Karl Joosep Pihel

“If there is one thing common to the great modern speculative philosophers, Leibniz, Hegel and Deleuze, it is the risk that re-animating the universe with a non organic life might make it altogether uninhabitable for sane human beings.”
― Christian Kerslake, Deleuze and the Unconscious

“If serial music is by nature open form, if serial music is indeed an aleatoric process, then this is the case at the most important level of the musical message - its reception. The single most devastating misunderstanding regarding serialism is exactly at the functioning of apparently dialectical opposites - rationality and irrationality, control and freedom - extremes which, in the serial aesthetic, become as intertwined and as interdependent as the actual musical material. The relation composer-listener is just as important, and begs that we reflect on our relationship to those works, and our discussions of them. Until we do, most debates on serial music, based as they are on a mode of musicological thinking still discretely influenced by thematic thinking - the proposition of a direct relationship between the creation of musical idea and its transmission - will remain fundamentally misjudged.”
― M. J. Grant

“Rereading, an operation contrary to the commercial and ideological habits of our society, which would have us "throw away" the story once it has been consumed ("devoured"), so that we can then move on to another story, buy another book, and which is tolerated only in certain marginal categories of readers (children, old people, and professors), rereading is here suggested at the outset, for it alone saves the text from repetition (those who fail to reread are obliged to read the same story everywhere), multiplies it in its variety and its plurality: rereading draws the text out of its internal chronology ("this happens before or after that") and recaptures a mythic time (without before or after); it contests the claim which would have us believe that the first reading is a primary, naïve, phenomenal reading which we will only, afterwards, have to "explicate," to intellectualize (as if there were a beginning of reading, as if everything were not already read: there is no first reading, even if the text is concerned to give us that illusion by several operations of suspense, artifices more spectacular than persuasive); rereading is no longer consumption, but play (that play which is the return of the different).”
― Roland Barthes

“Just as we once abhorred the vacuum, today we find repugnant the very idea of deceleration, regression, retreat, limitation, degrowth, applying brakes, descent - sufficiency. Anything that brings to mind any of these movements toward an intensive sufficiency of world (instead of an epic overcoming of the "limits " separating us from a hyperworld) is immediately accused of naïve localism, primitivism, irrationalism, bad conscience, guilt, or even just fascistic tendencies, period.”
― Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, The Ends of the World