02 mai 2012

a film about the Holocaust

"We, the survivors, are not the true witnesses.... We survivors are not only an exiguous but also an anomalous minority: we are those who by their prevarications or abilities or good luck did not touch bottom. Those who did so, those who saw the Gorgon, have not returned to tell about it or have returned mute, but they are the “Muslims,” the submerged, the complete witnesses, the ones whose deposition would have a general significance. They are the rule, we are the exception."
- Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved

“In the Holocaust, I discovered the human condition, the terminus of a great adventure at which Europeans arrived after two thousand years of culture and morality.”
- Imre Kertész





and of course, the oft-forgotten final image...


[quotes via Genocide and the Fine Arts, Adam Thirlwell's review of Claude Lanzmann's The Patagonian Hare: A Memoir]

01 mai 2012

the possibility of intervening

"The occupations movement was the sudden return of the proletariat as a historical class, a proletariat now enlarged to include a majority of the salaried employees of modern society and still tending toward the real abolition of classes and of wage labor. The movement was a rediscovery of collective and individual history, an awakening to the possibility of intervening in history, an awareness of participating in an irreversible event."
 - The Beginning of an Era (Internationale Situationniste #12, September 1969)