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Ain't Enough to Look Human

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Abhijit Naskar

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“Idle, archaic, indifferent mentality. I am beginning to feel I might give all this up, as if the challenge were not worth the trouble, might give up all judgement. This state of mind has been with me from childhood, from adolescence - a lack lustre, slipshod, idle, irresponsible, uncultivated, undesiring state. These books, did they ever interest me? These women, did I ever feel any emotion for them? All these different countries, did I want to discover them? Only the inhumanity of things has affected me, and I have in fact been unable to bring this into my own life. I read this verdict in the graph of the tonality of events, of the melancholy of faces, of the vanity and futility of our undertakings. I am still astonished by the mirror we can offer to others, by the loving or ironic image which we still are sometimes in each others' mirrors. Increasingly, it is machines, not people, who get nervous. People only become nervous if they force themselves to look like machines. All situations where you have to make a choice come down to this: do you prefer a woman with a very ordinary body but an attractive face, or one whose body is attractive, but whose face is nothing special? The problem is a false one. It is always preferable to be in a situation where there is no choice to be made either because the woman is perfect, or because she is the only one available.”

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“One is never simply the child of a father and a mother. I was born in 1929 just after Black Thursday, under the sign of Leo and the Crisis. These mythical powers never leave you. They manifest themselves in a certain mode of thought, a mode which smacks of the desert but is nonetheless vital, analytical and solitary - Solar Criticism. Born at the time of the first great crisis of modernity, I hope to live long enough to witness its catastrophic turn at the end of the century (if there is a logic of birth and death, as I believe). I have a friend born of the flight from Paris in 1939. That exodus had rekindled his father's extinguished passions. He is thus the product of an unexpected copulation with History. The glorious anticipation of summer by springtime gives you the urge to anticipate everything in thought. But it is the anticipation which is the thought itself. It can thus come to us from natural phenomena, from sun and shade.”

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“The unconscious is very serious today - even a little bit sad - because we repress serious things into it: sex, death, libido, desire. But if it were irony and offhandedness which were repressed, what form would the new unconscious take then? It would become ironic; we would have ironic, breezy drives and fantasies, which would surface in our dreams and our slips, in our neuroses and madness. But isn't it already that way, in a sense? Television will perhaps only have been invented in order, by a delectable detour, to give back its force to the silence of the image. We certainly have to accept an authority, but one more stupid than ourselves. That is the great law of the political world. This is wonderfully apparent in the USSR (Zinoviev tells of the pharaonic stupidity of the Soviet leaders, equalled only by the pharaonic servitude of the Soviets themselves), but you can see it in France just as clearly. Why prefer Marchais, Le Pen, Chirac and other such hollow figures to more sophisticated people? Why have they not long ago sunk beneath their own idiocy? The fact is that these figures are the surest remedy against the anxiety we all feel at the reign and the primacy of intelligence. They reassure us about our own stupidity, and this is their vital function as it was that of the shaman. And how can you ward off stupidity, if not by a greater stupidity? I notice that on windows which have been left untouched, which have not, in other words, seen the faintest shadow of a duster for ten years, there is not more than a fraction of a millimetre of dirt and dust. No more, in the end, than the wind and rain scratch from the surface of a rock in the same period. There is a dreamlike slowness to both erosion and sedimentation.”

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“Cast aside all caution from sleeping creatures, for they know not the meaning of destiny - to them destiny is out of their hands, so they shiver in imagination all their life - they make their own prison of misery and insecurity and die in it every day - but you my friend, you who is a human, you who is alive and not dead, you who is awake with not practicality but responsibility - not with insecurity but with love - are not bound by destiny, for destiny is fantasy invented by the weak - those who are strong and determined make their own reality out of their blood and sweat.”

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Book:Servitude is Sanctitude
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