marx and engels

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before tehy can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind. (476)

Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. "Manifesto of the Communist Party." 1888. Ed. Friedrich Engels. The Marx-Engels Reader. 2nd ed. Ed. Robert C. Tucker. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1978. 469-500.

olsen

Friedrich experiences a frothy sensation. Although his teachers at Pforta seem to consider him merely competent, industrious, and conscientious among other industrious and conscientious students, he knows every evening in addition to his regular studies he composes poems, keeps a notebook, and performs experiments in the autobiographical essay until the blue phantoms begin to lap behind his eyelids and his vision smudges. These days he cannot stop thinking and feeling. Sometimes he sleeps only four or five hours a night. Pages and pages of ideas unspool from his forehead like Rapunzel's hair from her tower. (90-91)

Olsen, Lance. Nietzsche's Kisses. Normal: FC2, 2006.

guattari

Sometimes I have this image: I see myself walking a plank above an absolute abyss, and I say to myself, what is this? What does it all mean? How is it that this keeps on happening? Who among us hasn't come up against such evidence? But immediately one is snatched up, thrown against remote-controlled behavior apparatuses, taken up by emergies, games and gambles. Even dead tired, one keeps on at the roulette wheel or the poker table with an amazing vitality.
...
It is obvious that we are all suspended over the same abyss, even if we use different means in order not to see it. We are all at the mercy of the same stupor that can take you by the throat and literally suffocate you. We are all like Swann, half crazy after his separation from Odette and feeling, like the plague, any mention that could evoke, even indirectly, her existence. (12)

Félix Guattari. "So What." Trans. Chet Wiener. Chaosophy. Ed. Sylvére Lotringer. New York: Semiotext[e], 1995. 9-29.