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Bifurcation Quotes

Browse 15 quotes about Bifurcation.

Bifurcation Quotes

“На поминках по моему отцу за одним столом в первый и последний раз встретились две ветви моей семьи — дед по матери, уроженец юга Украины и выпускник техникума, сталинист, ветеран Финской и Великой Отечественной, и двоюродная бабушка по отцу, яркий представитель московской еврейской интеллигенции, доктор наук, муж которой чудом не попал в лагерь. В какой-то момент речь зашла о репрессиях — семья отца была репрессирована, его отец погиб в лагере, а сам он провел несколько лет в ссылке. И произошла удивительная вещь. Оказалось, что эти два человека прожили свои жизни в разных странах, никак не пересекавшихся друг с другом. Дед, по его словам, не знал о репрессиях, их, скорее всего, и не было. А в той стране, где жила бабушка, все всё знали с 20-х годов, и аресты и лагеря были, в общем, главной реальностью, в которой существовали она и ее круг. Тот разговор за столом со всей очевидностью продемонстрировал то, что абстрактно кажется невероятным. Объективной реальности прошлого не существует. Ее формирует память, а память необъективна. Но гораздо важнее, что такое неопределенное прошлое, в свою очередь, формирует настоящее. Замороженная и «непредсказуемая» история страны с двоящейся памятью оборачивается двоящейся реальностью в настоящем. Такая раздвоенность чревата, в лучшем случае, «просто» невозможностью двигаться вперед, в худшем — гражданской войной.”

PastImaginationFamilyMemoryUncertaintyRepressionObjectivityStalinismBifurcation
Author:Николай Эппле
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“Thought is measured by a different rule, and puts us in mind, rather, of those souls whose number, according to certain ancient myths, is limited. There was in that time a limited contingent of souls or spiritual substance, redistributed from one living creature to the next as successive deaths occurred. With the result that some bodies were sometimes waiting for a soul (like present-day heart patients waiting for an organ donor). On this hypothesis, it is clear that the more human beings there are, the rarer will be those who have a soul. Not a very democratic situation and one which might be translated today into: the more intelligent beings there are (and, by the grace of information technology, they are virtually all intelligent), the rarer thought will be. Christianity was first to institute a kind of democracy and generalized right to a personal soul (it wavered for a long time where women were concerned). The production of souls increased substantially as a result, like the production of banknotes in an inflationary period, and the concept of soul was greatly devalued. It no longer really has any currency today and it has ceased to be traded on the exchanges. There are too many souls on the market today. That is to say, recycling the metaphor, there is too much information, too much meaning, too much immaterial data for the bodies that are left, too much grey matter for the living substance that remains. To the point where the situation is no longer that of bodies in search of a soul, as in the archaic liturgies, but of innumerable souls in search of a body. Or an incalculable knowledge in search of a knowing subject.”

SoulBodyThoughtBifurcation
Book:The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact
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“All these dreams of helplessness, distress, of forking paths, of being locked up miles from anywhere, all these confused, indescribable episodes, are expressions of the fact that one is coming close to a secret zone, an impassable line - not at all, as the conventional interpretation has it, the bar of repression, but something more subtle of which we are the repressed.”

RepressionBifurcation
Book:Cool Memories V: 2000 - 2004
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“Whilst they are hardly to be seen in real life these days, the most intense passions continue to figure in our dreams. Are these then a reserve of fresh and timeless energy, running beneath the stages of life (and perhaps reaching beyond the mishap that is death)? Or is this freshness not merely the hallucination of a jaded desire? In other words: are there two lines to our lives, the one of a non biological, immemorial youth, which we experience in dreams, and the other an organic line of life and death, of duration and of remembrance, with which we identify our pale and mortal existence? Could there be two fundamental sequences and no relation between them? Or is the first simply the projection of the second, its hallucinatory discourse, as, deep down, psychoanalysis argues? I am for the first hypothesis: we have two existences, each of which is wholly original and independent of the other (it is not a case of a psychological splitting). Neither existence can be used to interpret the other - which is why psychoanalysis is futile.”

PsychoanalysisBifurcation
Book:Cool memories
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“There is a residual sense for me, having grown up in the early '70s, that I did not know I had, which was a sense that the military are different than I. Because there was such a divide between the military world - and there still is, because there's no draft - and the civilian world is one of the rotten harvests of the Vietnam War, was this sort of bifurcation of America in that way.”

KnowsWorldWayStillsDifferentWarAmericaMilitaryDividesVietnamHarvestCiviliansRottenVietnam WarResidualBifurcation
Author:Stephen Colbert
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“We seem to be in the midst of a process of cascading bifurcations that may last some 50 more years. We can be sure some new historical order will emerge. We cannot be sure what that order will be. Concretely, we may symbolize the first bifurcation as the effect of the world revolution of 1968 which continued up to and including the so-called collapse of the communisms in 1989, the social bifurcation.”

WorldYearsFirstsMaySeemsLastsOrderSocialProcessEffectsRevolutionCapitalismHistoricalIncludingCommunismMidstCollapseBifurcation
Author:Immanuel Wallerstein
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“One by one, these governments came undone, and were forced into IMF tutelage (and national illegitimacy) by the careening oil prices, the debt imbroglio, and falling terms of trade. The last of these governments to fall were the Communist regimes of eastern Europe, which have now gone the way of other Third World countries. The second in the cascade of bifurcations is thus symbolized by 1989.”

WorldWayCountryGovernmentLastsFallTermGoneCapitalismEuropeThirdsTradeDebtOilCommunistRegimesEasternUndoneThird WorldEastern EuropeThird World CountriesCascadeImfOil PriceTutelageBifurcation
Author:Immanuel Wallerstein
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“In a dynamical system, or a massively complex dynamical system such as we live in, when there is a moment of bifurcation, which is the technical mass jargon for “the snap”, that is the only time you get to do anything about the evolution of the system. So according to this self-inflating view, we live at an especially important special moment in history where when we think something or do something it has actually an enormous effect on the future. What we do has some influence on the creation of the future more than at other times in history.”

ThinkingImportantSelfMomentsViewsInfluenceSpecialEffectsCreationEvolutionMassComplexesEnormousOnly TimeSnapsJargonSpecial MomentsBifurcation
Author:Ralph Abraham
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