Raoul Vaneigem Quotes & Sayings

Daydreaming subverts the world. — Raoul Vaneigem

As poverty has been reduced in terms of mere survival, it has become more profound in terms of our way of life. — Raoul Vaneigem

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. — Raoul Vaneigem

Hope is the leash of submission. — Raoul Vaneigem

Everything has been said yet few have taken advantage of it. Since all our knowledge is essentially banal, it can only be of value to minds that are not. — Raoul Vaneigem

In the twentieth century, death terrifies men less than the absence of real life. — Raoul Vaneigem

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. — Raoul Vaneigem

The key is within each of us. No instructions come with it. — Raoul Vaneigem

People are bewitched into believing that time slips away, and this belief is the basis of time actually slipping away. — Raoul Vaneigem

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

Poetry seldom occurs in poems. Poetry only occurs when words cause action. — Raoul Vaneigem

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. — Raoul Vaneigem

We can escape the commonplace only by manipulating it, controlling it, thrusting it into our dreams or surrendering it to the free play of our subjectivity. — Raoul Vaneigem

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. — Raoul Vaneigem

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

The nihilist makes one mistake: he does not realise that other people are also nihilists, and that the nihilism of other people is now an active historical factor. He has no consciousness of the possibility of transcendence. The fact is, however, that the present reign of survival, in which all the talk about progress expresses nothing so much as the fear that progress may be impossible, is itself a product of history, is itself the outcome of all the renunciations of humanity that have been made over the centuries. Indeed, the history of survival is the historical movement which will eventually undo history itself. For clear awareness of just how nightmarish life has become is on the point of fusing with a consciousness of the successive renunciations of the past, and thus too with the real desire to pick up the movement of transcendence everywhere in space and time where it has been prematurely interrupted. — Raoul Vaneigem

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. — Raoul Vaneigem

Work to survive, survive by consuming, survive to consume: the hellish cycle is complete. — Raoul Vaneigem

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

Our task is not to rediscover nature but to remake it. — Raoul Vaneigem

Daily life is governed by an economic system in which the production and consumption of insults tends to balance out. — Raoul Vaneigem

Where constraint breaks people, and mediation makes fools of them, the seduction of power is what makes them love their oppression. Because of it, people give up their real riches for a cause that mutilates them; for an appearance that reifies them; for roles that wrest them from authentic life; for a time whose passage defines and confines them. — Raoul Vaneigem

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. — Raoul Vaneigem

People without imagination are beginning to tire of the importance attached to comfort, to culture, to leisure, to all that destroys imagination. This means that people are not really tired of comfort, culture and leisure, but of the use to which they are. — Raoul Vaneigem

Production and consumption are the nipples of modern society. Thus suckled, humanity grows in strength and beauty; rising standard of living, all modern conveniences, distractions of all kinds, culture for all, the comfort of your dreams. — Raoul Vaneigem

Ideally a book would have no order in it, and the reader would have to discover his own. — Raoul Vaneigem

Each component of the organism, like the individual in the social body, possesses the capacity for enjoyment of the self through sharing with others. — Raoul Vaneigem

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

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? — Raoul Vaneigem

The work of art of the future will be the construction of a passionate life. — Raoul Vaneigem

Never before has a civilization reached such a degree of a contempt for life; never before has a generation, drowned in mortification, felt such a rage to live. — Raoul Vaneigem

The history of our times calls to mind those Walt Disney characters who rush madly over the edge of a cliff without seeing it, so that the power of their imagination keeps them suspended in mid-air; but as soon as they look down and see where they are, they fall. — Raoul Vaneigem

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

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. — Raoul Vaneigem

In the kingdom of consumption the citizen is king. A democratic monarchy: equality before consumption, fraternity in consumption, and freedom through consumption. — Raoul Vaneigem

To work for delight and authentic festivity is barely distinguishable from preparing for a general insurrection — Raoul Vaneigem

What could I wish for the present but to take the greatest pleasure in being what I am? — Raoul Vaneigem

The eruption of lived pleasure is such that in losing myself I find myself; forgetting that I exist, I realize myself. — Raoul Vaneigem

The world of the commodity is a world upside-down, which bases itself not upon life but upon the transformation of life into work. — Raoul Vaneigem

We have a world of pleasure to win, and nothing to lose but boredom. — Raoul Vaneigem

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. — Raoul Vaneigem

It is entirely up to us to invent our own lives. — Raoul Vaneigem

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. — Raoul Vaneigem

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

I do not dream of a gentle revolution. My passion runs to the violence of supersession, the ferocity of a life that renounces nothing. — Raoul Vaneigem

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

There are more truths in twenty-four hours of a man's life than in all the philosophies. — Raoul Vaneigem

The organization controlling the material equipment of our everyday life is such that what in itself would enable us to construct it richly plunges us instead into a poverty of abundance, making alienation all the more intolerable as each convenience promises liberation and turns out to be only one more burden. We are condemned to slavery to the means of liberation. — Raoul Vaneigem

Work is the opposite of creativity. — Raoul Vaneigem

In an industrial society which confuses work and productivity, the necessity of producing has always been an enemy of the desire to create. — Raoul Vaneigem

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. — Raoul Vaneigem