"Analogy is repetition compulsion. Analogy is calendar. Analogy is the bloat and float of language. It untethers words from their referential fixity. It detaches dates from their chronological rigidity. Analogy can be liberatory when– if– it is pried loose from a memory culture that has become repressive and inert. When they’re not stultifying or being commandeered to nefarious ends, analogies can be energising; they can force a historical reckoning, they can articulate elective affinities and affiliations, they can forge alternative kinships and solidarities. Analogies can channel what Walter Benjamin called the mimetic capacity or power: they can extract similarities from a history that would otherwise atomise into a spray of disconnected particles or dissolve into a mush of sameness. Analogy is a historical sinew: it can loosen the joints of a tradition that has become ossified and arthritic and can restore actualitya peculiar synchronicity– to a time out of joint. Analogy is a historical muscle: it contracts, condenses, thickens time; it stores energy like a battery; it’s a time bomb that explodes the continuum of homogeneous empty time. That is why analogies are such a political minefield as we’re seeing today: Who gets to use them? Who gets to say ‘fascism’? Who gets to say ‘apartheid’? Who gets to say ‘genocide’? Who gets to say ‘holocaust’? Who gets to prescribe or proscribe the terms of comparison or even to grant the right to compare? Politics,as Benjamin once said of philosophy, is a battle for the monopoly over a limited number of terms. Analogies are real estate in a colonial land grab where language is the terrain of an ongoing primitive accumulation.

"Persistence is not driven by the whip of “cruel optimism.” Persistence is not the vulgar pursuit of immortality or the extension of life by other means, it’s not the survivalist preparation for apocalypse. And persistence is definitely not resilience. It lacks that bounce and plasticity—which is to say that persistence is not the forced flexibility and pliability of the neoliberal subject. Persistence is ill-adaptive: brittle, unbending, uncompliant, impatient, inefficient, untimely. It is sustained neither by the drumbeat of victory nor by the sublime consolation of defeat. Persistence disorganizes the normative temporal and spatial order. It exerts a needling, scrabbling pressure—resistant to direction, desisting from project and program, insistent in its demands. It is a duration, a hardness, a perdurance that extends beyond the limits of endurance. Persistence is obstinacy, ostinato, the stubborn rhythm of a time without flow—a “strong, slow drilling” through a present that has become rigid and inert.

"There is a moment in the experience of love when you start to cut yourself on everything. On the edges of drawers and on the screen of your mobile phone, on your toothbrush and when you are watering a house plant, when you put your trousers on and when you take them off, when you open a book or close a door, when you tie your shoelaces and when you adjust the thermostat on the central heating; even bars of soap and the handrails on buses cut you. Suddenly objects want to sharpen their edges on you."