Academics From France

"Il y a une chose plus triste à perdre que la vie, c’est la raison de vivre, Plus triste que de perdre ses biens, c’est de perdre son espérance."

"Il n'y a pour les choses et pour les poèmes qu'une seule manière d'être nouveaux, c'est d'être vrais et qu'une seule manière d'être jeunes, c'est d'être éternels."

"Si l'ordre est le plaisir de la raison, le désordre est le délice de l'imagination."

"J'avais complètement oublié la religion et j'étais à son égard d'une ignorance sauvage. La première lueur de vérité me fut donnée par la rencontre des livres d'un grand poète, à qui je dois une éternelle reconnaissance, et qui a eu dans la formation de ma pensée une part prépondérante, Arthur Rimbaud. La lecture des Illuminations, puis, quelques mois après, d'Une Saison en enfer, fut pour moi un événement capital. Pour la première fois, ces livres ouvraient une fissure dans mon bagne matérialiste et me donnaient l'impression vivante et presque physique du surnaturel."

"In the little moment that remains to us between the crisis and the catastrophe, we may as well drink a glass of champagne."

"Art imitates nature not in its effects as such, but in its causes, in its ‘manner,’ in its process, which are nothing but a participation in and a derivation of actual objects, of the Art of God himself."

"Théâtre des ris et des pleurs Lit! où je nais, et où je meurs, Tu nous fais voir comment voisins Sont nos plaisirs et chagrins."

"Her godmother, who was a fairy, said to her, "You want to go to the ball, don't you?""

"When she had done her work, she would go over to the chimney corner, and sit among the cinders."

"Go into the garden and get me a pumpkin."

"She then gave her a pair of slippers made of glass, the prettiest in the world."

"Charm is the true gift of the Fairies."

"Haven't you heard that this house belongs to an ogre who eats little children?"

"Fetch me my seven-league boots so I can catch the children."

"The king was astonished at the vast amount of property owned by the Marquis of Carabas."

"Anne, my sister Anne, do you see nothing coming?" "I see nothing but the sun that makes everything dusty, and the grass that grows green."

"She said to her, "Grandmother, what great arms you have!" "That's to embrace you the better, my child." "Grandmother, what great legs you have!" "That's to run the better, my child." "Grandmother, what great ears you have!" "That's to hear the better, my child." "Grandmother, what great teeth you have!" "That's for to eat you." And upon saying these words, this naughty Wolf threw himself upon Little Red Riding Hood, and ate her."

"These were all the women whom Bluebeard had married, and whose throats he had cut one after the other."

"But the blood always remained, for the key was enchanted."

"...Open anything you want. Go anywhere you wish. But I absolutely forbid you to enter that little room, and if you open it so much as a crack, nothing will protect you from my wrath."

"Let us admit that no matter how small the chance it could happen, one molecule could be created by such astronomical odds of chance. However, one molecule is of no use. Hundreds of millions of identical ones are necessary. Thus we either admit the miracle or doubt the absolute truth of science."

"One example of these kinds of statistics comes from Evolution: Possible or Impossible by James F. Coppedge [who] cites an article by Ulric Jelinek … which claims that the odds are 1 in 10^243 against "two thousand atoms" (the size of one particular protein molecule) ending up in precisely that particular order "by accident." Where did Jelenik get that figure? From Pierre Lecompte du Nouy... who in turn got it from Charles-Eugene Guye, a physicist who died in 1942. Guye had merely calculated the odds of these atoms lining up by accident if "a volume" of atoms the size of the Earth were "shaken at the speed of light," failing to factor in laws of chemistry, which create preferences for the formation and behavior of molecules, and ignoring that there are millions if not billions of different possible proteins. This calculation comes to Coppedge third-hand, and is now outdated (it was calculated before 1942, even before the discovery of DNA)."

"When I was a student I was assigned “Mythologies” and “A Lover’s Discourse,” by Roland Barthes, and felt at once that something momentous had happened to me, that I had met a writer who had changed my course in life somehow; and looking back now, I think he did."

"Whereas the work is understood to be traceable to a source (through a process of derivation or "filiation"), the Text is without a source — the "author" a mere "guest" at the reading of the Text."

"The Text is plural. Which is not simply to say that it has several meanings, but that it accomplishes the very plural of meaning: an irreducible (and not merely an acceptable) plural. The Text is not a co-existence of meanings but a passage, an overcrossing; thus it answers not to an interpretation, even a liberal one, but to an explosion, a dissemination."

"The discourse on the Text should itself be nothing other than text, research, textual activity, since the Text is that social space which leaves no language safe, outside, nor any subject of the enunciation in position as judge, master, analyst, confessor, decoder. The theory of the Text can coincide only with a practice of writing."

"What the public wants is the image of passion, not passion itself."

"The Text is not a definitive object."

"A work has two levels of meaning: literal and concealed. A Text, on the other hand is engaged in a movement … a deferral … a dilation of meaning … the play of signification. Metonymy — the association of part to whole — characterized the logic of the Text. In this sense the Text is "radically symbolic" and lacks closure."

"Barthes's discovery and articulation of the "new" liberatory category of perception and deciphering, semiotic-mythology, belongs to the praxis of his heroic mythologist, alone. This unfortunate theoretical strategy makes the articulation of a coalitional consciousness in social struggle impossible to imagine or enact. ... His terminologies appropriate the technologies of the oppressed for use by academic classes."

"Statistically, myth is on the right. There, it is essential, well-fed, sleek, expensive, garrulous, it invents itself ceaselessly. It takes hold of everything, all aspects of the law, of morality, of aesthetics, of diplomacy, of household equipment, of Literature, of entertainment."

"The bourgeoisie hides the fact that it is the bourgeoisie and thereby produces myth; revolution announces itself openly as revolution and thereby abolishes myth."

"Myth deprives the object of which it speaks of all history. In it, history evaporates."

"Bourgeois norms are experienced as the evident laws of a natural order—the further the bourgeois class propagates its representations, the more naturalized they become."

"Myth is depoliticized speech."

"By reducing any quality to quantity, myth economizes intelligence: it understands reality more cheaply."

"The bourgeoisie is defined as the social class which does not want to be named."

"La forme bâtarde de la culture de masse est la répétition honteuse: on répète les contenus, les schèmes idéologiques, le gommage des contradictions, mais on varie les formes superficielles: toujours des livres, des émissions, des films nouveaux, des faits divers, mais toujours le même sens."

"Encratic language (the language produced and spread under the protection of power) is statutorily a language of repetition; all official institutions of language are repeating machines: schools, sports, advertising, popular songs, news, all continually repeat the same structure, the same meaning, often the same words."

"Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire."

"The politician being interviewed clearly takes a great deal of trouble to imagine an ending to his sentence: and if he stopped short? His entire policy would be jeopardized!"

"The petit-bourgeois is a man unable to imagine the Other. If he comes face to face with him, he blinds himself, ignores and denies him, or else transforms him into himself."

"Total abstraction was something intellectual to me. I didn't feel it.. ..I saw a Dubuffet show at Pierre Matisse [the son of Henri Matisse who run an art-gallery in New York then] in the late forties and came back with a new vocabulary."

"The very troubling intensity of Dubuffet's portraits is not the effect of an exact resemblance, but on the contrary, comes from extreme deformation, from a game of occultations which preserves the effigy on its apparition. The painting agitates like a mechanism of image variation which insidiously deforms physiognomy to the limits of denaturalization.."

"In my estimation these heavily impastoed 'haute pâte' [thick paste paintings, Dubuffet made c. 1945-46] ..which introduce base materials (e.g., sand, asphalt, and pebbles) into high art, are not simply attempts to shock, or to achieve succès de scandale, by returning figuration to a more 'primitive' or infantile state (as many of Dubuffet's early critics and detractors claimed). They also reflect, albeit negatively, an historically specific phenomena—namely, the classicizing 'rappel à l'ordre' [turning back to the order and nationalistic retour à la terre [return to the earth] mentalities rampant in France at the time. Dubuffet's writings from this period are replete with explicit and implicit denunciations of this 'return' to classicism via the Renaissance.. .For instance.. .. Dubuffet lambastes this return of 'Greekeries, post-Greekeries, and neo-Greekeries' in contemporary art, and elsewhere [he] describes himself as staunchly 'anti-Humanist'."

"Art should be born from the materials."

"I have observed that very often I gain access to a little secret that I have sought for a long time by way of a fortuitous encounter quite unrelated to the matter: for example six months I try to draw a camel in a way that satisfies me, and I make a thousand attempts without ever managing to do it. Then one day it is a drawing of a plump on the label of a pot of jam or the shadow thrown by an ink pot, or something or other equally unrelated to the matter that provides me with the solution. This kind of thing has happened so often that I have acquired the habit of always being on the outlook, and when I want to draw a camel I no longer limit myself, as I once did, to looking (only, fh) at camels.."

"At present [around 1960-1970] I make objects (whether a type-writer, wheelbarrow, bed or fishingboat..) very 'hourloupés' [like his painting: Courre Merlan (Whiting Chase), 1964. What I mean is that I am swimming upstream against the 'l'Hourloupe' current. I am approaching it from the opposite direction: instead of starting out with indeterminate lines that eventually give me a wheelbarrow, I start out with the idea of making a wheelbarrow and then add my indeterminate lines. In effect what I am doing is making the current run simultaneously in both directions at the same time."

"I have always been haunted by the feeling that the painter has much to gain from making use of the forces that tend to work against his action"

"Fautrier's exhibition [in Paris 1945] made an extremely strong impression on me. Art had never before appeared so fully realised in its pure state. The word 'art' had never before been so loaded with meaning for me."