The Art of Tetman Callis

“We have been conscious for centuries, and look, we have not come through. The quality of our consciousness is wrong, to begin with. We need the consciousness of appreciation, not the consciousness of possession; the open hand, not the grip of claw.” – Denis Donoghue, The Ordinary Universe

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“Love is wiser than Philosophy, though she is wise, and mightier than Power, though he is mighty.” – Oscar Wilde, “The Nightingale and the Rose”

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“None of us can help the things life has done to us. They’re done before you realise it, and once they’re done they make you do other things until at last everything comes between you and what you’d like to be, and you’ve lost your true self for ever.” – Eugene O’Neill, Long Day’s Journey […]

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“To reconcile the demands of the imagination with the impositions of the world is a delicate exercise; especially if the natural idiom of the imagination is a language of freedom, mobility, and range, and the idiom of the world is, for the most part, deception and abuse.” – Denis Donoghue, The Ordinary Universe

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“Reverence for life involves saying ‘yes’ to the human situation, limited and finite as it is; it disposes us to respect persons, to value them, to find the human predicament full of hazard and therefore full of significance; to find that moral choice is important and that life is possibility if not promise.” – Denis […]

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“If the spaces of life are occupied by generous perception, there is less room for masty things; belligerence, bravado, cruelty, condescension.” – Denis Donoghue, The Ordinary Universe

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“That which checks all the police forces of avoidance is, if I can put it thus, avoidance itself. There are, for example, what are called ‘publications’: one can fail to know them, this is always possible in a given context; but one can arrange things, in a certain milieu, in order to avoid knowing that […]

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“Every human formation has as its essence, and not for accidental purposes, the restraining of pleasure.” – Jacques Lacan (quoted by Jacques Derrida in The Post Card (trans. Alan Bass))

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“Nor in Æschylus nor Dante, those stern masters of tenderness, in Shakespeare, the most purely human of all the great artists, in the whole of Celtic myth and legend, where the loveliness of the world is shown through a mist of tears, and the life of a man is no more than the life of […]

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“Behind joy and laughter there may be a temperament, coarse, hard and callous. But behind sorrow there is always sorrow. Pain, unlike pleasure, wears no mask. Truth in art is not any correspondence between the essential idea and the accidental existence; it is not the resemblance of shape to shadow, or of the form mirrored […]

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“Many men on their release carry their prison about with them into the air, and hide it as a secret disgrace in their hearts, and at length, like poor poisoned things, creep into some hole and die. It is wretched that they should have to do so, and it is wrong, terribly wrong, of society […]

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“The gods are strange, and punish us for what is good and humane in us as much as for what is evil and perverse.” – Oscar Wilde, “De Profundis”

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“When I think about religion at all, I feel as if I would like to found an order for those who cannot believe: the Confraternity of the Faithless, one might call it, where on an altar, on which no taper burned, a priest, in whose heart peace had no dwelling, might celebrate with unblessed bread […]

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“Through fiction truth properly declares itself. Fiction manifests the truth: the manifestation that illustrates itself through evasion.” – Jacques Derrida, The Post Card (trans. Alan Bass)

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“Kings ought never to pledge their word. If they keep it not, it is terrible, and if they keep it, it is terrible also.” – Oscar Wilde, Salomé

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“Pure pleasure and pure reality are ideal limits, which is as much as to say fictions. The one is as destructive and mortal as the other.” – Jacques Derrida, The Post Card (trans. Alan Bass)

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“To become sensitive and pitiful the child must know that he has fellow-creatures who suffer as he has suffered, who feel the pains he has felt, and others which he can form some idea of, being capable of feeling them himself. Indeed, how can we let ourselves be stirred by pity unless we go beyond […]

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“The golden age was always a condition alien to the human race.” – Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract (quoted by Jacques Derrida in Of Grammatology (trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak))

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“It is at the moment when agrarian capitalism begins to establish itself that the means of stabilizing it in written balance accounts appears and it is also at the moment when social hierarchization is affirmed that writing constructs its first genealogists. . . . The appearance of writing is not fortuitous; after millennia of maturation […]

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“Societies have assumed their final form: no longer is anything changed except by arms and cash. And since there is nothing to say to people besides give money, it is said with placards on street corners or by soldiers in their homes.” – Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile (quoted by Jacques Derrida in Of Grammatology (trans. Gayatri […]

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“The bodily effect of our sufferings is less than one would suppose; it is memory that prolongs the pain, imagination which projects it into the future, and makes us really to be pitied. This is, I think, one of the reasons why we are more callous to the sufferings of animals than of men, although […]

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“In the experience of suffering as the suffering of the other, the imagination, as it opens us to a certain nonpresence within presence, is indispensable: the suffering of others is lived by comparison, as our nonpresent, past or future suffering. Pity would be impossible outside of this structure, which links imagination, time, and the other […]

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“How are we moved to pity? By getting outside ourselves and identifying with a being who suffers. We suffer only as much as we believe him to suffer. It is not in ourselves, but in him that we suffer.” – Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Essay on the Origin of Languages (quoted by Jacques Derrida in Of Grammatology […]

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“Fear and weakness are the sources of cruelty.” – Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Essay on the Origin of Languages (quoted by Jacques Derrida in Of Grammatology (trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak))

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“Writing may not have sufficed to consolidate human knowledge, but it may well have been indispensable to the consolidation of dominions. To bring the matter nearer to our own time: the European-wide movement towards compulsory education in the nineteenth century went hand in hand with the extension of military service and with proletarization. The struggle […]

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“From the moment that there is meaning there are nothing but signs. We think only in signs.” – Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak) (emphasis in original)

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“To locate the promising marginal text, to disclose the undecidable moment, to pry it loose with the positive lever of the signifier; to reverse the resident hierarchy, only to displace it; to dismantle in order to reconstitute what is always already inscribed. Deconstruction in a nutshell. But take away the assurance of the text’s authority, […]

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“I recognize that I love—you—by this: that you leave in me a wound that I do not want to replace.” – Jacques Derrida, The Post Card (trans. Alan Bass)

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“Work with very limited materials and integrate the universe into them through a continuous variation.” – Karlheinz Stockhausen (interviewed in Le Monde, July 21, 1977)

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“I would like to write to you so simply, so simply, so simply . . . so that above all the language remains self-evidently secret, as if it were being invented at every step.” – Jacques Derrida, The Post Card (trans. Alan Bass)

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