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...to write is to struggle and resist; to write is to become; to write is to draw a map: 'I am a cartographer.'

Gilles Deleuze, Foucault (1986)

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The path is writing and writing is a body and a body is bodies (the grove of trees). Just as meaning appears beyond writing, as though it were the destination, the end of the road (an end that ceases to be an end the moment we arrive there, a meaning that vanishes the moment we state it), so the body first appears to our eye as a perfect totality, and yet it too proves to be intangible: the body is always somewhere beyond the body. On touching it, it divides itself (like a text) into portions that are momentary sensations: a sensation that is a perception of a thigh, an earlobe, a nipple, a fingernail, a warm patch of groin, the hollow in the throat like the beginning of a twilight. The body that we embrace is a river of metamorphoses, a continual division, a flowing of visions, a quartered body whose pieces scatter, disperse, come back together again with the intensity of a flash of lightning hurtling toward a white black white fixity. A fixity that is destroyed in another black white black flash; the body is the place marking the disappearance of the body. Reconciliation with the body culminates in the annihilation of the body (the meaning). Every body is a language that vanishes at the moment of absolute plenitude; on reaching the state of incandescence, every language reveals itself to be an unintelligible body. The word is a disincarnation of the world in search of its meaning; and an incarnation: a destruction of meaning, a return to the body. Poetry is corporeal: the reverse of names.

Octavio Paz, The Monkey Grammarian (1974, trans. 1981)

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Lucinda Childs

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To learn the art of remaining motionless amid the agitation of the whirlwind, to learn to remain still and to be as transparent as this fixed light amid the frantic branches—this may be a program for life. ... No one is alone and nothing is solid: change is comprised of fixities that are momentary accords.

Octavio Paz, The Monkey Grammarian (1974, trans. 1981)

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Madness is really a manifestation of the "soul"...

José Barchilon, Introduction to Michael Foucault, Madness & Civilization (1965)

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To name a sensibility, to draw its contours and to recount its history, requires a deep sympathy modified by revulsion.

Susan Sontag, "Notes on 'Camp'" (1964)

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It is possible for history to lend its voice to a dialectical process that does not take the outcome of the struggles it narrates for granted. The upshot of this is that it must suspend its judgments if it is to proceed at all. Nothing is given as past. The temporal order of history is, by its constitution, hybrid.

Manfredo Tafuri, "A Search for Paradigms: Project, Truth, Artifice," Assemblage 28 (1995)

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There is in fact nothing so ignobly useless and superfluous as the organ called the heart, the filthiest invention that beings could have invented for pumping me with life.

Antonin Artaud, quoted in Jean-Luc Nancy, Corpus (2008)

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The bare body made of bones, flesh, muscle, skin, nails and hair, seems to fade, seems to dilute itself in the desire which energizes everything, before being absorbed by that movement of universal growth... But even these bodies of young girls, these fine, thin, almost emaciated bodies... are always directly connected with the image of an astral body; they are all bodies of souls.

Dolf Sternberger, "Jugendstil. Begriff und Physiognomie" (1934)

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The original form of all dwelling is existence not in the house but in the shell. The shell bears the impression of its occupant. In the most extreme instance, the dwelling becomes a shell. The nineteenth century, like no other century, was addicted to dwelling. It conceived the residence as a receptacle for the person, and it encased him with all his appurtenances so deeply in the dwelling's interior that one might be reminded of the inside of a compass case, where the instrument with all its accessories lies embedded in deep, usually violet folds of velvet.

Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project

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For a while yet I can write all this down and express it. But there will come a day when my hand will be far from me, and when I bid it write, it will write words I do not mean. The time of that other interpretation will dawn, when not one word will remain upon another, and all meaning will dissolve like clouds and fall down like rain.

Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Briggs (1910, trans. 1949)

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Par un pur anachronisme? Non, si on entend par là faire l'histoire du passé dans les termes du présent. Oui, si on entend par là faire l'histoire du présent.

Michel Foucault, Surveiller et Punir (1975)

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Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy! Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch! Light streaming out of the sky!

Allen Ginsberg, "Howl" (1955)

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Who cares to have your mind so smooth?

Christopher Knowles to Robert Wilson, according to Robert Wilson in his lecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, 18 October 2013

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Habit is a compromise effected between the individual and his environment, or between the individual and his own organic eccentricities, the guarantee of a dull inviolability, the lightning-conductor of his existence... Breathing is habit. Life is habit. The creation of the world did not take place once and for all time, but takes place every day. Habit then is the generic term for the countless treaties concluded between the countless subjects that constitute the individual and their countless correlative objects.

Samuel Beckett, Proust (1931)