Ce n’est pas par la génie, c’est par la souffrance, par elle seule, qu’on cesse d’être une marionnette.

Emil Cioran, Aveux et anathèmes, Gallimard, Paris, 1987, p. 77.

Où apparaît l’art, la vie disparaît.

Francis Picabia, L’humour poétique.

To be Modern Art a work need not be either modern nor art ; it need not even be a work. A three-thousand yeur-old mask from the South Pacific qualifies as Modern and a piece of wood found on a beach becomes Art.

Harold Rosenberg, cité par Thierry de Duve, in Au nom de l’art, Les éditions de minuit, Paris, 1989, p. 107.

Le miroir est le maître des peintres.

Léonard de Vinci

For art to be ‘unpolitical’ means only to ally itself with the ‘ruling’ group.

Bertolt Brecht, ‘A Short Organum for the Theater’ (via aidsnegligee)

Si tu ne participes pas à la lutte tu participes à la défaite.

Bertolt Brecht

Combat is not a judgment of God, but the way to have done with God and with judgment. No one develops through judgment, but through a combat that implies no judgment. Existence and judgment seem to be opposed on five points: cruelty versus infinite torture, sleep or intoxication versus the dream, vitality versus organization, the will to power versus a will to dominate, combat versus war. What disturbed us was that in renouncing judgment we had the impression of depriving ourselves of any means of distinguishing between existing beings, between modes of existence, as if everything were now of equal value. But is it not rather judgment that presupposes preexisting criteria (higher values), criteria that preexist for all time (to the infinity of time), so that it can neither apprehend what is new in an existing being, nor even sense the creation of a mode of existence? Such a mode is created vitally, through combat, in the insomnia of sleep, and not without a certain cruelty toward itself: nothing of all this is the result of judgment. Judgment prevents the emergence of any new mode of existence. For the latter creates itself through its own forces, that is, through the forces it is able to harness, and is valid in and of itself inasmuch as it brings the new combination into existence. Herein, perhaps, lies the secret: to bring into existence and not to judge. If it is so disgusting to judge, it is not because everything is of equal value, but on the contrary because what has value can be made or distinguished only by defying judgment. What expert judgment, in art, could ever bear on the work to come? It is not a question of judging other existing beings, but of sensing whether they bring forces to us, or whether they return us to the miseries of war, to the poverty of the dream, to the rigors of organization. As Spinoza had said, it is a problem of love and hate and not judgment; ‘my soul and body are one….What my soul loves, I love. What my soul hates, I hate….All the subtle sympathizings of the incalculable soul, from the bitterest hate to passionate love.’ This is not subjectivism, since to pose the problem in terms of force, and not in other terms, already surpasses all subjectivity.

Gilles Deleuze, To Have Done With Judgment (via neutralnatura)

The combat-against tries to destroy or repel a force (to struggle against “the diabolical powers of the future”), but the combat-between, by contrast, tries to take hold of a force in order to make it one’s own. The combat-between is the process through which a force enriches itself by seizing hold of other forces and joining itself to them in a new ensemble: a becoming.
[…]
But neither is combat a “will to nothingness.” Combat is not war. War is only a combat-against, a will to destruction, a judgment of God that turns destruction into something “just.” The judgment of God is on the side of war, and not combat. Even when it takes hold of other forces, the force of war beings by mutilating these forces, reducing them to their lowest state. In war, the will to power merely means that the will wants strength [puissance] as a maximum of power [pouvoir] or domination. For Nietzsche and Lawrence, war is the lowest degree of the will to power, its sickness… They do so in order to show more clearly that this is not the way combat works. Combat, by contrast, is a powerful, nonorganic vitality that supplements force with force, and enriches whatever it takes hold of.

Gilles Deleuze, To Have Done With Judgment (via neutralnatura)

L’écrivain ne peut créer un monde plus insensé que Dieu.

Imre Kertész, Journal de galère, Trad. du hongrois par Natalia Zarembra-Huzsvai et Charles Zarembra, Actes sud, Paris, 2010(1992), p. 221.

Dieu seul a le privilège de nous abandonner. Les hommes ne peuvent que nous lâcher.

Emil Cioran, De l’inconvénient d’être né, Gallimard, Paris, 1973, p. 50.