5 Quotes by Marie Luise Knott

Arendt's laughter was the laughter of incongruence, the laughter that erupts when facing absurdity, a pause to catch one's breath. We happen upon something that makes no sense, we laugh, and respond with wit. For while laughter is a re-action, irony and wit are (spoken or written) actions. Irony expresses the unwillingness or the inability to put up with nonsense. Wit arises when people can easily and quickly see similarities between dissimilar things.

Irony is her means of holding experience at arm's length in order to think it through, a protection against panic and powerfully aggressive impulses that would only interfere with her ability to judge.

Where certainty ceases, thinking begins; the knower sets off into uncertainty. Both traditional ideas and their inverse had to be abandoned as supports. As the life of Katznelson shows, to achieve such freedom there has to be first the ability to allow oneself to be confused by intrusive reality along with diagnostic and intellectual courage.

As the philosopher Gilles Deleuze put it, no painter ever stands before a completely blank canvas, no author ever sits before a blank page. In fact, the surface confronting the modern artist is full of inherited images that must first be cleared from the imagination before one can begin to create one's own.

Until then, fascism had been seen as conservative or reactionary, but in reality, he' [Katznelson] 'continued, it had long since proved to be a revolutionary force, ready to make a pact with anyone in order to further its own plans for world domination. Fascism was no longer an outlaw movement, he argued. It had moved center stage with the goal of replacing the humane ideal with a system based on lies, cruelty, and humiliation.