Raoul Vaneigem
Raoul Vaneigem
Raoul Vaneigemis a Belgian writer. He was born in Lessines. After studying romance philology at the Free University of Brusselsfrom 1952 to 1956, he participated in the Situationist International from 1961 to 1970. He currently resides in Belgium and is the father of four children...
NationalityBelgian
ProfessionPhilosopher
CountryBelgium
believe people slipping
People are bewitched into believing that time slips away, and this belief is the basis of time actually slipping away.
self body individual
Each component of the organism, like the individual in the social body, possesses the capacity for enjoyment of the self through sharing with others.
kings kingdoms citizens
In the kingdom of consumption the citizen is king. A democratic monarchy: equality before consumption, fraternity in consumption, and freedom through consumption.
giving-up real people
Where constraint breaks people, and mediation makes fools of them, the seduction of power is what makes them love their oppression. Because of it, people give up their real riches for a cause that mutilates them; for an appearance that reifies them; for roles that wrest them from authentic life; for a time whose passage defines and confines them.
tired mean imagination
People without imagination are beginning to tire of the importance attached to comfort, to culture, to leisure, to all that destroys imagination. This means that people are not really tired of comfort, culture and leisure, but of the use to which they are.
eye origin-of-life law
Privative appropriation and domination are thus originally imposed and felt as a positive right, but in the form of a negative universality. Valid for everyone, justified in everyone's eyes by divine or natural law, the right of privative appropriation is objectified in a general illusion, in a universal transcendence, in an essential law under which everyone individually manages to tolerate the more or less narrow limits assigned to his right to live and to the conditions of life in general.
mean organization everyday
The organization controlling the material equipment of our everyday life is such that what in itself would enable us to construct it richly plunges us instead into a poverty of abundance, making alienation all the more intolerable as each convenience promises liberation and turns out to be only one more burden. We are condemned to slavery to the means of liberation.
beauty dream humanity
Production and consumption are the nipples of modern society. Thus suckled, humanity grows in strength and beauty; rising standard of living, all modern conveniences, distractions of all kinds, culture for all, the comfort of your dreams.
dream play subjectivity
We can escape the commonplace only by manipulating it, controlling it, thrusting it into our dreams or surrendering it to the free play of our subjectivity.
eruption losing realizing
The eruption of lived pleasure is such that in losing myself I find myself; forgetting that I exist, I realize myself.
power purchasing flogging
Purchasing power is a license to purchase power.
running dream passion
I do not dream of a gentle revolution. My passion runs to the violence of supersession, the ferocity of a life that renounces nothing.
civilization degrees generations
Never before has a civilization reached such a degree of a contempt for life; never before has a generation, drowned in mortification, felt such a rage to live.
profound survival way
As poverty has been reduced in terms of mere survival, it has become more profound in terms of our way of life.