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Quote by James Hutton

“The result, therefore, of our present inquiry is, that we find no vestige of a beginning - no prospect of an end.”

Quote by James Hutton

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James Hutton
James Hutton

James Hutton, born on June 3, 1726 in Scotland, and died on March 26, 1797, was an outstanding geologist. He is considered one of the founders of modern geology, proposing many important concepts in geology, such as the concept of crustal movement and the significance of fossil records. more

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“Mostly I love Halloween because it is the orange-and-black beginning of a season that tumbles into Thanksgiving, which tumbles into Christmas. And Zombies just seem a little out of place in that. Thanksgiving should have nothing to do with armies of shuffling undead. Don’t get me started on Christmas. The only undead at Christmas should be Jacob Marley, wailing about greed. The iconic image of Halloween should be the pun’kin. The pun’kin, carved into faces that are scary only because we want them to be, winking from every porch. The pun’kin cast in plastic, swinging from the hands of knee-high princesses, leering back from department store shelves, until it gives way to tins of butter cookies. But I fear for the pun’kin. How long before before he is kicked down the street by zombie hordes, booted into obscurity? Young people tell me that no one—no one— wants to dress up like a pun’kin any more. All a pun’kin does they say is sit there, and glow. This may be true, all of it, but try to make a pie out of a zombie, and see where that gets you. Though I hear that, when it comes to pies, your canned zombie is the way to go.”

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“Revolutionary theory also enshrined the living utopian hope that the State would wither away, and that the political sphere would negate itself as such, in the apotheosis of a finally transparent social realm. None of this has come to pass. The political sphere has disappeared, sure enough - but so far from doing so by means of a self-transcendence into the strictly social realm, it has carried that realm into oblivion with it. We are now in the transpolitical sphere; in other words, we have reached the zero point of politics, a stage which also implies the reproduction of politics, its endless simulation. For everything that has not successfully transcended itself can only fall prey to revivals without end. So politics will never finish disappearing - nor will it allow anything else to emerge in its place. A kind of hysteresis of the political reigns. Art has likewise failed to realize the utopian aesthetic of modern times, to transcend itself and become an ideal form of life. (In earlier times, of course, art had no need of self-transcendence, no need to become a totality, for such a totality already existed - in the shape of religion.) Instead of being subsumed in a transcendent ideality, art has been dissolved within a general aestheticization of everyday life, giving way to a pure circulation of images, a transaesthetics of banality. Indeed, art took this route even before capital, for if the decisive political event was the strategic crisis of 1929, whereby capital debouched into the era of mass trans politics, the crucial moment for art was undoubtedly that of Dada and Duchamp, that moment when art, by renouncing its own aesthetic rules of the game, debouched into the transaesthetic era of the banality of the image. Nor has the promised sexual utopia materialized. This was to have consisted in the self-negation of sex as a separate activity and its self-realization as total life. The partisans of sexual liberation continue to dream this dream of desire as a totality fulfilled within each of us, masculine and feminine at once, this dream of sexuality as an assumption of desire beyond the difference between the sexes. In point of fact sexual liberation has succeeded only in helping sexuality achieve autonomy as an undifferentiated circulation of the signs of sex. Although we are certainly in transition towards a transsexual state of affairs, this has nothing to do with a revolution of life through sex - and everything to do with a confusion and promiscuity that open the door to virtual indifference (in all senses of the word) in the sexual realm.”

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“Prohibitions themselves are no longer transcendent. Once upon a time they were signified to us from on high by laws that came from a far-off region - perhaps, here again, an Island of Prohibitions, ruled over by a divinity concerned for our fate. But today they too have been internalized; they are produced by the brain. It is we who produce them; they are secretions of the individual unconscious. They no longer have any grandeur, nor, in the end, do they even have any charm. They either disappear purely and simply (it is forbidden to forbid), or become once again, paradoxically, objects of nostalgia, objects of desire - where once they separated us from the accomplishment of desire.”

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“It was strange. It was painful. It was wonderful. It was something unique to the twentieth century. To sit in a theater in 1994 and fall in love with a woman from 1929 … that would be like sitting in a theater in 1929 and falling in love with someone from 1864 … or like watching 1994 from the year 2059. These leaps across time are fantastic. Yet it’s inevitable that soon people will think nothing of watching a movie from a century before, any more than we would consider it odd to read a hundred-year-old book.”

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