Quotes from Raoul Vaneigem

Work to survive, survive by consuming, survive to consume, the hellish cycle is complete.

pissing on the altar is still a way of paying homage to the Church

Privative appropriation and domination are thus originally imposed and felt as a positive right, but in the form of a negative universality. Valid for everyone, justified in everyone's eyes by divine or natural law, the right of privative appropriation is objectified in a general illusion, in a universal transcendence, in an essential law under which everyone individually manages to tolerate the more or less narrow limits assigned to his right to live and to the conditions of life in general.

My pleasure is nameless: those all too rare moments when I create myself afford no purchase to external manipulation.

They hated children as they hated themselves; they beat them for their own good, and educated them from the perspective of their own incapacity to love life.

They spend their weeks waiting for Work to go put on its Sunday clothes.

First get to work; you can enjoy yourself afterwards! Such is the recurring, rhyming themesong that is passed down into the head, programming militarily the rhythm of the body's movements. Such is, in its numbing insistance, the tune that orchestrates the retreat of nascent intelligence. And rest assured – it will be a different intelligence that ends up in charge over the frozen behavior of working hours, an intelligence in which heart counts the least and is petrified the most.

Gazing upon the child, the presence in the adult's heart of an unfinished life, oscillating between birth and death, is clarified.

Le travail est partout où l'on ne fait rien de sa vie.

From the ruins of Heaven, humanity fell into the ruins of its own world. What

From now on the analysts are in the streets. Lucidity is not their only weapon. Their thinking is no longer in danger of being imprisoned, either by the false reality of gods or by the false reality of technocrats.

Thanks to the magic of the imagination, everything exists solely to be manipulated, caressed, broken apart, put back together or altered in any way I wish. Once the primacy of subjectivity is accepted the spell of things is broken. Started from other people, the search for the self is fruitless; we repeat the same futile gestures time after time. Started from oneself, on the other hand, actions are not repeated but rather revisited, corrected and fully realized.

The bourgeoisie does not dominate, it exploits. It does not need to be master, it prefers to use. Why has nobody seen that the principle of productivity simply replaced the principle of feudal authority? Why has nobody wanted to understand?

To consume is to be consumed by inauthenticity,

the economy cannot stop making us consume more and more, and to consume without respite is to change illusions at an accelerating pace which gradually dissolves the illusion of change. We find ourselves alone, unchanged, frozen in the empty space behind the waterfall of gadgets, family cars and paperbacks.

From the spectacular point of view, the reduction of man to consumer is an enrichment: the more things he has, the more roles he plays, the more he is. So it is decreed by the organization of appearances. But, from the point of view of lived reality, all power so attained is paid for by the sacrifice of true self-realization. What is gained on the level of appearances is lost on the level of being and becoming.

Poetry seldom occurs in poems. Poetry only occurs when words cause action.

Todo o além é um aquém da nossa vida não cumprida.

The poverty of 'the drama' as a literary genre goes hand in hand with the colonization of social space by theatrical attitudes. Enfeebled on the stage, theatre battens on everyday life and attempts to dramatize everyday behaviour.

Common sense is the lie codified and vulgarized.

The world is going to be remade, not reconditioned. All its would-be renovators are powerless to stop this. If these experts do not understand me, so much the better; I certainly have no desire to understand them.

For consumer society poverty is whatever cannot be consumed.

Et comment instruirait-il les enfants qu'il a devant lui, l'éducateur qui n'est même plus capable de redevenir enfant en renaissant chaque jour à lui-même? Celui qui porte dans son cœur le cadavre de son enfance n'éduquera jamais que des âmes mortes.

How can you tell it's the end of an era? When a suddenly intolerable present crystallizes in a short period of time what was so uneasily put up with in the past. And everyone is suddenly quite easily convinced that he or she is either going to be reborn in the birth of a new world, or die in the archaic netherworld of a society less and less adapted to the living.