“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
“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
“The preponderance of the entertainment and desire market is one stage in the project of social pacification, in which this market has been given the function of obscuring, provisionally, the living contradictions that traverse every point of the fabric of imperial biopolitics.” – Tiqqun, Preliminary Materials For a Theory of the Young-Girl
“The world is pooped out: there isn’t a dry fart left. Who that has a desperate, hungry eye can have the slightest regard for those existent governments, laws, codes, principle, ideals, ideas, totems, and taboos?” – Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer
“In the final phase of the Spectacle, everything is sexually mediated, which is to say that coitus has been substituted as the ultimate goal of the utility of individual things. It is toward coitus that the existence of the world of the commodity now exclusively moves.” – Tiqqun, Preliminary Materials For a Theory of the Young-Girl
“As soon as the corporeal presence of the industrial slave has fully entered the composition of the assessable output of what she can produce—her physiognomy being inseparable from her labor—the distinction between the person and the activity of that person becomes specious. The corporeal presence is already a commodity, independently of and in addition to the commodity this presence contributes to producing. Henceforth industrial slaves either establish an intimate relation between their corporeal presence and the money this presence brings in, or else they substitute themselves for the function of money, being money themselves: at once the equivalent of wealth and the wealth itself.” – Pierre Klossowski, Living Currency
“The vitrified aspect of the face of the Young-Girl must be explained by her status as commodity: She is the crystallization of a certain quantity of labor spent to put her in accordance with the norms of a certain type of exchange. And the form of the Young-Girl’s appearance, which is also that of a commodity, is characterized by the obscuring, if not the voluntary forgetting, of this concrete labor.” – Tiqqun, Preliminary Materials For a Theory of the Young-Girl (emphases in original)
“For the man in the paddock, whose duty it is to sweep up manure, the supreme terror is the possibility of a world without horses. To tell him that it is disgusting to spend one’s life shoveling up horse turds is a piece of imbecility. A man can get to love shit if his livelihood depends on it, if his happiness is involved.” – Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer
“El dinero trae desgracia a la felicidad (Money brings disgrace to happiness).” – Yago, pasión morena
“When private property is emptied of all its metaphysical substance, it does not immediately die. It survives, but its content is then only negative: the right to deprive others of the use of our assets.” – Tiqqun, Preliminary Materials For a Theory of the Young-Girl
“The rhetoric of the war of the sexes, and thus for now, of women’s revenge, operates as the ultimate ruse through which the logic of virility will have vanquished women without their knowledge: by enclosing them, at the price of a simple role reversal, in the submission/domination alternative, to the exclusion of all else.” – Tiqqun, Preliminary Materials For a Theory of the Young-Girl
“There is nothing in the Young-Girl’s life, even in the deepest zones of her intimacy, that escapes alienated reflexivity, that escapes the codification and the gaze of the Spectacle. This intimacy strewn with commodities yields entirely to advertising, and is entirely socialized as intimacy, which is to say that she is part-for-part subject to a fallacious commonality that does not allow her to express herself.” – Tiqqun, Preliminary Materials For a Theory of the Young-Girl (emphasis in original)
“Nowhere has there been a ‘sexual liberation’—that oxymoron!—but only the pulverization of everything that slowed the total mobilization of desire in view of the production of merchandise. The ‘tyranny of pleasure’ does not incriminate pleasure, but tyranny.” – Tiqqun, Preliminary Materials For a Theory of the Young-Girl (emphasis in original)
“The supposed liberation of women did not consist in their emancipation from the domestic sphere, but rather in the total extension of the domestic into all of society.” – Tiqqun, Preliminary Materials For a Theory of the Young-Girl
“The Young-Girl appears as the product and the principal outcome of the formidable surplus crisis of capitalistic modernity. She is the proof and the support of the limitless pursuit of the process of valorization when the process of accumulation proves limited (by the limits of the planet itself, ecological catastrophe, or social implosion).” – Tiqqun, Preliminary Materials For a Theory of the Young-Girl
“Progress is not an illusion, it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing. There is always a new tyrant waiting to take over from the old—generally not quite so bad, but still a tyrant. Consequently two viewpoints are always tenable. The one, how can you improve human nature until you have changed the system? The other, what is the use of changing the system before you have improved human nature? They appeal to different individuals, and they probably show a tendency to alternate in point of time. The moralist and the revolutionary are constantly undermining one another.” – George Orwell, “Charles Dickens”
“The formal domination of Capital has become more and more real. Consumer society now seeks out its best supporters from among the marginalized elements of traditional society—women and youth first, followed by homosexuals and immigrants. To those who were minorities yesterday, and who had therefore been the most foreign, the most spontaneously hostile to consumer society, not having yet been bent to the dominant norms of integration, the latter ends up looking like emancipation.” – Tiqqun, Preliminary Materials For a Theory of the Young-Girl (emphases in original)
“At the beginning of the 1920s, capitalism realized that it could no longer maintain itself as the exploitation of human labor if it did not also colonize everything that is beyond the strict sphere of production. Faced with the challenge from socialism, capital too would have to socialize. It had to create its own culture, its own leisure, medicine, urbanism, sentimental education and its own more, as well as a disposition toward their perpetual renewal. This was the Fordist compromise, the Welfare-State, family planning: social-democratic capitalism. For a somewhat limited submission to labor, since workers still distinguished themselves from their work, we have today substituted integration through subjective and existential conformity, that is, fundamentally, through consumption.” – Tiqqun, Preliminary Materials For a Theory of the Young-Girl (emphasis in original)
“If the imperial perspective had a slogan it would be ‘All Power To The Apparatuses!’ It is true that in the coming insurrection it will most often suffice to liquidate the apparatuses sustaining enemies in order to break them, enemies that in times past would have had to be shot. At bottom, the slogan has less to do with cybernetic utopianism that with imperial pragmatism: the fictions of metaphysics, these grand barren constructions which now compel neither faith nor admiration, are no longer able to unify the debris of universal disintegration. Under Empire, the old Institutions are deteriorating one after the other in a cascade of apparatuses. What is happening, and what is the truly imperial mission, is the concerted demolition of each Institution into a multiplicity of apparatuses, into an arborescence of relative and unpredictable norms. The educational system, for example, no longer bothers to present itself as a coherent order. It is now but a hodgepodge of classes, schedules, subjects, buildings, departments, programs, and projects that are so many apparatuses meant to keep bodies immobilized. With the imperial extinction of every event comes the world-wide, managed dissemination of apparatuses. Many voices can now be heard lamenting such a dreadful age. Some denounce a pervasive ‘loss of meaning,’ while others, the optimists, swear every morning to ‘give meaning’ to this or that misery only, invariably, to fail. All, in fact, agree to want meaning without wanting the event. They seem not to notice that apparatuses are by nature hostile to meaning, whose absence it is their job to maintain.” – Tiqqun, This Is not a Program (emphasis in original)
“A single discussion with a Marxist is enough to understand the real reason for his faith: Marxism serves as an existential crutch for many people who are scared that their world may not in fact be so self-evident.” – Tiqqun, This Is not a Program
“The immediate affirmation of a need or desire—in so far as it implies a certain knowledge of oneself—ethically contravenes imperial pacification; and it no longer has the justification of militancy. Militancy and its critique are both in different ways compatible with Empire; one as a form of work, the other as a form of powerlessness.” – Tiqqun, This Is not a Program
“Of the entire putrid legacy of the workers’ movement nothing stinks as much as the culture, and now the cult, of work. It is this culture and this culture alone, with its intolerable ethical blindness and its professional self-hatred, that one hears groaning with each new layoff, with each new proof that work is finished.” – Tiqqun, This Is not a Program (emphasis in original)
“The logic of the present situation is no longer of an economic but of an ethico-political kind. Work is the linchpin of the citizen factory. As such, it is indeed necessary, as necessary as nuclear reactors, city planning, the police, or television. One has to work because one has to feel one’s existence, at least in part, as foreign to oneself.” – Tiqqun, This Is not a Program (emphases in original)
“No one believes in work anymore, but for this very reason faith in its necessity has become all the more insistent. And for those not put off by the total degradation of work into a pure means of domestication, this faith most often turns into fanaticism. It is true that one cannot be a professor, a social worker, a ticket agent, or security guard without certain subjective after effects. That they now call work what until recently was called leisure—‘video game testers’ are payed to play the whole day; ‘artists’ to play the buffoon in public; a growing number of incompetents whom they name psychoanalysts, fortune-tellers, ‘coaches,’ or simply psychologists get handsomely paid for listening to others whine—doesn’t seem enough to corrode this unalloyed faith. It even seems that the more work loses its ethical substance, the more tyrannical the idol of work becomes. The less self-evident the value and necessity of work, the more its slaves feel the need to assert its eternal nature.” – Tiqqun, This Is not a Program (emphases in original)
“Citizens, insofar as they are made to compensate more and more frequently for the failures of the welfare state, will be paid more and more overtly for their work in comanaging social pacification. A citizen’s dividend will therefore be established as a form of coercion to maintain self-discipline, in the form of strange, extremely tight-knit, community policing. If necessary, they maight even call it ‘existence wages,’ since it would in fact entail sponsoring those forms-of-life most compatible with Empire.” – Tiqqun, This Is not a Program
“I have come to think that boredom is the worst of all a tramp’s evils, worse than hunger and discomfort, worse even than the constant feeling of being socially disgraced. It is a silly piece of cruelty to confine an ignorant man all day with nothing to do; it is like chaining a dog in a barrel, only an educated man, who has consolations within himself, can endure confinement. Tramps, unlettered types as nearly all of them are, face their poverty with blank, resourceless minds. Fixed for ten hours on a comfortless bench, they know no way of occupying themselves, and if they think at all it is to whimper about hard luck and pine for work. They have not the stuff in them to endure the horrors of idleness. And so, since so much of their lives is spent in doing nothing, they suffer agonies from boredom.” – George Orwell, “The Spike”
“Empire is well-armed to fight the two types of secession it recognizes: secession ‘from above’ through golden ghettos—the secession, for example, of global finance from the ‘real economy’ or of the imperial hyperbourgeoisie from the rest of the biolpolitical fabric—and secession ‘from below’ through ‘no-go areas’—housing projects, inner cities, and shanty-towns. Whenever one or the other threatens its meta-stable equilibrium, Empire need only play one against the other: the civilized modernity of the trendy against the retrograde barbarism of the poor, or the demands for social cohesion and equality against the inveterate egotism of the rich.” – Tiqqun, This Is not a Program
“Empire is when the means of production have become the means of control and the means of control the means of production. Empire signifies that henceforth the political moment dominates the economic moment. And the general strike is powerless against it. What must be opposed to Empire is the human strike. Which never attacks the relations of production without attacking at the same time the affective relations that sustain it. Which undermines the unavowable libidinal economy, restores the ethical element—the how—repressed in every contact between neutralized bodies.” – Tiqqun, Introduction to Civil War (emphases in original)
“I would not give twopence for a Christian who does not commemorate Christ’s birth every day and keep sober over it.” – George Bernard Shaw, “Chesterton on Shaw”
“The Welfare State, which first took over for the liberal State within Empire, is the product of a massive diffusion of disciplines and regimes of subjectivation peculiar to the liberal State. It arises at the very moment when the concentration of these disciplines and these regimes—for example with the widespread practice of risk management—reaches such a degree in ‘society’ that society is no longer distinguishable from the State.” – Tiqqun, Introduction to Civil War