Raoul Vaneigem

Who is Raoul Vaneigem?

Raoul Vaneigem is a Belgian writer and philosopher. He was born in Lessines. After studying romance philology at the Free University of Brussels from 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.

Famous Quotes:

• 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
• Ideally a book would have no order to it, and the reader would have to discover his own.
• Work to survive, survive by consuming, survive to consume: the hellish cycle is complete.
• Daily life is governed by an economic system in which the production and consumption of insults tends to balance out.
• Everything has been said yet few have taken advantage of it. Since all our knowledge is essentially banal, it can only be of value to minds that are not.
• 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.
• The eruption of lived pleasure is such that in losing myself I find myself; forgetting that I exist, I realize myself.
• People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints, such people have a corpse in their mouth.
• 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.
• 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.