Tiqqun Quotes

What civilization has done to women’s bodies is no different than what it’s done to the earth, to children, to the sick, to the proletariat; in short, to everything that isn’t supposed to “talk,” and in general to whatever the knowledge-powers of government and management don’t want to hear, which is thus relegated to exclusion from all recognized activity, relegated to the role of a witness.

The Young Girl knows everything as devoid of consequences, even her own suffering. Everything is funny, nothing's a big deal. Everything is cool, nothing is serious.

Domination and critique have always formed an apparatus covertly against a common hostis: the conspirator, who works under cover, who used everything THEY give him and everything THEY attribute to him as a mask. The conspirator is everywhere hated, although THEY will never hate him as much as he enjoys playing his game. No doubt a certain amount of what one usually calls “perversion” accounts for the pleasure, since what he enjoys, among other things, is his opacity. But that isn’t the reason THEY continue to push the conspirator to make himself a critic, to subjectivate himself as critic, nor the reason for the hate THEY so commonly express. The reason is quite simply the danger he represents. The danger, for Empire, is war machines: that one person, that people transform themselves into war machines, ORGANICALLY JOIN THEIR TASTE FOR LIFE AND THEIR TASTE FOR DESTRUCTION.

Empire does not confront us like a subject, facing us, but like an environment that is hostile to us.

Deep down inside, the Young-Girl has the personality of a tampon: She exemplifies all of the appropriate indifference, all of the necessary coldness demanded by the conditions of metropolitan life.

The Young-Girl's impotence or frigidity concretely manifest that her own erotic power is detached from her and autonomized to the point of dominating her.

The body that says “I,” in truth says “we.

The Young-Girl's ass is a global village.

According to the Tiqqun collective, we have become the innocuous, pliable inhabitants of global urban societies.7 Even in the absence of any direct compulsion, we choose to do what we are told to do; we allow the management of our bodies, our ideas, our entertainment, and all our imaginary needs to be externally imposed. We buy products that have been recommended to us through the monitoring of our electronic lives, and then we voluntarily leave feedback for others about what we have purchased. We are the compliant subject who submits to all manner of biometric and surveillance intrusion, and who ingests toxic food and water and lives near nuclear reactors without complaint. The absolute abdication of responsibility for living is indicated by the titles of the many bestselling guides that tell us, with a grim fatality, the 1,000 movies to see before we die, the 100 tourist destinations to visit before we die, the 500 books to read before we die.

Everybody knows the centres of neutralisation, where it is required that no emotion stands out, where each one has to contain himself, and everybody experiences them as such: enterprises (family included), parties, sports centres, art galleries, etc. The real question is to know why, since everyone knows what these places are about, they can nevertheless be so popular. Why would one prefer, always and above all, that nothing happens; that nothing occurs, in any case, that might cause shocks that are too deep?

He [Karl Deutsch] recommended abandoning the old concept that power was sovereign, which had too long been the essence of politics. To govern would become a rational coordination of the flows of information and decisions that circulate through the social body. Three conditions would need to be met, he said: an ensemble of 'capturers' would have to be installed so that no information originating from the “subjects” would be lost; information handling by correlation and association; and a proximity to every living community. The cybernetic modernization of power and the expired forms of social authority thus can be seen as the visible production of what Adam Smith called the “invisible hand,” which until then had served as the mystical keystone of liberal experimentation. The communications system would be the nerve system of societies, the source and destination of all power. The cybernetic hypothesis thus expresses no more or less than the politics of the “end of politics.” It represents at the same time both a paradigm and a technique of government. Its study shows that the police is not just an organ of power, but also a way of thinking.

There is the space of encounters which allow one to trace out an absolute limit to the analogy between the social world and the physical world. This is basically because two particles never encounter one another except where their rupture phenomena can be deduced from laboratory observations. The encounter is that durable instant where intensities manifest between the forms-of-life present in each individual. It is, even above the social and communications, the territory that actualizes the potentials of bodies and actualizes itself in the differences of intensity that they give off and comprise. Encounters are above language, outside of words, in the virgin lands of the unspoken, in suspended animation, a potential of the world which is also its negation, its “power to not be.” What is other people? “Another possible world,” responds Deleuze. The Other incarnates the possibility that the world has of not being, of being otherwise. This is why in the so-called “primitive” societies war takes on the primordial importance of annihilating any other possible world. It is pointless, however, to think about conflict without also thinking about enjoyment, to think about war without thinking about love. In each tumultuous birth of love, the fundamental desire to transform oneself by transforming the world is reborn. The hate and suspicion that lovers excite around them is an automatic defensive response to the war they wage, merely by loving each other, against a world where all passion must misunderstand itself and die off.

Incompleteness is the mode of being of everything that remains in contact with potential; the form of existence of everything devoted to becoming.

Tiqqun kolektifine göre, küresel kent toplumlarının zararsız sakinleri olduk. Doğrudan bir zorlamanın olmadığı durumda bile, bize yapmamız söylenen şeyi yapmayı tercih ediyoruz; bedenlerimizin, fikirlerimizin, eğlencemizin yönetilmesine ve bütün hayali ihtiyaçlarımızın bize dışarıdan dayatılmasına izin veriyoruz. Elektronik hayatlarımızın izlenmesi sonucunda bize tavsiye edilen ürünleri satın alıyor, sonra da satın aldığımız şeyler hakkında başkaları için gönüllü olarak yorumlar bırakıyoruz. Her tür biyometri ve gözetleme ihlaline boyun eğen, toksik yiyecek ve suyla beslenip şikayet etmeden nükleer reaktörlerin yakınında yaşayan uysal tebaayız.

La adolescencia es una categoría reciente creada por las exigencias del consumo de masas.

Where it was deemed appropriate to do so, information is supplied in footnotes from subsidiary Jewish traditions concerning other textual readings (the Tiqqune Sopherim, “emendations of the scribes”). These are identified in the footnotes as “Ancient Heb tradition.

Is it necessary to read Leviathan to know that “because the major part hath by consenting voices declared a sovereign, he that dissented must now consent with the rest, that is, be contented to avow all the actions he shall do, or else justly be destroyed by the rest. [...] And whether he be of the congregation or not, and whether his consent be asked or not, he must either submit to their decrees or be left in the condition of war he was in before, wherein he might without injustice be destroyed by any man whatsoever.

The deconstructionist, incapable of having an effect on even the smallest detail of his world, being literally almost no longer in the world and having made absence his permanent mode of being, tries to embrace his Bloomhood with bravado. He shuts himself up in that narrow, closed circle of realities that·still affect him at all --books, texts, films, and music-- because these things are as insubstantial as he is. He can no longer see anything in what he reads that might relate to life, and instead sees what he lives as a tissue of references to what he has already read. Presence and the world as a whole, insofar as Empire allows, are for him purely hypothetical. Reality and experience are for him nothing more than dubious appeals to authority.