The Art of Tetman Callis

“The most ordinary movements in the world, such as sitting down at a table and pulling the inkstand towards one, may agitate a thousand odd, disconnected fragments, now bright, now dim, hanging and bobbing and dipping and flaunting, like the underlinen of a family of fourteen on a line in a gale of wind. Instead […]

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“What you hope for, from a person sitting next to you on a train, is that he will be thin and will not smell.” – Lydia Davis, “Excerpts from a 1985 Diary”

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“In making itself the Trojan Horse of worldwide domination, desire has emptied itself of everything that smacked of domesticity, cosiness, privacy. The precondition of totalitarian reconfiguration of what is desirable has been its autonomy from every real object and all particular content. In learning to train itself on essences, desire has become, despite itself, an […]

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“When the Young-Girl has exhausted all artifice, there is one final artifice left for her: the renunciation of artifice. But this last one really is the final one.” – Tiqqun, Preliminary Materials For a Theory of the Young-Girl (emphasis in original)

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“The spread of the seduction relation into all social activities signals the death of whatever was still living within it. The spread of simulation is also what renders seduction more and more obviously impossible. Now is the time of the greatest unhappiness, the streets filled with heartless sensualists, seducers mourning for seduction, the corpses of […]

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“In the course of its metastasized development, seduction has lost in intensity what it has gained by extension. Never has amorous discourse been so poor as when everyone made it their duty to intone it and comment upon it.” – Tiqqun, Preliminary Materials For a Theory of the Young-Girl

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“It is very difficult to say, for example, whether the fit of rage of a baby of a few months old merely expresses the need to resist unwelcome treatment, or whether it already contains an element of revenge.” – Jean Piaget, The Moral Judgment of the Child (trans. Marjorie Gabain)

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“Anorexia expresses in women the same aporia that is manifest in men in the form of the pursuit of power: the will to mastery. It is only that, because of the greater severity of the culture’s patriarchal codification upon women, the anorexic brings the will to mastery to bear upon her body, for she cannot […]

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“Once the disease of reading has laid hold upon the system it weakens it so that it falls an easy prey to that other scourge which dwells in the ink pot and festers in the quill. The wretch takes to writing. And while this is bad enough in a poor man, whose only property is […]

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“Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another.” – Virginia Woolf, Orlando

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“The Young-Girl privatizes everything she apprehends. Thus, a philosopher is not a philosopher to her, but an extravagant erotic object, and likewise, a revolutionary is not a revolutionary, but costume jewelry.” – Tiqqun, Preliminary Materials For a Theory of the Young-Girl

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“The Young-Girl is an instrument in service to a general politics of the extermination of beings capable of love.” – Tiqqun, Preliminary Materials For a Theory of the Young-Girl

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“However little we may like it, toughness is the price of survival.” – George Orwell, “The Lion and the Unicorn”

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“Revolution does not mean red flags and street fighting, it means a fundamental shift of power. Whether it happen with or without bloodshed is largely an accident of time and place. Nor does it mean the dictatorship of a single class.” – George Orwell, “The Lion and the Unicorn”

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“It is through the Young-Girl that capitalism has managed to extend its hegemony to the totality of social life. She is the most obstinate pawn of market domination in a war whose objective remains the total control of daily life and ‘productive’ time. It is precisely because she represents the total acculturation of the self, […]

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“On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.” – George Orwell, “The Art of Donald McGill”

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“Codes of law and morals, or religious systems, never have much room in them for a humorous view of life. Whatever is funny is subversive, every joke is ultimately a custard pie, and the reason why so large a proportion of jokes centre round obscenity is simply that all societies, as the price of survival, […]

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“The Don Quixote-Sancho Panza combination, which of course is simply the ancient dualism of body and soul in fiction form, recurs more frequently in the literature of the last four hundred years than can be explained by mere imitation. It comes up again and again, in endless variations, Bouvard and Pecuchet, Jeeves and Wooster, Bloom […]

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“It may be that we are doomed, that there is no hope for us, any of us, but if that is so then let us set up a last agonizing, blood-curdling howl, a screech of defiance, a war-whoop! Away with lamentations! Away with elegies and dirges! Away with biographies and histories, and libraries and museums! […]

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“In the world of authoritarian commodities, the living recognize within themselves, in their alienated desires, the enemy’s demonstration of power.” – Tiqqun, Preliminary Materials For a Theory of the Young-Girl

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“Side by side with the human race there runs another race of beings, the inhuman ones, the race of artists who, goaded by unknown impulses, take the lifeless mass of humanity and by the fever and ferment with which they imbue it turn this soggy dough into bread and the bread into wine and the […]

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“The violence with which femininitude is administered in the world of authoritarian commodities recalls the way the dominant power feels free to manhandle its slaves, when in fact it needs them to ensure its own reproduction.” – Tiqqun, Preliminary Materials For a Theory of the Young-Girl

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“When the Spectacle attempts to ‘praise femininity’ or remarks fawningly on the ‘feminization of the world,’ one can only expect the cunning promotion of all manners of servitudes, the promotion of the constellation of ‘values’ that slaves always pretend to espouse.” – Tiqqun, Preliminary Materials For a Theory of the Young-Girl

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“The earth is not an arid plateau of health and comfort, but a great sprawling female with velvet torso that swells and heaves with ocean billows; she squirms beneath a diadem of sweat and anguish. Naked and sexed she rolls among the clouds in the violet light of the stars. All of her, from her […]

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