Saturday Night ("Dialectical") Bingo

“To undertake to combine so many elements alien to one another is to harbor within oneself a great disturbing force. To reproduce so many passions is not to calm one’s own. A lamp which is hot enough to fuse whole peoples is hot enough to consume its very hearth …. The souls of our fathers still throb in us for the pains that have been forgotten, almost as the man who has been wounded feels an ache in a hand he has lost.” 

-Jules Michelet, from Edmund Wilson’s To the Finland Station

“Passion, and passion in its profoundest, is not a thing demanding a palatial stage whereon to play its part. Down among the groundlings, among the beggars and rakers of the garbage, profound passion is enacted. And the circumstances that provide it, however trivial or mean, are no measure of its power.”  -Herman Melville, from Billy Budd

“People remember. They’ll remember specific people who broke their balls. That’s the way people are, and they will be shitting for those people. You know, if you’re thinking about the world, how the world looks to the Negro [sic]—here’s how the world looks to the American Negro: he’s a convict rioting in a corrupt prison, and if they do kill Pat O’Brien, so what? The conditions are bad, and sloppy, and that’ll be the scene.”

-Lenny Bruce, The Essential Lenny Bruce

“Only when the ‘lower classes’ do not want the old way, and when the ‘upper classes’ cannot carry on in the old way—only then can revolution triumph.”  -Vladimir Lenin, from Left-Wing Communism

“…“sublation”—the maintenance-of-what-has-been-negated-in-its-very-negation (that is, the negation of the negation) .... the survival of the past as the sublated can simply be reduced to the modality of a memory, which, further, is merely the inverse of (that is, the same thing as) an anticipation …. so in each instant of time the past survives in the form of a memory of what has been—that is, as the whispered promise of the present. That is why the past is never opaque or an obstacle. It must always be digestible as it has been predigested. Rome lived happily in a world impregnated by Greece: “sublated” Greece survived as objective memories .... That is why the present can feed on the shades of the past, or project them before it .... The past is never anything more that the present and only recalls that law of interiority which is the destiny of the whole future of humanity.”  -Louis Althusser, Contradiction and Overdetermination

“[Great men] must be named heroes insofar as they have drawn their goals and vocations not only from the tranquil ordered streams of events sanctioned by the reigning system, but from a source whose content is hidden and has not yet attained actual existence, in the still subterranean internal spirit which knocks for admittance to the external world, and breaks its way in, because it is not the almond which suits this kernel.”  -Georg W. F. Hegel, via Althusser