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Quote by Ben Lerner

“My concern is how we live fictions, how fictions have real effects, become facts in that sense, and how our experience of the world changes depending on its arrangement into one narrative or another.”

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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“Are there are fireflies on the West Coast? I never saw any when I lived in California.”

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“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.”

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“Many of the left thinkers that really matter to me - that formed a big part of my thinking about politics and art - emphasize how capitalism is a totality, how there's no escape from it, no outside.”

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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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