Imagined

“The nation is an imagined political community… It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion. It is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship. Ultimately, it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people … willingly to die for such limited imaginings.”

— Benedict Anderson

Homo Sacer

“The world of the happy and that of the unhappy, the world of the good and that of the evil contain the same states of things; with respect to their being-thus they are perfectly identical. The just person does not reside in another world. The one who is saved and the one who is lost have the same arms and legs. The glorious body cannot but be, the mortal body itself. What changes are not the things but their limits. It
is as if there hovered over them something like a halo, a glory.”

- Giorgio Agamben

Fragments of WB

“Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet… This storm is what we call progress.”

- Walter Benjamin