“Nothing is louder, if unheard, throughout history than the howl, so often gagged or violently silenced, of the oppressed.”— George Steiner, “‘Tragedy,’ Reconsidered”
“It seemed to me at the time an absolutely natural and crucial thing to say; and it hoped for disproof. That disproof came with Paul Celan’s poetry, which refuted that statement — and Adorno knew it before he died. Let’s take a few steps backward. The obscene question of counting dead heads doesn’t arise, but I group the concentration camps, whether they be in Poland, in Germany or all over the damn place, together: the phenomenon of massive incarceration and elimination of millions of human beings from one end of the world to the other. One of the possible responses is to say our whole culture proved absolutely impotent and defenseless, in fact it adorned much of this stuff. Gieseking was playing the complete Debussy piano music on the nights when one could hear the screams of the people in the sealed railway cars at the station in Munich on the way to Dachau, just outside Munich. They could be heard all the way to the concert hall. That is on record. There’s not the slightest witness that he didn’t play magnificently or that his audience wasn’t wholly responsive and profoundly moved.”— George Steiner, on Adorno’s declaration, “No poetry after Auschwitz,” The Paris Review, 1995
““We know now that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day’s work at Auschwitz in the morning.””— George Steiner
“It is unlikely that man, as we know him, would have survived without the fictive, counter-factual, anti-determinist means of language, without the semantic capacity, generated and stored in the ‘superfluous’ zones of the cortex, to conceive of, to articulate possibilities beyond the treadmill of organic decay and death.”— George Steiner, After Babel
“At a time when 9,000 Jews were being exterminated each day neither the RAF nor the US Air Force bombed the ovens or sought to blow up the camps…I wonder what would have happened if Hitler had played the game after Munich, if he had simply said, ‘I will make no move out of the Reich so long as I am allowed a free hand inside my borders". Dachau, Buchenwald and Theresienstadt would have operated in the middle of the 20th century until the last Jew in reach had been made soap…Society might, on occasion, have boycotted German wines. But no foreign power would have taken action. Tourists would have crowded the Autobahn and spas of the Reich, passing near, but not too near, the death camps as we now pass Portuguese jails or Greek prison islands…Men are accomplices to that which leaves them indifferent.”— George Steiner, ‘A Kind of Survivor - For Elie Wiesel’.
“Pursuing knowledge means accepting uncertainty. Heisenberg’s principle has the consequence that no physical events can ultimately be described with absolute certainty or with “zero tolerance,” as it were. The more we know, the less certain we are. …Our relations with others also require a principle of tolerance. We encounter other people across a gray area of negotiation and approximation. Such is the business of listening and the back and forth of conversation and social interaction. …the moral consequence of knowledge is that we must never judge others on the basis of some absolute, God-like conception of certainty. All knowledge … can be exchanged only within what we might call “a play of tolerance,” whether in science, literature, politics or religion. As he eloquently put it, “Human knowledge is personal and responsible, an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty.“”— SIMON CRITCHLEY, The Dangers of Certainty: A Lesson From Auschwitz (via http://nyti.ms/1k1pB7c)
“Yes, absolutely. Today’s memory theatre is the internet. I deliberately avoid broaching the question of the internet in Memory Theatre, but it’s what the whole thing is about. The difference — and it is crucial — between the internet and the memory theatre is the difference between Gedächtnis and Erinnerung, between an external, mechanized memory and an internal, living recollection. What has happened — largely without anyone noticing it — is that we have outsourced memory onto the internet. Everything is there, googleable, but not in our heads. Is this a good thing? I don’t know. It is certainly an odd thing, given that for several thousand years all education has ever meant has been the cultivation of a trained memory. We have somehow abandoned that in the name of forgetfulness. So, yes, we have chosen to drink the waters of Lethe and enter our private Hades. Literature can at the least remind us of that choice.”— Simon Critchley
“Perhaps the closest we come to dying is through writing, in the sense that writing is a leave-taking from life, a temporary abandonment of the world and one’s petty preoccupations in order to try to see things more clearly. In writing, one steps back and steps outside life in order to view it more dispassionately, both more distantly and more proximately. With a steadier eye. One can lay things to rest in writing: ghosts, hauntings, regrets, and the memories that flay us alive.”— Simon Critchley, Notes on Suicide, 2015
“She could not speak and yet she was speaking. Her tongue vibrated in such a way that she seemed to express the meanings of words without the words themselves. Then, suddenly, she let herself be carried away by a rush of words which she pronounced almost beneath her breath, with varied inflections, as if she wanted only to amuse herself with sounds and bursts of syllables. She gave the impression that, speaking a language whose infantile character prevented it from being taken for a language, she was making the meaningless words seem like incomprehensible ones. She said nothing, but to say nothing was for her an all too meaningful mode of expression, beneath which she succeeding in saying still less. She withdrew indefinitely from her babbling, to enter yet another, less serious babbling, which she nevertheless rejected as too serious, preparing herself by an endless retreat beyond all seriousness for repose in absolute puerility, until her vocabulary, through its nullity, took on the appearance of a sleep which was the very voice of seriousness.”— Maurice Blanchot, Thomas the Obscure
“People who sleep badly always appear more or less guilty. What do they do? They make night present. […] Night, the essence of night, does not let us sleep. In the night no refuge is to be found in sleep. And if you fail sleep, exhaustion finally sickens you, and this sickness prevents sleeping; it is expressed by insomnia, by the impossibility of making sleep a free zone, a clear and true resolution. In the night one cannot sleep.”— Maurice Blanchot, Sleep, Night, The Space of Literature
