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
Raoul Vaneigem quotes about
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.
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.
world-upside-down transformation commodity
The world of the commodity is a world upside-down, which bases itself not upon life but upon the transformation of life into work.
nature tasks rediscovery
Our task is not to rediscover nature but to remake it.
wish pleasure greatest-pleasures
What could I wish for the present but to take the greatest pleasure in being what I am?
work creativity ideas
In an industrial society which confuses work and productivity, the necessity of producing has always been an enemy of the desire to create.
winning boredom world
We have a world of pleasure to win, and nothing to lose but boredom.
balance insult life-is
Daily life is governed by an economic system in which the production and consumption of insults tends to balance out.
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.
delight preparing festivities
To work for delight and authentic festivity is barely distinguishable from preparing for a general insurrection
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.
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.
submission leashes
Hope is the leash of submission.
centuries discover increasing kick people side standing time
We must discover new frontiers... People have been standing for centuries before a worm-eaten door, making pinholes in it with increasing ease. The time has come to kick it down, for it is only on the other side that everything begins.