we shall have more of them than we need.
Just as the savage must wrestle with Nature to satisfy his wants, to maintain and reproduce life, so must civilised man, and he must do so in all social formations and under all possible modes of production. With his development this realm of physical necessity expands as a result of his wants; but, at the same time, the forces of production which satisfy these wants also increase. Freedom in this field can only consist in socialised man, the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of Nature; and achieving this with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most favourable to, and worthy of, their human nature. But it nonetheless still remains a realm of necessity. Beyond it begins that development of human energy which is an end in itself, the true realm of freedom, which, however, can blossom forth only with this realm of necessity as its basis. The shortening of the working-day is its basic prerequisite.
What we understand by the economic conditions which we regard as the determining basis of the history of society are the methods by which human beings in a given society produce their means of subsistence and exchange the products among themselves (in so far as division of labour exists). Thus the entire technique of production and transport is here included. According to our conception, this technique also determines the method of exchange and, further, the division of products, ...
