The Art of Tetman Callis

“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 […]

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“One is ejected into the world like a dirty little mummy; the roads are slippery with blood and no one knows why it should be so. Each one is traveling his own way and, though the earth be rotting with good things, there is no time to pluck the fruits; the procession scrambles toward the […]

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“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 […]

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“El dinero trae desgracia a la felicidad (Money brings disgrace to happiness).” – Yago, pasión morena

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“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

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“Had one single element of man’s nature been altered, vitally, fundamentally altered, by the incessant march of history? By what he calls the better part of his nature, man has been betrayed, that is all. At the extreme limits of his spiritual being man finds himself again naked as a savage. When he finds God, […]

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“On the meridian of time there is no injustice: there is only the poetry of motion creating the illusion of truth and drama. If at any moment anywhere one comes face to face with the absolute that great sympathy which makes men like Gautama and Jesus seem divine freezes away; the monstrous thing is not […]

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“Nothing will avail to offset this virus which is poisoning the whole world. America is the very incarnation of doom. She will drag the whole world down to the bottomless pit.” – Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

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“Seduction is not originally the spontaneous relation between men and women, but rather the dominant relation of men amongst themselves.” – Tiqqun, Preliminary Materials For a Theory of the Young-Girl (emphasis in original)

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“The ‘dictatorship of beauty’ is also the dictatorship of ugliness. It does not signify the brutal hegemony of a certain paradigm of beauty, but rather, more radically, the hegemony of the physical simulacrum as the form of the objectivity of beings. Understood as such, we can see that nothing prevents such a dictatorship from extending […]

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“New York makes even a rich man feel his unimportance. New York is cold, glittering, malign. The buildings dominate. There is a sort of atomic frenzy to the activity going on; the more furious the pace, the more diminished the spirit. A constant ferment, but it might just as well be going on in a […]

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“It is not difficult to be alone if you are poor and a failure. An artist is always alone—if he is an artist. No, what the artist needs is loneliness.” – Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer (emphasis in original)

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“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.” – […]

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“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 […]

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“One can sleep almost anywhere, but one must have a place to work. Even if it’s not a masterpiece you’re doing. Even a bad novel requires a chair to sit on and a bit of privacy.” – Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

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“For a hundred years or more the world, our world, has been dying. And not one man, in these last hundred years or so, has been crazy enough to put a bomb up the asshole of creation and set it off. The world is rotting away, dying piecemeal. But it needs the coup de grâce, […]

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“Things are always happening. It seems wherever I go there is drama. People are like lice—they get under your skin and bury themselves there. You scratch and scratch until the blood comes, but you can’t get permanently deloused. Everywhere I go people are making a mess of their lives. Everyone has his private tragedy. It’s […]

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“Any writer who accepts or partially accepts the discipline of a political party is sooner or later faced with the alternative: toe the line, or shut up. It is, of course, possible to toe the line and go on writing—after a fashion. Any Marxist can demonstrate with the greatest of ease that ‘bourgeois’ liberty of […]

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“When one looks back at the twenties, nothing is queerer than the way in which every important event in Europe escaped the notice of the English intelligentsia. The Russian Revolution, for instance, all but vanishes from the English consciousness between the death of Lenin and the Ukraine famine—about ten years. Throughout those years Russia means […]

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“When one says that a writer is fashionable one practically always means that he is admired by people under thirty.” – George Orwell, “Inside the Whale”

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“The Young-Girl’s education is the inverse of all other forms of education: First the immediate innate perfection of youth, then the effort to maintain herself at the height of this primary nullity, and finally, collapse in the face of the impossibility of returning to this side of time.” – Tiqqun, Preliminary Materials For a Theory […]

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“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)

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“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

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“The Young-Girl is happy to speak of her childhood with emotion, in order to give the impression that she has not gotten over it, that at bottom, she is still naive. Like all whores, she dreams of candor. But unlike whores, she insists that we believe her, and that we believe her sincerely. Her infantilism, […]

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“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, […]

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“By investing young people and women with an absurd symbolic surplus value, by making them the exclusive carriers of the two new kinds of esoteric knowledge proper to the new social order—consumption and seduction—Spectacle has effectively emancipated the slaves of the past, but it has emancipated them as slaves.” – Tiqqun, Preliminary Materials For a […]

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“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? […]

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“If you hate violence and don’t care for politics, the only remedy remaining is education. Perhaps society is past praying for, but there is always hope for the individual human being, if you can catch him young enough.” – George Orwell, “Charles Dickens”

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“When hatred of Hitler became a major emotion in America, it was interesting to see how promptly ‘anti-Fascism’ was adapted to pornographic purposes by the editors of the Yank Mags. One magazine which I have in front of me is given up to a long, complete story, ‘When Hell Came to America’, in which the […]

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“There is little mysticism without an element of transcendence, and, conversely, there is no transcendence without a certain degree of egocentrism.” – Jean Piaget, The Moral Judgment of the Child (trans. Marjorie Gabain)

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