Petit Quotes
As soon as a real artist finds out what art is, the more is he likely to feel the need of keeping silent about it, and about himself in connection with it. There is almost, these days, a kind of petit scandale in the thought of allying oneself with anything of a professional nature. And it is at this point that I shrink a little from asserting myself with regard to professional aspects of art. And here the quality of confession must break through.
Marsden Hartley
It is not Germany that will turn Bolshevist but Bolshevism that will become a sort of National Socialist. Besides, there is more that binds us to Bolshevism than separates us from it. There is, above all, genuine revolutionary feeling, which is alive everywhere in Russia except where are Jewish Marxists. I have always made allowance for this circumstance, and given orders that former Communists are to be admitted to the party at once. The petit bourgeois Social-Democrat and the trade-union boss will never make a National Socialist, but the Communist always will.... Our spirit is so strong, and the power of our magnificent movement to transform souls so elemental, that men are remodeled against their will... A social revolution would lend me new, unsuspected powers. I do not fear permeation with revolutionary Communist propaganda.
Hermann Rauschning
The communist peasant-nationalist regimes of Asia, relying on the Führerprinzip, extreme ethnocentric nationalism, and racism (and the ultimately grotesque in antimodernism in the case of the Cambodia of the Khmer Rouge) seem to some to represent the fascistization of communism. There is no doubt that, as discussed earlier, fascism and communism share many fundamental characteristics, and Russian spokesmen delight in applying the same words to China as to Nazi Germany: ‘petit bourgeois' policy, ‘bourgeois nationalism,' ‘military-bureaucratic degeneration,' ‘subservient obedience' of the masses, ‘anti-intellectualism,' ‘voluntarism,' ‘subjectivism,' ‘autarchic' policies that try to place ‘surplus population' on ‘foreign territories,' concluding that ‘the Maoist approach in no way differs from fascism.
Stanley G. Payne
The idea of the saint is the exact opposite of the priest in service of the Holy. The priest is a functionary of the Holy;' there is no Holy without its officials, without the bureaucratic machinery supporting it, organizing its ritual, from the Aztecs' official of human sacrifice to the modern sacred state or army rituals. The saint on the contrary, occupies the object petit a, of pure object, of somebody undergoing radical subjective destitution. He... enacts no ritual, he conjures nothing, he just persists in his inert presence.
Slavoj Žižek
The famous MacGuffin, the Hitchockian object, the pure pretext whose sole role is to set the story in motion but which is in itself nothing at all - the only significance of the MacGuffin lies in the fact that it has some significance for the characters - that it must seem to be of vital importance to them... - that's a MacGuffin, a pure nothing which is non the less efficient... what Lacan calls object petit a: a pure void which functions as the object cause of desire.
Slavoj Žižek
