> Happiness (finally)-->--notes
SELECTED NOTES + RESEARCH (1999-2003)

"If a change is made in the customs and social institutionans, it's owing to them; if, in spite of their small army, the Hacs have nothing to fear, again they owe it to them; if in their straightforward language lightning-flashes of anger have been fixed, beside which the honeyed deviousness of foreign writers seems insipid dog-food, it is again to them they owe it, to a few raggedy, wretched, hopeless kids." -- Michaux, not listed.

 A = Arcades Project - Walter Benjamin
B = Bruegel - Keith Roberts, Phaidon Press
R = King James Bible, Book of Revelations
C = Charles Fourier – James Beecher
K = Empire of the Senseless, (H)annibal Lector, My Father – Kathy Acker
T = The Thirty Year’s War – Andrew Kopkind
P = The Politics of Friendship – Jacques Derrida
G = Visions of Excess, The Accursed Share Vol. II, and Poems – George Bataille
S = The Physiology of Taste – Brillat-Savarin
F = Theory of the Four movements – Charles Fourier
J = Girls on the Run – John Ashbery


“pains eternal and always new.” A 26

Yes, when all the world from Paris to China
Pays heed to your doctrine, O divine Saint-Simon,
 The glorious Golden Age will be reborn.
Rivers will flow with chocolate and tea,
Sheep roasted whole will frisk on the plain,
And sautéed pike will swim in the seine.
Fricasseed spinach will grow on the ground,
Garnished with crushed fired croutons;
The trees will bring forth apple compotes,
And farmers will harvest boots and coats.
It will snow wine, it will rain chickens,
And ducks cooked with turnips will fall from the sky.

—Langlé and Vanderburch, Louis-Bronzeet le Saint-Simonien

C. Fourier (2000)

“I pity you, unhappy stars.” A. 199

“But our life is too short and our power of vision too small for us to be more than friends in the sense of this sublime possibility! Lit us then believe in our star friendship even if we should e compelled to be earth enemies.” P 271

In this way they have reared up great artist, poets, but unfortunately also assassines, and especially reformers—incrediable bitter-enders. -- Michaux, unlisted.

&Unlike Marx and Engels, Fourier attached as much importance to sexual and generational conflicts as to the conflicts of social classes. He was also sensitive to an extremely wide range social ills, and particularly the kinds of mental and psychic suffering that the sufferer himself could not explain and understand. Fourier was concerned not only with the exploitation of factory workers and the hardships of small peasant farmers but also with the drudgery of housewives, the boredom of office workers, the abuse of children and the loveless and insecure lives of the elderly, and the sufferings of the ugly, whatever their class and status.” C 218
“…it struggles against the future with a prophetic and pathetic energy.” P 88
“Hatred made us erect.” K(h) 55

&Infidelity was not a serious crime in Harmony, but inauthenticity was.” C 307
“Hausmann’s predilection for perspectives, for long open vistas, represents an attempt to dictate art forms to technology (the technology of city planning). This always results in kitsch.” A 126

“The building of barricades appears in Fourier as an example of “non-salaried by impassioned work.” A 141

“Nothing so sad, so lacking in social spontaneity, as this vast shifting of stones by the end of despotism. There is no more dismal symptom of decadence. In proportion as Rome collapsed in agony, its monuments grew more numerous and more colossal.” A. p.144

“Lightning is the kiss of clouds, stormy but faithful. Two lovers who adore each other, and who will tell it in spite of all obstacles, are two clouds animated with opposites electricities, and swelled in tragedy.” A 194
 “What knowledge could ever measure up to the injunction to choose between those whom one loves, whom one must love, whom one can love? Between themselves? Between them and the others? All of them?” P 22

“Apocatastasis: The restoration of all things.” A 459

“In such a world which was non-reality terrorism made a lot of sense.” K 35

“Hierarchy of children: juveniles, gymasians, lyceans, seraphems, cherubs, urchins; imps, weanlings, nurslings.” A 640
“Breugel was indifferent to the concept of ideal beauty, and was incapable of realizing it in an acceptable manner when its presence was obviously indicated.” B 7
“Lightning is the kiss of clouds, stormy but faithful. Two lovers who adore each other, and who will tell it in spite of all obstacles, are two clouds animated with opposites electricities, and swelled in tragedy.” A 194

 “During the 80,000 years allotted to the earth, each of its souls [would] 810 (or 1,620) lives, of which half would be in this world and half in the next. Of these lives 765 would be happy and 45 miserable.” C 329

“I can, in practice, relate myself humanly to an object only if the object relates itself humanly to man.” A 209
“It is one of the most noteworthy peculiarities of the human heart…that so much selfishness in individuals co-exist with the lack of envy which every present day feels toward its future.’ This lack of envy indicates that the idea we have of happiness is deeply colored by the time in which we live. Happiness for us is thinkable only in the air we have breathed, among the people who have lived with us. In other words, there vibrates in the idea of happiness the idea of salvation. This happiness is founded on the very despair and desolation which were ours. Our life, it can be said, is a muscle strong enough to contract the whole of historical time. Or, to put it differently, the genuine conception of historical time rests entirely upon the image of redemption.” A 479


“The consolation of philosophy”
“The educator: Hilarion.” A 641
 “Fourier recognizes many forms of collective procession and cavalcade: storm, vortex, swarm, serpentage.” A 642
“What knowledge could ever measure up to the injunction to choose between those whom one loves, whom one must love, whom one can love? Between themselves? Between them and the others? All of them?” P 22

“This is an accurate map of Utopia: the Republic of Lust, the Empire of the Stomach, the Kingdom of the Golden Calf.” Utopia show at NYPL
---
 “In due course he began to see himself not only as the successor of Newton but also as the founder of a universal system that would explain the plans adopted by God for everything from the destiny of man and the future of the solar system to the most minute alterations of matter in the animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms.” C 67
“The art of refined gluttony”
“Our unbelievable perhaps does not signify haziness and mobility, the confusion preceding knowledge or renouncing all truth. If it is undecidable and without truth in its own moment (but it is, as a matter of fact, difficult to assign a proper moment to it), this is in order that it might be a condition of decision, interruption, revolution, responsibility and truth.” P 43
“His response to the ‘silence’ and in comprehensibility of nature was to make it speak a familiar language, to proceed form the assumption that everything in nature must have a human meaning.” C 352
“In other places, this lunacy is more amiable, bordering often on wisdom…” A 637
"Happiness, about which so much, or rather so much nonsense, has been talked about, consists in having many passions and many means of satisfying them. We have few passions and hardly sufficient means to satisfy a quarter of them. this is why our globe is for the moment one of the most miserable in the universe. Other planets may perhaps experience equal unhappiness, but none can suffer more, and God, despite his power, cannot invent more refined social torments than the ones we endure on this miserable globe."
--Charles Fourier

"The scene is changing, and the truth you pretend to be seeking is about to appear and overwhelm you. There is nothing for you to do but die honourably, like defeated gladiators. Prepare the payment you owe to truth, seize the torch, set up the stake, and consign the rubbish of your philosophical libraries to the flames.
--Charles Fourier

"It is at once the most tragic and redeeming experience. It is what we do instead of committing suicide, when the alternatives are exhausted and all the connections that blind men's lives in familiar patterns are cut. Death and transfiguration is the ultimate human drama; revolution combines those two acts in a single transcendent scene." T
 “Like everything else in Harmony, its orgies were classified by Fourier in a host of different categories. There were introductory orgies and farewell orgies, fortuitous orgies and bacchanalian orgies. There was an orchestrated orgy or “omnigamous quadrille” in which the movements of each participant were as carefully choreographed as those of a minuet. There was even a “museum orgy” which offered only visual gratification to its participant and was designed to encourage the development of the aesthetic faculties of the Harmonians.” C 311

What is it to imagine something you had
a restoration from ancient mounds that
tell this.

forgotten once, is it inventing, or more of
were probably there? You that can tell all,
“I, who would have and would be a pirate: I cannot. I who live in my mind which is my imagination as everything — wanderer, adventurer, fighter, commander-in-chief of allied forces—I am nothing in these times.” K 26
“This isn’t enough. Nothing is enough, only nothing. I want to get to what I don’t know which is discipline. In other words, I want to be mad, not senseless, but angry beyond memories and reason. I want to be mad. I went further into the city." K 51
“For the semblance to which the historical hour condemns things is eternal.” A 220
“Who among us, in his idle hours, has not taken a delicious pleasure in constructing for himself a model apartment, a dream house, a house of dreams?” A 227

“Mythology is a dictionary of living hieroglyphics.” A 236
“Imagination was both a dead business and the only business left to the dead.” K
“The truth of friendship is a madness of truth, a truth that has nothing to do with the wisdom which, throughout the history of philosophy qua the history of reason, will have set the tone of this truth – by attempting to have us believe that amorous passion was madness, no doubt, but that friendship was the way of wisdom and of knowledge, no less than of political justice.” P 52

“And I went unto the angel, and said unto him, Give me the little book. And he said unto me, take it, and eat it up; and it shall make thy belly bitter, but it shall be in thy mouth sweet as honey R Chapter 10 Verse 9
You authors of the inexact sciences claim to be working for the good of the whole human race. Do you think that the six hundred million barbarians and savages are not part of it? Yet they suffer. And what have you done for them? Nothing. Your systems are only applicable in Civilisation, whose misfortunes are aggravated each time your policies are put into practice. When you possess the art of making us happy, perhaps you will think you are fulfilling God's design by trying to limit happiness to the inhabitants of Civilisation who occupy only a tiny part of the globe. But God sees the human race as single family, all of whose members have a right to its blessings. he wants either the whole of mankind to be happy, or nobody at all.
--C. fourier

“The debt is infinite”