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Raoul Vaneigem

Raoul Vaneigem Books

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“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.”

FreedomLiberationAnarchyAnarchismAnarchistAnticapitalismLibertarian SocialismLeftist
Author:Raoul Vaneigem
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“The economy has ceased hiding itself behind mystifying words like God, devil, fatality, grace, damnation, nature, progress, duty, and necessity, with which, over the years, it gave itself an inescapable credibility. It no longer troubles itself with the frilly liberals, it is no longer bothered by the leninists in blue jeans — it laughs at the idea of taking any great leaps while wearing fascist jackboots or socialist bootees. It’s so simple and obvious it stands naked, and its omnipresence makes it familiar and familial. Reduced to the final necessity of survival, the economy brings together all its past lies; the lie that there is no hope for humanity’s survival outside of the economy.”

EconomyAnarchismAnticapitalismLibertarian SocialismLeftistEconomists
Author:Raoul Vaneigem
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“If love is under siege, it is because it threatens the very essence of commercial civilization. Everything is designed to make us forget that love is our most vivid manifestation and the most common power of life that is in us. Shouldn't we wonder how the lights that glimmer in the eye can blow a fuse for a time, even as barriers of oppression break and jam our passions? Yet despite a life stunted and distorted by mediated Spectacle, nothing has ever managed to strip love of its primal force. Although the heart's music fails to overwhelm the cacophony of profit efficiency, bit by bit it composes our destinies, according to tones, chords, and dissonances which render us happy if only we learn to harmonize the scattered notes that string emotions together.”

LoveUtopianSituationist
Author:Raoul Vaneigem
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“L'unité de l'homme primitif et de la nature est d'essence magique. L'homme ne se sépare vraiment de la nature qu'en la transformant par la technique et, la transformant, il la désacralise. Or l'emploi de la technique est subordonné à une organisation sociale. La société naît avec l'outil. Bien plus, l'organisation est la première technique cohérente de lutte contre la nature. L'organisation sociale - hiérarchisée puisque fondée sur l'appropriation privative - détruit peu à peu le lien magique existant entre l'homme et la nature, mais à son tour elle se charge de magie, elle crée entre elle et les hommes une unité mythique calquée sur leur participation au mystère de la nature.”

NatureMagieSacré
Book:The revolution of everyday life
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“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.”

RealityAppearanceSelf RealizationConsumerismStatusIndividuationConsumer
Book:The revolution of everyday life
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“People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints, such people have a corpse in their mouth.”

PeopleLoveUnderstandingClassStrugglePositiveRevolutionMouthsEverydayEveryday LifeRebelliousCorpsesRefusalConstraintsSubversiveReferringClass StruggleConstrain
Book:Situationism: A Compendium
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“The millions of human beings who were shot, tortured, starved, treated like animals and made the object of a conspiracy of ridicule, can sleep in peace in their communal graves, for at least the struggle in which they died has enabled their descendants, isolated in their air-conditioned apartments, to believe, on the strength of their daily dose of television, that they are happy and free. The Communards went down, fighting to the last, so that you too could qualify for a Caribbean cruise.”

BelieveHumansMadeLastsFightingHuman BeingsSleepAnimalMillionsStruggleAirObjectsTelevisionShotsDiedGravesTreatedConspiracyIsolatedApartmentRidiculeDoseCruiseDescendantsCaribbean
Author:Raoul Vaneigem
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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.”

LittlesEnoughOrderSocialObjectsConversationArgumentSellsDrinkingCelebrateIdeologyWanderLabourLeisureConsumptionMaking LoveLicenseHierarchyProletariatPurchasingLeisure TimePurchasing PowerRiotingFloggingSocial Hierarchy
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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”

MenMindLittlesRealBodyActionDeathBitsCenturyDyingThousandLittle BitAbsenceReal LifeStealingExhaustedMind And BodyTwentieth Century
Book:The revolution of everyday life
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“Production and consumption are the nipples of modern society. Thus suckled, humanity grows in strength and beauty; rising standard of living, all modern conveniences, distractions of all kinds, culture for all, the comfort of your dreams.”

KindDreamHumanityCultureGrowsBeautyModernComfortStandardsProductionsAll KindsYour DreamsRisingMaterialismDistractionConsumptionConvenienceModern SocietyStandards Of LivingNipplesStrength And BeautyModern Conveniences
Book:The revolution of everyday life
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“Where constraint breaks people, and mediation makes fools of them, the seduction of power is what makes them love their oppression. Because of it, people give up their real riches for a cause that mutilates them; for an appearance that reifies them; for roles that wrest them from authentic life; for a time whose passage defines and confines them.”

PeopleGivingRealCausesRolesBreakFoolGiving UpAppearanceRichesOppressionPassagesSeductionConstraintsMediationAuthentic Life
Book:Situationism: A Compendium
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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.”

MeanLife IsTurnsPovertyMaterialsPromiseOrganizationSlaveryEverydayBurdenLiberationAbundanceMaterialismConsumerismEveryday LifeEquipmentConstructsAlienationConveniencePlungeOverconsumption
Author:Raoul Vaneigem
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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.”

EyeFormLawFeltNaturalConditionsDivineLimitsEssentialsIllusionNegativeUniversalManageTolerateDominationJustifiedTranscendenceNatural LawAppropriationUniversalityOrigin Of Life
Author:Raoul Vaneigem
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