Adversaria (14)
‘One can only accept the answers one needs’ —Marghanita Laski (Ecstasy in Secular and Religious Experiences, p. 1)
‘Phrases of neatness, cosiness, and comfort can never be an answer to the sphinx’s riddle’ —William James (Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 364)
‘There is something ghostly, in this history where questions disappear, and answers survive’ —Franco Moretti (The Bourgeois, p. 14)
‘What Kant’s pen could not do, the guillotine did for him’ —Frederick C. Beiser (The Fate of Reason, p. 198)
‘In the lesser poets, and in the greater poets, too, at times when inspiration is not equal to the effort, the result is, all too often, loss of vitality, tastelessness, and lack of precision’ —E.V. Gordon (introduction to The Pearl, p. xxxvii)
‘I suggest that some part of the honorific superiority of horses over cows may be due to the fact that one cannot ride to ecstasy on a cow’ —Marghanita Laski (contra Veblen, in Ecstasy in Secular and Religious Experiences, p. 198f., n.5)
‘Although he did not possess any great philosophical talent, Eberhard did have one indisputable skill: he knew how to give an academic dispute the added air of scandal’ —Frederick C. Beiser (The Fate of Reason, p. 219)
Capital posits the permanence of value (to a certain degree) by incarnating itself in fleeting commodities and taking on their form, but at the same time changing them just as constantly; alternates between its eternal form as money and its passing form in commodities; permanence is posited as the only thing it can be, a passing passage – process – life.