anthropofugal

I have always wondered whether everyone’s interior life is as exhaustingly complicated as mine, if everyone is placed, like a white mouse, in the middle of their labyrinthine mind, through which they have to find a path, just one, the true one, while all the others lead to traps with no escape.

[T]he real source of our anxiety is not simply our future death but, above all, the possibility of our (present) non-reality and non-existence, the fact that it could be that we are not. […] This can explain to some extent why the prospect of our future (even if imminent) death seems less scary than the idea of our existence, our being as it is now, possibly constituting a scam – because it bears on our present (and past) reality rather than on our future reality. To paraphrase [Clément] Rosset: to perish in the future would at least confirm that we have lived. The anxiety relating to deception can be much more visceral.

“you are not my cure, nobody has that power, (…)”

“The society of laboring and achievement is not a free society. It generates new constraints. Ultimately, the dialectic of master and slave does not yield a society where everyone is free and capable of leisure, too. Rather, it leads to a society of work in which the master himself has become a laboring slave. In this society of compulsion, everyone carries a work camp inside. This labor camp is defined by the fact that one is simultaneously prisoner and guard, victim and perpetrator. One exploits oneself. It means that exploitation is possible even without domination.”

“Your own tactic is to train yourself in the art of becoming enigmatic to everybody. My young friend, suppose there was no one who troubld himself to guess your riddle--what joy, then, would you have in it?”

“When we are taught that safety lies always with sameness, then difference, of any kind, will appear as a threat. When we choose to love we choose to move against fear—against alienation and separation. The choice to love is a choice to connect—to find ourselves in the other.”

“We must be our own before we can be another’s.”