The Book of Pleasures

Last night, over the course of four hours continuous reading, I discovered Raoul Vaneigem:

"Sabotage, absenteeism, voluntary unemployment, riots, wildcat strikes, stealing for fun and doing things for the hell of it - the axe is laid to the commercial tree and I'm delighted. As sure as work kills pleasure, pleasure kills work. If you are not resigned to dying of disgust, then you will be happy enough to rid your life of the odious need to work, to give orders (and obey them), to lose and to win, to keep up appearances, and to judge and be judged.”
The Book of Pleasures, p20.

"To drink, insatiably thirsty, at the 'cup of life' is the best guarantee of its never running dry. Children know it - they take everything as if it were an unlooked-for present. Lively senses make their world live, long before the economic imperative starts totting the bills run up by life; before they learn about reciprocity; before they set out to deserve their presents, demand their due, be rewarded for winning, or punished for a depreciation, or thank those who remove one by one the charms of an existence without opposition." Ibid. p38.

"Women have long shared with artists, children and madmen the privilege of shrieking, singing, weeping, throwing their arms about, offering any old thing in gift, and betraying what is usually kept quiet. Since industrialisation won them the priceless right to work in a factory, gain a wage, run a business and command an airborne division - while artists became civil servants and promoted culture - only children and the so-called mentally ill are left to give confused expression to the convolutions of language prised from the grip of trade." Ibid. p48.

"If someone strikes me on my left cheek, I will smack him in the teeth sooner than offer him my right. Is not my enemy whoever constrains me, threatens me or makes me feel guilty? I want to live what I specifically am, without norms and without always watching for someone waiting for me at the corner of the street. If I kill what represses me, it will be inadvertantly, as I stride out happily, without looking back." Ibid. p65

"Nothing is passionately interesting if you are counting the pennies or feel forced to do it. Only desire teaches us to live. You hear people all to often weigh their words and pause for you to admire profundity. Desire, on the other hand, leaves everyone to work out his own way in silence." Ibid. p92.