People From Paris

"If there is a God, he has left no tracks in the laws of physics; or if he has, he has covered them up very well."

"Nowadays, however, we are much more aware of the fact that the best proof in the world is worth no more than its premises: every scientific theory is transitory and provisional, in wait for a better one, and accepted only as long as the experimental results conform to its predictions."

"We do not discover mathematical truths; we remember them from our passages through this world outside our own."

"The world is full, at every scale, and every scale ignores the higher and lower ones."

"Chaos cuts with two edges. We have seen how it is impossible to retrieve past history from current observations. We will now show that it is impossible to predict future states from the current observations."

"So every possible reality, once God gives it existence, will reveal its own identity. Its life will unfold slowly, whereas God encompasses it at a single glance."

"Many great failures and many great successes are due to chance and not to human folly or ingenuity."

"The optimist believes that this is the best of all possible worlds, and the pessimist fears that this might be the case."

"An equilibrium is not always an optimum; it might not even be good. This may be the most important discovery of game theory."

"The film is supported by its strong, vivid images and a hypnotic score by François-Eudes Chanfrault (known by his equally great music for Inside)."

"...the frenetic pace, driven by the music which is sometimes metal, and sometimes seraphic, of François-Eudes Chanfrault."

"The whole is supported by a soundtrack by François-Eudes Chanfrault that is absolutely remarkable."

"Between survival and the camera bobbing at sea, the film draws from its cast and some convincing gore scenes well, all on a trippy soundtrack by François-Eudes Chanfrault ({{w|Vinyan]], The Hills Have Eyes)."

"The director/writer team is friends and fans of another French duo, Alexandre Aja and Grégory Levasseur, responsible for the blood-drenched Haute Tension. Logically, they have chosen to share the same editor (Baxter) and composer (François-Eudes Chanfrault), resulting in equally effective jackknife editing and a sonorous score."

"Donkey Punch is powered by claustrophobic menace and a notably effective score, by François-Eudes Chanfrault, that features spectral synths and the eerie clack of electro-castanets."

"But there are constants. The first is anxiety, because you have to reinvent an entire personal universe from that of another, understanding the film, its form, its rhythm, its colors."

"Chanfrault is one of the few French musicians to accommodate both a classical and a true technological expertise."

"François-Eudes Chanfrault is a young French musician who participated in the soundtrack for ' , a thriller by , before he distinguished himself by his compositions and electronic offset to the documentaries of (including that of ')."

"Finally, the role of sound in these films is very important, and directors give it a lot of attention. We work hard, we try, it is not just enough to illustrate. We must build a character in its own music."

"I worked carefully in the darkness and the silence."

"I love working on genre films."

"She relates how she then viewed his body at the morgue, while a long static shot of the park where the murder took place unspools, backed by Francois Eudes Chanfrault's sparse, sorrowful, string-based score."

"I enjoy a freedom of tone and experimentation unparalleled, almost unthinkable in more traditional films — producers are becoming more conservative, dramatically."

"It was a fascinating experience where I literally wrote and recorded music live on the picture while Fabrice was screaming "more, more", yelling and singing to finally explode together in a "yeahhhhhh, that's fucking great!""

"We thought about the movie as a global piece of work, not picture, then voices, then music."

"I think my work is unusual, so when someone comes to me, it's rarely to ask me some Zimmer shit, even though it happens sometimes. When it happens, I do my best to write decent / elegant music that could match their needs and mine. But mostly, people want me to be myself."

"Much attention has been paid … to the music of François-Eudes Chanfrault, composer of The Hills Have Eyes."

"My own story is like a fairy tale nobody would believe because it's exactly what you expect but it never happened."

"And while expecting me to be the more free I could be, he pushed me to my own corners, always asking for more. More freedom, more experiments, more noise, more trash, more, more."

"Oleg Cassini is the rarest of rare species: a man who genuinely loves women. And for all his talk it is he that has served them for most of his years. He has devoted his life to making women look and feel beautiful with his classically designed clothes most famously creating 'The Look' for Jacqueline Kennedy when she was First Lady. As the first designer to license in 1951, he has been creating everything from evening dresses to sunglasses in more than 60 countries ever since. His name has always suggested glamour, champagne, polo ponies, a box at the opera, he was married to a movie star, and engaged to Grace Kelly before she became a princess. The son of Russian aristocrats banished to Europe after the revolution...he designs clothes that betray a lifelong ache for lost grandeur, there is about him in every gesture from knocking ash from his cigar to straightening his tie an echo of old world distinction."

"Each man is contained and constrained, on entering social life, to fit his own life in, just as he fits his words and thoughts into a language that was formed without and before him and which is impervious to his power. Entering the game, as it were, whether of belonging to a nation or of using a language, a man enters arrangements which it does not fall to him to determine, but only to learn and respect the rules."

"DeMaistre and Bonald … wanted to teach men submission, to give them the religion of established power, to substitute, in Bonald’s phrase, “the evidence of authority for the authority of evidence.”"

"For the traditionalists the Enlightenment boiled down to a fatal misunderstanding. All philosophes had been wrong about the nature and also, if one could put it that way, about the sex of prejudice. They had mistaken an earth mother who sustained and inspired her children for a bogeyman of a father. Then, seeking to overthrow this father, they had in reality done away with the mother-figure."

"According to … the French counterrevolutionaries and German Romantics, … the corpus of prejudices was a country’s cultural treasure, its ancient and tested intelligence, present as the consciousness and guardian of its thought. Prejudices were the “we” of every “I”, the past in the present, the revered vessels of the nation’s memory, its judgements carried from age to age. Pretending to spread enlightenment, the philosophes had set out to extirpate these precious residua. … The result was that they had uprooted men from their culture at the very moment when they bragged of how they would cultivate them. … Convinced that they were emancipating souls, they succeeded only in deracinating them. These calumniators of the commonplace had not freed understanding from its chains, but cut it off from its sources. The individual who, thanks to them, must now cast off childish things, had really abandoned his own nature. … The promises of the cogito were illusory: free from prejudice, cut off from the influence of national idiom, the subject was not free but shrivelled and devitalised. … Everyday opinion should therefore be regarded as the soil where thought was nourished, its hearth and sanctuary, … and not, as the philosophes would have it, as some alien authority which overwhelmed and crushed it. … The cogito needed to be steeped in the profundities of the collective mind; the broken links with the past needed repairing; the quest for independence should yield to that for authenticity. Men should abandon their scepticism and give themselves over to the comforting warmth of majoritarian ideas, bowing down before their infallible authority."

"...The sublime feeling is not mere pleasure as taste is – it is a mixture of pleasure and pain... Confronted with objects that are too big according to their magnitude or too violent according to their power, the mind experiences its own limitations."

"So if Nussbaum’s neglect of global capitalism poses a problem for her project, so too does her blanket dismissal of postmodernism. Though I get impatient with Jean-François Lyotard and with all who cite him as a bringer of Higher Truths, I fi nd him impossible to dismiss completely — if one is going to be a responsible citizen of the world. For Lyotard surveys the world’s different ways of thinking and believes that to bring them to “consensus” — or even to try to get them communicating reciprocally — is to do irreparable harm to the integrity of others. More than this: for Lyotard, the effort to negotiate the heterogeneity of language games amounts to a kind of terror. This view is badly mistaken, I think. Try to imagine that our world is beset by too much communicative rationality, desperately in need of more monads and monologists, and you’ll see what I mean. And yet Lyotard’s idea of the “differend,” or the nonnegotiable difference, strikes me as absolutely essential to an understanding of education and cultural conflict. If you pursue Lyotard too far, of course, you wind up unable to criticize other cultures’ practices of female circumcision or widow burning, but if you don’t pursue Lyotard at all, you risk succumbing to the fantasy that all disputes between “reason” and “unreason,” or between different varieties of reasoning, can be mediated by a double dose of reason."

"There’s a necessity for physical experience and a recourse to exemplary cases of bodily ascesis to understand and make understood a type of emptying of the mind, an emptying that is required if the mind is to think. This obviously has nothing to do with tabula rasa, with what Descartes (vainly) wanted to be a starting from scratch on the part of knowing thought."

"The body might be considered the hardware of the complex technical device that is human thought."

"Philosophy is possible only because the material ensemble called “man” is endowed with very sophisticated software. But also, this software, human language, is dependent on the condition of the hardware. Now: the hardware will be consumed in the solar explosion, taking philosophical thought with it (along with all other thought) as it goes up in flames. So the problem of the technological sciences can be stated as follows: how can we provide this software with a hardware that is independent of the conditions of life on earth? That is: how can we make thought without a body possible?"

"In the discussion we had last year at Siegen, in this regard, emphasis was put on the sort of emptiness that has to be obtained from mind and body by a Japanese warrior-artist when doing calligraphy, by an actor when acting: the kind of suspension of ordinary intentions of mind associated with habitus, or arrangements of the body. It’s at this cost, said Glenn and Andreas, … that a brush encounters the “right” shapes, that a voice and a theatrical gesture are endowed with the “right” tone and look. The soliciting of emptiness, this evacuation—very much the opposite of overweening, selective identificatory activity—doesn’t take place without some suffering. … The body and mind have to be free of burdens for grace to touch us."

"The grand narrative has lost its credibility, regardless of what mode of unification is uses, regardless of whether it is a speculative narrative or a narrative of emancipation."

"The decline of narrative can be seen as an effect of the blossoming of techniques and technologies since the Second World War, Which has shifted emphasis from the ends of action to this means; it can also be seen as an effect of the redeployment of advanced liberal capitalism after its retreat under the protection of Keynesianism during the period of 1930-1960, a renewal that has eliminated the communist alternative and valorized the individual enjoyment of goods and services."

"While we talk, the sun is getting older. It will explode in 4.5 billion years. … In comparison everything else seems insignificant. Wars, conflicts, political tension, shifts in opinion, philosophical debates, even passions—everything’s dead already if this infinite reserve from which you now draw energy to defer answers, if in short thought as a quest, dies out with the sun. … The inevitable explosion to come, the one that’s always forgotten in your intellectual ploys, can be seen in a certain way as coming before the fact to render these ploys … futile. … In 4.5 billions years there will arrive the demise of your phenomenology and your utopian politics, and there’ll be no one there to toll the death knell or hear it. It will be too late to understand that your passionate, endless questioning always depended on a “life of the mind.” … Thought borrows a horizon and orientation, the limitless limit and the end without end it assumes, from the corporeal, sensory, emotional and cognitive experience of a quite sophisticated but definitely earthly existence. With the disappearance of the earth, thought will have stopped—leaving that disappearance absolutely unthought of. … The death of the sun is a death of mind. … There’s no sublation or deferral if nothing survives. … The sun, our earth, and your thought will have been no more than a spasmodic state of energy, an instant of established order, a smile on the surface of matter in a remote corner of the cosmos. … Human death is included in the life of the mind. Solar death implies an irreparably exclusive disjunction between death and thought: if there’s death, then there’s no thought."

"What is new in all this is that the old poles of attraction represented by nation-states, parties, professions, institutions, and historical traditions are losing their attraction. And it does not look as though they will be replaced, at least not on their former scale."

"Already in the last few decades, economic powers have reached the point of imperiling the stability of the state through new forms of the circulation of capital that go by the generic name of multinational corporations."

"Legitimation is the process by which a legislator is authorized to promulgate such a law as a norm."

"Matter asks no questions, expects no answers of us. It ignores us. It made us the way it makes all bodies—by chance and according to its laws."

"Let us wage war on totality; let us be witnesses to the unpresentable, let us activate the different and save the honor of the name."

"Our working hypothesis is that the status of knowledge is altered as societies enter what is known as the postindustrial age and cultures enter the postmodern age."

"The relationship of the suppliers and users of knowledge to the knowledge they supply and use is now tending, and will be increasingly tend to, to assume the form already taken by the relationship of commodity producers and consumers to the commodities they produce and consume--that is, the form of knowledge."