Raoul Vaneigem Quotes

People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints, such people have a corpse in their mouth

Who wants a world in which the guarantee that we shall not die of starvation entails the risk of dying of boredom?

Down with a world in which the guarantee that we will not die of starvation has been purchased with the guarantee that we will die of boredom.

Daydreaming subverts the world.

The millions of human beings who were shot, tortured, starved, treated like animals and made the object of a conspiracy of ridicule, can sleep in peace in their communal graves, for at least the struggle in which they died has enabled their descendants, isolated in their air-conditioned apartments, to believe, on the strength of their daily dose of television, that they are happy and free. The Communards went down, fighting to the last, so that you too could qualify for a Caribbean cruise.

To be rich nowadays merely means to possess a large number of poor objects.

The same people who are murdered slowly in the mechanized slaughterhouses of work are also arguing, singing, drinking, dancing, making love, holding the streets, picking up weapons and inventing a new poetry.

Suffering is the pain of constraints. An atom of pure delight, no matter how small, can hold it at bay.

It is much more a lack of fun which batters us than over abundance and indulgence

My creativity, no matter how poor, is for me a far better guide than all the knowledge with which my head has been crammed. In the night of Power, its glimmer keeps the enemy forces at bay.

Purchasing power is a license to purchase power. The old proletariat sold its labour power in order to subsist; what little leisure time it had was passed pleasantly enough in conversations, arguments, drinking, making love, wandering, celebrating and rioting. The new proletarian sells his labour power in order to consume. When he’s not flogging himself to death to get promoted in the labour hierarchy, he’s being persuaded to buy himself objects to distinguish himself in the social hierarchy. The ideology of consumption becomes the consumption of ideology.

God cannot know anything, will anything or do anything without me. With God I created myself, I created all things, and my hand holds up heaven, earth and all the creatures of the earth. Without me there is nothing.

If love is under siege, it is because it threatens the very essence of commercial civilization. Everything is designed to make us forget that love is our most vivid manifestation and the most common power of life that is in us. Shouldn't we wonder how the lights that glimmer in the eye can blow a fuse for a time, even as barriers of oppression break and jam our passions? Yet despite a life stunted and distorted by mediated Spectacle, nothing has ever managed to strip love of its primal force. Although the heart's music fails to overwhelm the cacophony of profit efficiency, bit by bit it composes our destinies, according to tones, chords, and dissonances which render us happy if only we learn to harmonize the scattered notes that string emotions together.

I refuse to be called by any name, and suddenly, beneath the unnameable, I discover the wealth of lived experience, inexpressible poetry, the preconditions of supersession.

Those whom Power can neither govern nor kill, it taxes with madness.

O trabalho foi aquilo que o homem achou de melhor para nada fazer da sua vida.

Because of its increasing triviality, everyday life has gradually become our central preoccupation

Everywhere the same law holds good: ‘There is no weapon of your individual will which, once appropriated by others, does not turn against you.’ If

Identification with an ethnic or national community, with a religion, ideology, or any abstraction is nothing but a blood-soaked delusion.

What drives us to despair is not the immensity of our unsatisfied desires, but the moment when our fledgling passion discovers its own emptiness. Insatiable desire for passionate knowledge of one pretty girl after another stems from anxiety and from fear of love, so afraid are we of never encountering anything but objects. The dawn when lovers leave each other's arms is the same dawn that breaks on the execution of revolutionaries without a revolution. Isolation a deux cannot prevail over the isolation of all. Pleasure is broken off prematurely and lovers find themselves naked in the world, their actions suddenly ridiculous and feeble. No love is possible in an unhappy world.

No more Guernicas, no more Auschwitzes, no more Hiroshimas, no more Setifs. Hooray! But what about the impossibility of living, what about this stifling mediocrity and this absence of passion? What about the jealous fury in which the rankling of never being ourselves drives us to imagine that other people are happy? What about this feeling of never really being inside your own skin?

To talk of a modern work of art enduring is sillier than talking of the eternal values of Standard Oil.

We live our roles better than our own lives.

Real friends care little for forms.

Those who organize the world organize both suffering and the pain-killers for dealing with it;

Whatever you possess possesses you in return.

The feeling of ‘having done one’s duty’ makes everyone into their own honourable executioner.

If I must die, at least let me die as I have occasionally loved.

Henceforward, no revolution will be worth the name if it does not at the very least imply the radical elimination of all hierarchy.

Let us have no more suicide from weariness, which comes like a final sacrifice crowning all those that have gone before. Better one last laugh à la Cravan, or one last song à la Ravachol.

Qu’est-ce que le nihilisme ? Rozanov répond parfaitement à la question quand il écrit : “La représentation est terminée. Le public se lève. Il est temps d’enfiler son manteau et de rentrer à la maison. On se retourne : plus de manteau ni de maison.

Oppression is no longer centralized, for it is everywhere. The positive aspect of this disintegration is that everyone begins to see, in their state of almost complete isolation, that they must first save themselves, make themselves the centre, and from their own subjectivity build a world where they can be at home anywhere.

there is something admirable ... to have to coexist ... some thousands of souls for whom even the hope of a last judgment has been taken away.

The harder you run after time, the faster time goes: this is the law of the consumable.

My pleasure is nameless: those all too rare moments when I create myself afford no purchase to external manipulation.

Religious beliefs concealed humans from themselves, a Bastille walling them up in a pyramidal world with God at the summit and the king just below. Alas,

The desire to live is a political decision. Who wants a world where the guarantee of freedom from starvation means the risk of death from boredom?

... pissing on the altar is still a way of paying homage to the Church

Work to survive, survive by consuming, survive to consume, the hellish cycle is complete.

They hated children as they hated themselves; they beat them for their own good, and educated them from the perspective of their own incapacity to love life.

They spend their weeks waiting for Work to go put on its Sunday clothes.

Pour le pouvoir, l’ennemi numéro UN, c’est la créativité individuelle s’irradiant librement.

Any remnants of passionate tension between sexual pleasure and the adventurous quest for it are fast disintegrating into a panting succession of mechanically repeated gestures whose rhythm offers no hope of approaching so much as a semblance of orgasm. The quantitative Eros of speed, rapid change, and love-against-the-clock everywhere disfigures the face of real pleasure.

The great collective illusions, anaemic from shedding the blood of so many, have since given way to the thousands of prepacked ideologies sold by consumer society like so many portable brain-scrambling machines. Will

What is certain is that it is sheer madness a century later, when the economy of consumption is absorbing the economy of production and the exploitation of labour power is being subsumed by the exploitation of everyday creativity.

Malaise invades me as the crowd around me grows. The compromises I have made with stupidity under the pressure of circumstances rush to meet me, swimming towards me in hallucinating waves of faceless heads. Edvard Munch's famous painting, The Cry, evokes for me something I feel ten times a day. A man carried along by a crowd, which only he can see, suddenly screams out in an attempt to break the spell, to call himself back to himself, to get back inside his own skin. The tacit acknowledgments, fixed smiles, lifeless words, listlessness and humiliation sprinkled in his path suddenly surge into him, driving him out of his desires and his dreams and exploding the illusion of 'being together'. People touch without meeting; isolation accumulates but is never realized; emptiness overcomes us as the density of the crowd grows. The crowd drags me out of myself and installs thousands of little sacrifices in my empty presence. Everywhere neon signs are flashing out the dictum of Plotinus: All beings are together though each remains separate. But we only need to hold out our hands and touch one another, to raise our eyes and meet one another, and everything comes into focus, as if by magic.

The harder you run after time, the faster time goes: this is the law of the consumable. Try to stop it, and it will wear you out and age you all the more easily. Time must be caught on the wing, in the present—but the present has yet to be constructed.

Guerrilla war is a total war. This is the path on which the Situationist International is set: calculated harassment on every front—cultural, political, economic, and social. The battlefield is everyday life, which guarantees the unity of the struggle.

...the economy cannot stop making us consume more and more, and to consume without respite is to change illusions at an accelerating pace which gradually dissolves the illusion of change. We find ourselves alone, unchanged, frozen in the empty space behind the waterfall of gadgets, family cars and paperbacks.

Kendimi ararken hangi sapa yollarda yolumu yitiririm? Beni koruma numarasıyla, beni kendimden ayıran perde ne? Beni oluşturan bu ufalanmış parçaların içinde kendimi nasıl yeniden keşfedebilirim? Kendimi kavrama konusunda asla bilmediğim bir belirsizliğe doğru ilerliyorum. Sanki önümdeki yol önceden belirlenmiş. Sanki iç dünyam, kendi yarattığını sandığı; ama gerçekte onu biçimlendiren zihinsel bir manzaranın çizgilerinin bir parçası. Saçma -dünyanın rasyonelliğini onayladığı ve tartışmasız kabul edildiği için saçmalar saçması- bir güç beni durmaksızın sıçramaya zorluyor; ama asla terk edemediğim sert bir zeminde ayaklarım. Ve kendime doğru yaptığım bu yararsız atlayışımla, sadece bugünle olan bağımı yitirme başarısını gösteriyorum: çoğu kez, kendimden uzakta, ölü zamanın ritmiyle yaşarım.

First get to work; you can enjoy yourself afterwards! Such is the recurring, rhyming themesong that is passed down into the head, programming militarily the rhythm of the body’s movements. Such is, in its numbing insistance, the tune that orchestrates the retreat of nascent intelligence. And rest assured – it will be a different intelligence that ends up in charge over the frozen behavior of working hours, an intelligence in which heart counts the least and is petrified the most.

Privative appropriation and domination are thus originally imposed and felt as a positive right, but in the form of a negative universality. Valid for everyone, justified in everyone's eyes by divine or natural law, the right of privative appropriation is objectified in a general illusion, in a universal transcendence, in an essential law under which everyone individually manages to tolerate the more or less narrow limits assigned to his right to live and to the conditions of life in general.

In an industrial society that conflates work and productivity, the need to produce has always stood opposed to the desire to create. What spark of humanity, which is to say possible creativity, can remain alive in a being dragged from sleep at six every morning, jolted about in commuter trains, deafened by the racket of machinery, bleached and steamed by speed-up and meaningless gestures and production quotas, and tossed out at the end of the day into great railway-station halls—temples of arrival and departure for the hell of weekdays and the nugatory paradise of the weekend, where the masses commune in brutish weariness?

The economy has ceased hiding itself behind mystifying words like God, devil, fatality, grace, damnation, nature, progress, duty, and necessity, with which, over the years, it gave itself an inescapable credibility. It no longer troubles itself with the frilly liberals, it is no longer bothered by the leninists in blue jeans — it laughs at the idea of taking any great leaps while wearing fascist jackboots or socialist bootees. It’s so simple and obvious it stands naked, and its omnipresence makes it familiar and familial. Reduced to the final necessity of survival, the economy brings together all its past lies; the lie that there is no hope for humanity’s survival outside of the economy.

L'unité de l'homme primitif et de la nature est d'essence magique. L'homme ne se sépare vraiment de la nature qu'en la transformant par la technique et, la transformant, il la désacralise. Or l'emploi de la technique est subordonné à une organisation sociale. La société naît avec l'outil. Bien plus, l'organisation est la première technique cohérente de lutte contre la nature. L'organisation sociale - hiérarchisée puisque fondée sur l'appropriation privative - détruit peu à peu le lien magique existant entre l'homme et la nature, mais à son tour elle se charge de magie, elle crée entre elle et les hommes une unité mythique calquée sur leur participation au mystère de la nature.

People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints, such people have a corpse in their mouth.’ Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life

For consumer society poverty is whatever cannot be consumed.

To consume is to be consumed by inauthenticity,

From now on the analysts are in the streets. Lucidity is not their only weapon. Their thinking is no longer in danger of being imprisoned, either by the false reality of gods or by the false reality of technocrats.

From the ruins of Heaven, humanity fell into the ruins of its own world. What

Todo o além é um aquém da nossa vida não cumprida.

Poetry seldom occurs in poems. Poetry only occurs when words cause action.

Αν πρέπει να πεθάνω, ας πεθάνω τουλάχιστο όπως μου έλαχε να αγαπήσω.

From the spectacular point of view, the reduction of man to consumer is an enrichment: the more things he has, the more roles he plays, the more he is. So it is decreed by the organization of appearances. But, from the point of view of lived reality, all power so attained is paid for by the sacrifice of true self-realization. What is gained on the level of appearances is lost on the level of being and becoming.

The bourgeoisie does not dominate, it exploits. It does not need to be master, it prefers to use. Why has nobody seen that the principle of productivity simply replaced the principle of feudal authority? Why has nobody wanted to understand?

How can you tell it’s the end of an era? When a suddenly intolerable present crystallizes in a short period of time what was so uneasily put up with in the past. And everyone is suddenly quite easily convinced that he or she is either going to be reborn in the birth of a new world, or die in the archaic netherworld of a society less and less adapted to the living.

Revolutionary moments are carnivals in which the individual life celebrates its unification with a regenerated society,” wrote Situationist Raoul Vaneigem.

The world is going to be remade, not reconditioned. All its would-be renovators are powerless to stop this. If these experts do not understand me, so much the better; I certainly have no desire to understand them.

The poverty of ‘the drama’ as a literary genre goes hand in hand with the colonization of social space by theatrical attitudes. Enfeebled on the stage, theatre battens on everyday life and attempts to dramatize everyday behaviour.

Common sense is the lie codified and vulgarized.

Thanks to the magic of the imagination, everything exists solely to be manipulated, caressed, broken apart, put back together or altered in any way I wish. Once the primacy of subjectivity is accepted the spell of things is broken. Started from other people, the search for the self is fruitless; we repeat the same futile gestures time after time. Started from oneself, on the other hand, actions are not repeated but rather revisited, corrected and fully realized.

Et comment instruirait-il les enfants qu'il a devant lui, l'éducateur qui n'est même plus capable de redevenir enfant en renaissant chaque jour à lui-même? Celui qui porte dans son cœur le cadavre de son enfance n'éduquera jamais que des âmes mortes.

Le travail est partout où l'on ne fait rien de sa vie.

Gazing upon the child, the presence in the adult’s heart of an unfinished life, oscillating between birth and death, is clarified.

We participate, without feeling it's significance, to a battle of the free life against the profitable agony. This battle is not lead the way military do. It never expects neither victory nor defeat, it does not rely on tactics, it mobilizes nor brute force nor the ruse. It is not based on any project, nor any action plan. It is a battle on between a decay of all things, a weariness of the people that convinced them to die, and the permanent revival of a life that will never give up, permanently claims rights, and progresses through its quiet determination to ignore the obstacles.