John Holloway Quotes

She wondered how Dr. Watson - a clever man in his own right - had lasted so many years without bashing his roommate over the head out of sheer frustration.

Not that Dr Watson wasn't benign - he was one of the best souls in the Empire - but a man didn't get to be her uncle's right-hand man without a good uppercut and the stamina of a draft horse.

Comradeship, dignity, amorosity, love, solidarity, fraternity, friendship, ethics: all these names stand in contrast to the commodified, monetised relations of capitalism, all describe relations developed in struggles against capitalism and which can be seen as anticipating or creating a society beyond capitalism.

You're an interesting person, Jack." Sullivan said. "I wish I could figure out what you were thinging when you punched Stern and turned on Isabel." "Well, I think that's the thing." Holloway said. "I think it's clear that sometimes I just don't think." "I think you do." Sullivan said. "It's just you think about you first. The not thinking part comes right after that.

The struggle is lost from the beginning, long before the victorious party or army conquers state power and ‘betrays’ its promises. It is lost once power itself seeps into the struggle, once the logic of power becomes the logic of the revolutionary process, once the negative of refusal is converted into the positive of power-building.

Jack Holloway told me he would get the son of a bitch who killed my child and the mate of my child," Papa continued. "Jack Holloway did get that son of a bitch. Jack Holloway got you. You are the man who killed my child. Get off my planet, you son of a bitch.

Well, I’m sorry you might possibly be out a bit of money, Jack,” Isabel said. “Jesus, Isabel,” Holloway said. He opened the door. “A bit of money? Try at least a couple billion credits. That’s billion, with a b. Saying that’s a bit of money is like saying a forest fire is a nice way to roast some marshmallows.

Any truth is better than indefinite doubt. —Sherlock Holmes, as recorded by John H. Watson, M.D., “The Adventure of the Yellow Face

Doing is inherently plural, collective, choral, communal.

Nonsubordination is the simple, unspectacular struggle to shape one's life. It is people's reluctance to give up the simple pleasures of life, their reluctance to become machines, the determination to forge and maintain some degree of power-to.

The real determinant of society is hidden behind the state and the economy: it is the way in which our everyday activity is organised, the subordination of our doing to the dictates of abstract labour, that is, of value, money, profit. It is this abstraction which is, after all, the very existence of the state. If we want to change society, we must stop the subordination of our activity to abstract labour, do something else.

We are the sole creators of the system which entraps us.

Identification is domination.

We do not need to have a picture of what a true world would be like in order to feel that there is something radically wrong with the world that exists.

We need no promise of a happy ending to justify our rejection of a world we feel to be wrong.

A whole world of horror is contained in the process of definition.

We are the only creators, the only gods. Guilty gods, negated gods, damaged, schizophrenic gods, but above all self- changing gods.

Definition implies subordination.

Pleasure doing business with you, Chad,” Holloway said, setting down the infopanel. “Please die in a fire, Jack,” Bourne said.

It takes a certain kind of dog to willingly demote himself from alpha dog, and that dog was Carl. Holloway would have to speak to him about it, for what little good it would do, Carl being a dog and all.

Certainty can only be on the side of domination. Certainty is to be found in the homogenisation of time, in the freezing of doing into being. Self-determination is inherently uncertain. The death of the old certainties is to be welcomed as a liberation.

Capital exists because we create it. We created it yesterday (and every day for the last two hundred years or so). If we do not create it tomorrow, it will cease to exist. Its existence depends on the constant repetition of the process of exploitation (and of all the social processes that make exploitation possible). It is not like Frankenstein's creature. It does not have an existence independent of our doing. It does not have a duration, a durable independent existence. It only appears to have a duration. The same is true of all the derivative forms of capital (state, money, etc.). The continuity of these monsters (these forms of social relations) is not something that exists independent of us: their continuity is a continuity that is constantly generated and re-generated by our doing. The fact that we have reasons for generating capital does not alter the fact that capital depends for its existence from one day to the next, from one moment to the next, on our act of creation. Capital depends upon us: that is the ray of hope in a world that seems so black.

I’m not a good man, Mark,” Holloway said. “But I was the right man. And for this, that was enough.

AMERICANS -- U.S. NAVY, ABOARD MINESWEEPER USS PELICAN (AM 49), MANILA BAY Alton C. Ingram, Lieutenant. “Todd,” Commanding Officer Frederick J. Holloway, Lt. (jg), Operations Officer. Oliver P. Toliver, III, Lt. (jg) “Ollie,” Gunnery Officer. Bartholomew, Leonard (n), Chief Machinists Mate, “Rocky,” Chief Engineer. Farwell, Luther A., Quartermaster Second Class, Top helmsman. Hampton, Joshua P., Electronics Technician 1st Class, Crew Whittaker, Peter L., Engineman 3rd Class, Crew Forester, Kevin T. Quartermaster 3rd Class, Crew Forester, Brian I., Quartermaster Striker, Crew Yardly, Ronald R., Pharmacist's Mate Second Class “Bones,” Crew. Sunderland, Kermit G. Gunner's Mate 1st Class, Crew. AMERICANS

It is the very horror of the world that obliges us to learn to hope.

In order to protect our jobs, our visas, our profits, our chances of receiving good grades, our sanity, we pretend not to see, we sanitise our own perception, filtering out the pain, pretending that it is not here but out there, far away, in Africa, in Russia, a hundred years ago, in an otherness that, by being alien, cleanses our own experience of all negativity.

The rule of identity is the rule of amnesia.

Identity negates possibility, denies openness to other life. Identity kills, both metaphorically and very, very literally.

Definition merely adds the locks to a world that is assumed to be closed.

The theory of crisis is not just a theory of fear but also a theory of hope.

Social self-determination does not and cannot exist in a capitalist society: capital, in all its forms, is the negation of self-determination.

Representation involves definition, exclusion, separation.

All this is to say that plays such as we have been examining do not (like the rituals themselves) suspend life in order to stage a ritual. They embed the essential movement of that ritual in life's common fabric. They ritualize reality. The general interest, no doubt, of a representation of life such as we find in these plays may be great in itself; but in the present context it is something more distinctive than this which has the main interest. This is, that because the ritual movement is embedded in a representation of life, and grows out of that, the double, deep response in us as audience which I have suggested that it excites is excited not of something which stands apart from life, but of something which points back to that: and does so with all the power of a work of art. The ritual sequence emerges from, and returns into, the world we know. It enacts and elucidates one of life's constant potentialities. Unlike the ritual, the tragedy does not stand in isolation. Insofar as it represents life, it brings us back to our own lives. This is an art which springs from reality, has its time of independence, and takes us back whence it sprang. The profound excitation of our natures which has been the effect of the plays is directed back upon the normal waking experience which is that nature's permanent source and guide.

John Holloway, perhaps the most poetic of contemporary Marxists, once proposed to write a book entitled Stop Making Capitalism.50 After all, he noted, even though we all act as if capitalism is some kind of behemoth towering over us, it’s really just something we produce. Every morning we wake up and re-create capitalism. If one morning we woke up and all decided to create something else, then there wouldn’t be capitalism anymore. There would be something else.

The power-to that exists in the form of power-over, in the form, therefore, of being denied, exists not only as revolt against its denial, it exists also as material substratum of the denial. The denial cannot exist without that which is denied. The done depends on the doing.29 The owner of the done depends on the doer. No matter how much the done denies the existence of the doing, as in the case of value, as in the case of capital, there is no way in which the done can exist without the doing. No matter how much the done dominates the doing, it depends absolutely on that doing for its existence.

[...] sentir que o mundo está equivocado não significa, necessariamente, que temos a imagem de uma utopia que ocupe o seu lugar. [...] Não necessitamos da promessa de um final feliz para justificar a nossa rejeição a um mundo que sentimos estar equivocado.

The starting point of theoretical reflection is opposition, negativity, struggle. It is from rage that thought is born, not from the pose of reason, not from the reasoned-sitting-back-and-reflecting-on-the-mysteries-of-existence that is the conventional image of 'the thinker

We start from negation, from dissonance. The dissonance can take many shapes. An inarticulate mumble of discontent, tears of frustration, a scream of rage, a confident roar. An unease, a confusion, a longing, a critical vibration