Liula

In a famous incident at the time of the release of Deux ou Trois Choses que Je Sais d’Elle, Jean-Luc Godard appeared on French television and brought along a real-life prostitute. In answer to protests, he remarked that prostitution is doing something you don’t want to do, for money, and that everyone working for television was a prostitute. If one accepts the definition, then it is clear that prostitution is one of the central defining characteristics of capitalist culture.

If you doubt your own love, you will be compelled to doubt every lesser thing, and if there is no greater thing than love, you will be compelled to doubt every other thing, which means that nothing, really nothing, will be undoubted by you.

The reason why a work of genius is not easily admired from the first is that the man who has created it is extraordinary, that few other men resemble him. It is his work itself that, by fertilising the rare minds capable of understanding it, will make them increase and multiply. It was Beethoven's quartets themselves (the Twelfth, Thirteenth, Four- teenth and Fifteenth) that devoted half a century to forming, fashioning and en- larging the audience for Beethoven's quar- tets, thus marking, like every great work of art, an advance if not in the quality of artists at least in the community of minds, largely composed to-day of what was not to be found when the work first appeared, that is to say of persons capable of appreciating it. What is called posterity is the posterity of the work of art.

You don’t need to go to church to be a Christian. If you go to Taco Bell, that doesn’t make you a taco."

Hemingway believed that the fundamental differences— the ones that really mattered— ran deeper than the question of how much money you had. That’s why in The Great Gatsby, the fact that Gatsby has made a great deal of money isn’t quite enough to win Daisy Buchanan back. Rich as he has become, he’s still “Mr. Nobody from Nowhere,” not Jay Gatsby but Jimmy Gatz. The change of name is what matters. One way to look at The Great Gatsby is as a story about a poor boy who makes good, which is to say, a poor boy who becomes rich— the so-called American dream. But Gatsby is not really about someone who makes a lot of money; it is instead about someone who tries and fails to change who he is. Or, more precisely, it’s about someone who pretends to be something he’s not; it’s about Jimmy Gatz pretending to be Jay Gatsby. If, in the end, Daisy Buchanan is very different from Jimmy Gatz, it’s not because she’s rich and he isn’t (by the end, he is) but because Fitzgerald treats them as if they really do belong to different races, as if poor boys who made a lot of money were only “passing” as rich. “We’re all white here,” someone says, interrupting one of Tom Buchanan’s racist outbursts. Jimmy Gatz isn’t quite white enough.

Being a body is something that we must come to accommodate psychically, something that we must live

Sadism demands a story

Cinema is conceived of as a drug that lulls and mollifies the militancy of the masses, by bribing them with pleasurable dreams, thus distracting them from the stern tasks which are their true destiny

The question of gender relations becomes satirically tied to questions of value: the young woman who controls her own sexual value in a free exchange for pleasure rather than profit is juxtaposed to the young woman who calculates her sexual value in a free exchange for profit rather than pleasure.

Personality means hardly more than dazzling white teeth and freedom from body odor and emotions. That is the triumph of the advertising in the culture industry: the compulsive imitation by consumers of cultural commodities which, at the same time, they recognize as false

The individual subject who remains silent speaks not less but more through silence than when speaking aloud.