“Stylistic quirks reminiscent of Jean Paul. Fourier loves preambles, cisambles, transambles, postambles, introductions, extroductions, prologues, interludes, postludes, cismediants, mediants, transmediants, intermedes, notes, appendixes.”; “Fourier recognizes many forms of collective procession and cavalcade: storm, vortex, swarm, serpentage.” Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 642 (W13,3 and W13,5).
“O, what a noble mind is here o’erthrown / The courtier’s, scholar’s, soldier’s, eye, tongue, sword, / Th’ expectancy and rose of the fair state,/ The glass of fashion and the mould of form, / Th’ observed of all observers, quite, quite down! / And I, of ladies most deject and wretched, / That sucked the honey of his music vows, / Now see that noble and most sovereign reason, / Like sweet bells jangled, out of tune and harsh, / That unmatched form and feature of blown youth / Blasted with ecstasy. O, woe is me / T’ have seen what I have seen, see what I see!” William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. William Farnham (Baltimore: Penguin, 1957), act 3, sc. 1, lines 150–61.
“We have a task before us which must be speedily performed. We know that it will be ruinous to make delay. The most important crisis of our life calls, trumpet-tongued, for immediate energy and action. We glow, we are consumed with eagerness to commence the work, with the anticipation of whose glorious result our whole souls are on fire. It must, it shall be undertaken to-day, and yet we put it off until to-morrow; and why? There is no answer, except that we feel perverse, using the word with no comprehension of the principle. To-morrow arrives, and with it a more impatient anxiety to do our duty, but with this very increase of anxiety arrives, also, a nameless, a positively fearful, because unfathomable, craving for delay. This craving gathers strength as the moments fly. The last hour for action is at hand. We tremble with the violence of the conflict within us—of the definite with the indefinite—of the substance with the shadow. But, if the contest has proceeded thus far, it is the shadow which prevails,—we struggle in vain. The clock strikes, and is the knell of our welfare. At the same time, it is the chanticleer-note to the ghost that has so long over-awed us. It flies—it disappears—we are free. The old energy returns. We will labour now. Alas, it is too late!” Edgar Allan Poe, “The Imp of the Perverse” (1850), in Edgar Allan Poe: Poetry and Tales, ed. Patrick F. Quinn (New York: Library of America, 1984) 828.
“Weren’t you always distracted by expectation, as if every event announced a beloved?” Rainer Maria Rilke, “The First Elegy,” in Duino Elegies (1922), trans. Stephen Mitchell, available at href="http://homestar.org/bryannan/duino.html">→.
“My life closed twice before its close; It yet remains to see / If Immortality unveil / A third event to me." Emily Dickinson, "My life closed twice before its close" (1896) in Final Harvest: Emily Dickinson's Poems, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (Boston: Little, Brown, 1961), 314-5.
“Who am I? If this once I were to rely on a proverb, then perhaps everything would amount to knowing whom I haunt.” André Breton, Nadja (1928), trans. Richard Howard (New York: Grove Press, 1960), 11.
“So little is known about the psychology of emotional processes that the tentative remarks I am about to make on the subject may claim a very lenient judgment. The problem before us arises out of the conclusion we have reached that anxiety comes to be a reaction to the danger of a loss of an object. Now we already know one reaction to the loss of an object, and that is mourning. The question therefore is, when does that loss lead to anxiety and when to mourning. In discussing the subject of mourning on a previous occasion I found that there was one feature about it which remained quite unexplained. This was its peculiar painfulness. And yet it somehow seems self-evident that separation from an object should be painful. Thus the problem becomes more complicated; when does separation from an object produce anxiety, when does it produce mourning, and when does it produce, it may be, only pain?” Sigmund Freud, Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety (1926), trans. Alix Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1936), 166.
“In a way, they seemed to be arguing the case as if it had nothing to do with me. Everything was happening without my participation. My fate was being decided without anyone so much as asking my opinion.” Albert Camus, The Stranger (1942), trans. Matthew Ward (New York: Random House, 1989), 98.
“What men call love is a very small, restricted, feeble thing compared with this ineffable orgy, this divine prostitution of the soul giving itself entire, all it poetry and all its charity, to the unexpected as it comes along, to the stranger as he passes.” Charles Baudelaire, “Crowds,” in Paris Spleen, (1869), trans. Louise Varèse (New York: New Directions Publishing, 1970), 20.
“In attempting to explain F For Fake’s state-side failure, it has occurred to me that perhaps the subject matter was at least partially to blame, and that this country is so blissfully enslaved by the notion of the special sanctity of the expert that an overtly anti-expert film was bound to go too much against the national grain.” Orson Welles (1983), available at →.
“We sense a man persistently escaping the mould he’s being cast in. The story confirms that anyone can fake the lecture but it takes a superior imposter to fake the thinking.” Clifford Irving, Phantom Rosebuds (San Francisco: New Langton Arts, 2008).
“For a long time I would go to bed early. Sometimes, the candle barely out, my eyes closed so quickly that I did not have time to tell myself: ‘I am falling asleep.’ And half an hour later the thought that it was time to look for sleep would awaken me; I would make as if to put away the book which I imagined was still in my hands, and to blow out the light; I had gone on thinking, while I was asleep, about what I had just been reading, but these thoughts had taken a rather peculiar turn; it seemed to me that I myself was the immediate subject of my book: a church, a quartet, the rivalry between François I and Charles V.” Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time: Swann’s Way (1913), trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terrence Kilmartin, rev. D. J. Enright (New York: Random House, 1992), 1.
“This working-through of the resistances may in practice turn out to be an arduous task for the subject of the analysis and a trial of patience for the analyst. Nevertheless it is a part of the work which effects the greatest changes in the patient and which distinguishes analytic treatment from any kind of treatment by suggestion.” Sigmund Freud, “Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through: Further Recommendations on the Technique of Psychoanalysis” (1914), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1986), 12:155–6.
“The discovery of the Musée Gustave Moreau, at around the age of sixteen, influenced forever the way I love . . . It goes so far that these kind of women probably concealed all the others, yes, I was completely bewitched.” André Breton, Manuscript: À propos de Gustave Moreau (1950).
“Après-coup (subst. M., adj. and adv.). Translation from the German Nachträglichkeit: Term frequently used by Freud in relation to his conception of temporality and psychic causality: experiences, impressions, memory traces are reformulated later depending on new experiences, and their accessibility to another degree of development. It is then possible for them to obtain a physic utility as well as new meaning." Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-analysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Norton, 1974).
“I once came close to a conversion to the good and to felicity, salvation. How can I describe my vision, the air of Hell is too thick for hymns! There were millions of delightful creatures in smooth spiritual harmony, strength and peace, noble ambitions, I do not know what all?” Arthur Rimbaud, A Season in Hell, trans. Paul Schmidt (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1976).
“Autobiography seems to depend on actual and potentially verifiable events in a less ambivalent way than fiction does. It seems to belong to a simpler mode of referentiality, of representation, and of diegisis. It may contain lots of phantasms and dreams, but these deviations from reality remain rooted in a single subject whose identity is defined by the uncontested readability of his proper name . . . but are we so certain that autobiography depends on its subject or a (realistic) picture of its model? We assume that life produces the autobiography as an act produces its consequences, but can we not suggest, with equal justice, that the autobiographical project may itself produce and determine the life and that whatever the writer does is in fact governed by the technical demands of self-portraiture and thus determined, in all its aspects by the resources of his medium?” Paul De Man, “Autobiography as De-facement,” in MLN 94, No. 5 (December 1979): 920.
“Such reflections lead me to the conclusion that criticism, abjuring, it is true, its dearest prerogatives, but aiming, on the whole, at a goal less futile than the automatic adjustment of ideas, should confine itself to scholarly incursions upon the very realm supposedly barred to it, and which, separate from the work, is a realm, where the author’s personality, victimized by the petty events of daily life, expresses itself quite freely and often in so distinctive a manner.” “We have said nothing about Chirico until we have taken into account his personal views about the artichoke, the glove, the cookie, or the spool. In such matters as these, how much we could gain from his cooperation! As far as I am concerned, a mind’s arrangement with regard to certain objects is even more important than its regard for certain arrangements of objects, these two kinds of arrangement controlling between them all forms of sensibility.” Breton, Nadja, 13, 16.
“By making autobiography into a genre, one elevates it above the literary status of mere reportage, chronicle, or memoir and gives it a place, albeit a modest one, among the canonical hierarchies of the major literary genres. This does not go without some embarrassment, since compared to tragedy, or epic, or lyric poetry, autobiography always looks slightly disreputable and self-indulgent in a way that may be symptomatic of its incompatibility with the monumental dignity of aesthetic values.” De Man, “Autobiography as De-facement”: 919.