“He [Joyce] was always looking for a job, one suitable, of course, to a man who does not want to work, and now during spells of sobriety, for it must not be imagined that he was not occasionally sober, he would make optimistic calculations of how much he could earn ‘between hopping and trotting.’”
-Stanislaus Joyce, My Brother’s Keeper
“On the whole Joyce was a very reasonable man, and it was only about three things that he was quite fanatical: the first was the merit of Ibsen; the second, strangely enough, the merit of Carmen; the third was the relative merits of restaurants, for a bad meal could sour his temper. Indeed, it was over this last matter that a serious break occurred between us.”
-Arthur Power, Conversations with James Joyce
“In a sense, all the rest of my life I’ve been trying to do intellectual things that would attract beautiful boys.”
-Foucault
“There are times in life when the question of knowing if one can think differently than one thinks and perceive differently than one sees is absolutely necessary if one is to go on looking and reflecting at all. People will say, perhaps, that these games with oneself need only to go on behind the scenes; that they are, at best, part of those labors of preparation that efface themselves when they have had their effects. But what, then, is philosophy today, philosophical activity, I mean, if not the critical labor of thought upon itself? And if it does not consist, in place of legitimating what one already knows, in undertaking to know how, and up to what limit, it would be possible to think differently?”
-Foucault, Preface to The History of Sexuality
“We are apparently in the midst of discussing the problem of humanism, but I wonder if in reality we are not in the midst of referring to a much simpler problem, that of happiness. I believe that humanism, at least on the level of politics, might be defined as every attitude that considers the aim of politics to be the production of happiness. Now, I do not think that the notion of happiness is truly thinkable. Happiness does not exist, and the happiness of men exists still less.”
-Foucault, 1967 interview
“…Both illustrate, conjointly, three crucial aspects of Foucault’s own understanding of language and the order of things:
—Language alone makes possible order and reasoned knowledge of the world.
—At the same time, language makes thinkable the unreal and unreasonable.
—Language therefore calls into question the world and ultimately itself in a dizzying spiral of possibilities and impossibilities, realities and unrealities, that may well climax, as it did for Roussel, in a mad and lyrical embrace of the void, oblivion and death—‘that formless, silent, unsignifying region where language can free itself.’ “
-James Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault
—Look here, Cranly, he said. You have asked me what I would do and what I would not do. I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve in that which I no longer believe whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use—silence, exile, and cunning […] You have made me confess the fears that I have. But I will tell you also what I do not fear. I do not fear to be alone or to be spurned for another or to leave whatever I have to leave. And I am not afraid to make a mistake, even a great mistake, a lifelong mistake, and perhaps as long as eternity too.
-Joyce, Portrait of the Artist
We must free ourselves from this cultural conservativism, as well as from political conservatism. We must uncover our rituals for what they are: completely arbitrary things, tied to our bourgeois way of life; it is good—and that is the real theater—to transcend them in the manner of play, by means of games and irony; it is good to be dirty and bearded, to have long hair, to look like a girl when one is a boy (and vice versa); one must put ‘in play,’ show up, transform, and reverse the systems which quietly order us about.
-Michel Foucault
