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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

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Raoul Vaneigem
Age: 90
Born: 1934
Born: March 21
Journalist
Philosopher
Writer
Transformation
Bases
Upon
Work
Life
World
Upside
Commodity

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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.
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In the twentieth century, death terrifies men less than the absence of real life. All these dead, mechanized, specialized actions, stealing a little bit of life a thousand times a day until the mind and body are exhausted, until that death which is not the
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Hope is the leash of submission.
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Work is the opposite of creativity.
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In the twentieth century, death terrifies men less than the absence of real life.
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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.
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The work of art of the future will be the construction of a passionate life.
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Suffering is the pain of constraints. An atom of pure delight, no matter how small, can hold it at bay.
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To work for delight and authentic festivity is barely distinguishable from preparing for a general insurrection
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Daily life is governed by an economic system in which the production and consumption of insults tends to balance out.
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Work to survive, survive by consuming, survive to consume the hellish cycle is complete.
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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.
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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.
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As poverty has been reduced in terms of mere survival, it has become more profound in terms of our way of life.
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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.
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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.
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Daydreaming subverts the world.
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I do not dream of a gentle revolution. My passion runs to the violence of supersession, the ferocity of a life that renounces nothing.
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Our task is not to rediscover nature but to remake it.
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What could I wish for the present but to take the greatest pleasure in being what I am?
Raoul Vaneigem