'Human rights will not make us bless capitalism. A great deal of innocence or cunning is needed by a philosophy of communication that claims to restore the society of friends, or even of wise men, by forming a universal opinion as 'consensus' able to moralize nations, States, and the market. Human rights say nothing about the immanent modes of existence of people provided with rights. Nor is it only in the extreme situations described by Primo Levi that we experience the shame of being human. We also experience it in insignificant conditions, before the meanness and vulgarity of existence that haunts democracies, before the propagation of these modes of existence and of thought-for-the-market, and before the values, ideals, and opinions of our time. The ignominy of the possibilities of life that we are offered appears from within. We do not feel ourselves outside of our time but continue to undergo shameful compromises with it. This feeling of shame is one of philosophy's most powerful motifs. We are not responsible for the victims but responsible before them. And there is no way to escape the ignoble but to play the part of the animal (to growl, burrow, snigger, distort ourselves): thought itself is sometimes closer to an animal that dies than to a living, even democratic, human being.'

'The fact that we are now in an ironic phase of literature largely accounts for the popularity of the detective story, the formula of how a man-hunter locates a pharmakos and gets rid of him.'

'J'envoie quelqu'un faire des courses. Je lui donne une feuille de papier où se trouvent inscrit les signes « cinq pommes rouges ». Il porte cette feuille au marchand.…'

'… we enter into the social world of study, which is one in which you start to lose track of your debts and begin to see that the whole point is to lose track of them…'

Zerowork

'Are we Aristotle's enemies?'

'There is, then, a philosophy of "life" in Spinoza; it consists precisely in denouncing all that separates us from life, all these transcendent values that are turned against life, these values that are tied to the conditions and illusions of consciousness. Life is poisoned by the categories of Good and Evil, of blame and merit, of sin and redemption. What poisons life is hatred, including the hatred that is turned back against oneself in the form of guilt. Spinoza traces, step by step, the dreadful concatenation of sad passions; first, sadness itself, then hatred, aversion, mockery, fear, despair, morsus conscientiae, pity, indignation, envy, humility, repentance, self-abasement, shame, regret, anger, vengeance, cruelty…. His analysis goes so far that even in hatred and security he is able to find that grain of sadness that suffices to make these the feelings of slaves. The true city offers citizens the love of freedom instead of the hope of rewards or even the security of possessions; for "it is slaves, not free men, who are given rewards for virtue." Spinoza is not among those who think that a sad passion has something good about it. Before Nietzsche, he denounces all the falsifications of life, all the values in the name of which we disparage life. We do not live, we only lead a semblance of life; we can only think of how to keep from dying, and our whole life is a death worship.'

'… tout roman policier est bâti sur deux meurtres dont le premier, commis par l’assassin, n’est que l’occasion du second dans lequel il est la victime du meurtrier pur et impunissable, du détective qui le met à mort, non par un de ces moyens vils que lui-même était réduit à employer, le poison, le poignard, l’arme à feu silencieuse, ou le bas de soie qui étrangle, mais par l’explosion de la vérité.'

'Workers' rejection of wage labor drew from notions of freedom, independence, and citizenship, which they applied to the interconnecting areas of politics, society, economics, and the family. In the political arena, workers thought that equality was possible only if each member of the polity was economically independent. In the guise of the voluntary contract they perceived a compulsion that they believed made it impossible to exercise citizenship. Those who received wages could not possibly participate in civic life as the equals of their employers. Thus, the wage system would promote the formation of an aristocracy. In the late 1870s, for example, the labor editor J. P. McDonnell was discouraged to report: "After a century of political independence, we find that our social system is not better than that of Europe and that labor in this Republic, as in the European monarchies, is the slave of capitalism, instead of being the master of its own products." In economic terms, they believed that wages inevitably granted employees only a partial payment for their labor, leaving a portion of their work uncompensated. "In what does slavery consist?" asked the Mechanic's Free Press in 1830. "In being compelled to work for others so that they may reap the advantage." Finally, within the patriarchal family structure endorsed by male workers, masculine and feminine roles were sharply differentiated; the men were charged with breadwinning and the women with household responsibilities. If freedom was possibly only when workers owned their labor, neither men nor women could be free. On all these fronts, wage labor was a form of slavery and the growing army of wage laborers failed to qualify as free.

Most Americans believed independence to be possible only in a society of small producers. Many wondered, as Melvyn Dubofsky has asked, "how could a republican democracy built on the participation of economically independent freeholders and artisans endure in a society composed in the main of dependent wage earners?" Liberty and independence required that each worker receive the "fruits of his labor," that, as Abraham Lincoln declared, workers garner "the whole produce to themselves" and ask "no favors of capital on the one hand, nor of hirelings or slaves on the other." "God intended," said a union broadside of the 1850s, that every man should be "truly independent of his fellow and above the position of mere 'wage slaves.'"

Liberty was defined as complete ownership of one's own labor and, by extension, oneself. The notion of self-ownership was central to antebellum labor rhetoric and important well into the twentieth century. The "identification of the self and property," according to the literary critic Walter Benn Michaels, is "bourgeois." But valorization of self-ownership was not limited to America's middle class: workers too rested their economic understanding on this premise. Ira Steward, a machinist and labor leader from Boston, declared that under a regime of permanent wage labor, "there can be no freedom or self-ownership." Without these "natural and inalienable rights," he believed, the "self is destroyed."

The widespread popularity of the wage slavery metaphor in antebellum America linked disparate groups who shared little common ground other than an antipathy toward the wage system, including both southern defenders of chattel slavery and northern labor radicals. Free laborites and abolitionists considered wage labor acceptable only as a pit stop on the road to independent entrepreneurship and not as a permanent condition. Few antebellum Americans defended permanent wage labor; most agreed that it resembled slavery.'