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Quote by Ben Lerner

“I think the parable is a peculiar way of saying that redemption is immanent whether or not it's imminent, that the world to come is in a sense always already here, if still unavailable. I find this idea powerful for several reasons. For one thing, it's an antidote to despair.”

Quote by Ben Lerner

Author

Ben Lerner, born on February 4, 1979, is an American poet known for his unique style and profound reflections on contemporary social issues. more

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“Every relationship can feel saturated by market logic or at best purchased at the price of the immiseration of others.”

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“I'm increasingly on the side of thinkers like David Graeber who are talking back to this notion of totality and emphasizing how there are all kinds of moments in our daily lives that break - or at least could break - from the logic of profit and the modes of domination it entails. Zones of freedom, even if it's never pure.”

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“I like to think - knowing that it's an enabling fiction - of those moments as fragments from a world to come, a world where price isn't the only measure of value.”

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“I have no interest in artists who are purely affirmative, who've made a commercialized fetish of the culture's stupidity.”

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“I think that sexual pleasure and the weird color of the sky after a storm or the stream of tail lights across the bridge or the way silence can thin or thicken before music starts - all these things have to be harnessed by the political. The libidinal has to be harnessed by the political.”

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“I think the anti-intellectualism of a lot of contemporary fiction is a kind of despairing of literature's ability to be anything more than perfectly bound blog posts or transcribed sitcoms.”

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“Anyway I read more contemporary poetry than contemporary fiction so my mind goes first to a kind of crass "conceptualism" that repeats vanguard gestures of the past minus the politics and historical context.”

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“The transpersonal is more awe-inspiring, more exciting than the thing we confuse it for.”

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“When the narrator feels like an octopus, when he says his limbs are starting to multiply, he means he has inklings of orders of perception beyond his individual body.”

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