#cf.humanism

Only in forgiveness ..the subject breaks through its own narcissism and from the instrumental rationality on which it has always fed. (§807)

Emptiness reveals simultaneously Spirit’s inaugural power of self-invention and the measure of its despair. The Terror therefore does not function as the eruption of some kind of crazy excess or irrecuperable exception to the system.. ..Unworked negativity is ..the ..motor of Spirit’s dialectic.

Around 1840 it was ..fashionable to take turtles for a walk.. ..The flaneurs liked to have the turtles set the pace.. ..If they had had their way, progress would have been obliged to accommodate itself to this pace. But this attitude did not prevail.

men returned from the battlefield grown ..poorer in communicable experience.. ..What ..poured out in the flood of war books was anything but experience that goes from mouth to mouth. ..Never has experience been contradicted more thoroughly than strategic experience by tactical warfare

minds which seduce us are ..minds that have destroyed themselves trying to give their lives a meaning.

What we have today is the hegemonic figure of the liberal subject who, like Nietzsche’s Last Man, is concerned only with the pursuit of private pleasures + ideals of happiness

The purity of diabolical evil not only mirrors but sustains the purity of moral duty.. ..It purges purity itself of all positive content or determinacy, including not only the idea of moral destiny but even the determinate opposition of good and evil.