there is what I call 'systemic' violence, or the often catastrophic consequences of the smooth functioning of our economic and political systems.

But we should learn to step back, to disentangle ourselves from the fascinating lure of this directly visible 'subjective' violence, violence performed by a clearly identifiable agent.

there is a 'symbolic' violence embodied in language and its forms, what Heidegger would call ‘our house of being' [...] there is a more fundamental form of violence still that pertains to language as such, to its imposition of a certain universe of meaning

Toni Negri himself, the guru of the postmodern left, praises digital capitalism as containing in nuce all the elements of communism – one has only to drop the capitalist form, and the revolutionary goal is achieved.

Bill Gates is the icon of what he has called ‘frictionless capitalism’, a post-industrial society in which we witness the ‘end of labor’, in which software is winning over hardware and the young nerd over the older dark-suited manager.

Peter Sloterdijk provides the outlines of capitalism’s split from itself, its immanent selfovercoming: capitalism culminates when it ‘creates out of itself its own most radical – and the only fruitful – opposite [...]’

G. K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday, in which the highest police authority is the same person as the super-criminal, staging a battle with himself. In a proto-Hegelian way, the external threat the community is fighting is its own inherent essence

The use of the expression usually reserved for homosexuals (masturbation ‘brings selflove out of the closet’) hints at a kind of implicit teleology of the gradual exclusion of all otherness: first, in homosexuality, the other sex is excluded (one does it with another person of the same sex).

Alain Badiou develops the notion of ‘atonal’ worlds – monde atone – which lack the intervention of a Master-Signifier to impose meaningful order onto the confused multiplicity of reality.

Alain Badiou develops the notion of ‘atonal’ worlds – monde atone – which lack the intervention of a Master-Signifier to impose meaningful order onto the confused multiplicity of reality.