It does not require too much concentration to see that some themes and motives of the present book are the product of an imaginary dialogue with Francis Fukuyama's The End ofHistory and the Last Man, which originally appeared in 1992. (p36) * > The old world knew slave and serf, the bearers of the unhappy consciousness of their time. Modernity has invented the laser. (p40) * > "God is dead" means now that we live in a time in which the old absorption of rage through an austere beyond that demands respect increasingly vanishes. The deferral of human rage in favor of the wrath of God at the end time is no longer an accept able imposition for countless people, and has not been for quite a while. Such a situation indicates the likelihood of an overthrow. The politics of impatience expands accordingly. (p43) This one has some personal resonance: * > Even popular victimology more or less understands the reactions of injured people. Through bad experiences they are dislocated from the happy-forgetful center of society to its slippery margins, from which there is no longer any simple return to normal life. One understands this eccentric dynamic right away: to the victims of injustice and defeat, consolation through forgetting often appears unreachable. If it appears unreachable, it also appears unwanted, even unacceptable. This means that the fury of resentment begins at the moment the person who is hurt decides to let her self fall into humiliation as if it were the product of choice. To exaggerate pain in order to make it bearable, to transcend one's depressed suffering, to "sport with his misery"--quoting Thomas Mann's sensitive and humorous coinage about the primai father Jacob-to extend the feeling of suffered injustice to the size of a mountain in order to be able to stand on its peak full of bitter triumph: these escalating and twisting movements are as old as injustice, itself seemingly as old as the world. (p47) * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoolan_Devi][Phoolan Devi – haven՚t heard of her before, that՚s quite a story * > By participating in the language games of lamentation, the endangered group mobilizes the auto plastie effects of collective recitation (more specifically, the hearing of the reciter or singer) and thereby reconstitutes itself as the sender/receiver of the message of war and rage. (p 85) * > Among ail kinds of possible spectacles (Schauspielen) the end of the world is the only one for which one does not need to invest any resources to get a special seat. (p 95) * > Modern militancy looks back on a long succession of rage corporations in the shape of secret societies, terrorist organizations, revolutionary cells, national and supranational organizations, workers' par ties, unions of ail shades, aid organizations, and artistic associations. Ail of these are organized according to conditions of membership, rituals, and club activities, as well as their newspapers, journals, and editorial houses. (p 122) (yes I՚m skimming now) *