Raoul Vaneigem Quotes
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In the twentieth century, death terrifies men less than the absence of real life.
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To be rich nowadays merely means to possess a large number of poor objects.
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The work of art of the future will be the construction of a passionate life.
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Never before has a civilization reached such a degree of a contempt for life; never before has a generation, drowned in mortification, felt such a rage to live.
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We can escape the commonplace only by manipulating it, controlling it, thrusting it into our dreams or surrendering it to the free play of our subjectivity.
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Our task is not to rediscover nature but to remake it.
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I do not dream of a gentle revolution. My passion runs to the violence of supersession, the ferocity of a life that renounces nothing.
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Work is the opposite of creativity.
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Everything has been said yet few have taken advantage of it. Since all our knowledge is essentially banal, it can only be of value to minds that are not.
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There are more truths in twenty-four hours of a man's life than in all the philosophies.
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The world of the commodity is a world upside-down, which bases itself not upon life but upon the transformation of life into work.
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Work to survive, survive by consuming, survive to consume; the hellish cycle is complete.
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Each component of the organism, like the individual in the social body, possesses the capacity for enjoyment of the self through sharing with others.
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It is entirely up to us to invent our own lives.
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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.
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Daydreaming subverts the world.
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The eruption of lived pleasure is such that in losing myself I find myself; forgetting that I exist, I realize myself.
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People without imagination are beginning to tire of the importance attached to comfort, to culture, to leisure, to all that destroys imagination. This means that people are not really tired of comfort, culture and leisure, but of the use to which they are.
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The same people who are murdered slowly in the mechanized slaughterhouses of work are also arguing, singing, drinking, dancing, making love, holding the streets, picking up weapons and inventing a new poetry.
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Daily life is governed by an economic system in which the production and consumption of insults tends to balance out.
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As poverty has been reduced in terms of mere survival, it has become more profound in terms of our way of life.
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Suffering is the pain of constraints. An atom of pure delight, no matter how small, can hold it at bay.
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To work for delight and authentic festivity is barely distinguishable from preparing for a general insurrection
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The organization controlling the material equipment of our everyday life is such that what in itself would enable us to construct it richly plunges us instead into a poverty of abundance, making alienation all the more intolerable as each convenience promises liberation and turns out to be only one more burden. We are condemned to slavery to the means of liberation.
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Purchasing power is a license to purchase power.
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People are bewitched into believing that time slips away, and this belief is the basis of time actually slipping away.
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In the twentieth century, death terrifies men less than the absence of real life. All these dead, mechanized, specialized actions, stealing a little bit of life a thousand times a day until the mind and body are exhausted, until that death which is not the
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We have a world of pleasure to win, and nothing to lose but boredom.
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In an industrial society which confuses work and productivity, the necessity of producing has always been an enemy of the desire to create.
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Purchasing power is a license to purchase power. The old proletariat sold its labour power in order to subsist; what little leisure time it had was passed pleasantly enough in conversations, arguments, drinking, making love, wandering, celebrating and rioting. The new proletarian sells his labour power in order to consume. When he’s not flogging himself to death to get promoted in the labour hierarchy, he’s being persuaded to buy himself objects to distinguish himself in the social hierarchy. The ideology of consumption becomes the consumption of ideology.
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