Those who were still able to write beautiful melodies were kitsch composers like Tchaikovsky. Tchaikovsky approaches true art not in his numerous beautiful melodies, but when a melodic line is thwarted.

But in a radically atheist universe, you are not only responsible for doing your duty, You are also responsible for deciding what is your duty.

There is a contradiction between market liberalism and political liberalism. The market liberals (e.g., social conservatives) of today want family values, less government, and maintain the traditions of society (at least in America's case). However, we must face the cultural contradiction of capitalism: the progress of capitalism, which necessitates a consumer culture, undermines the values which render capitalism possible

A typical guy who buys organic food doesn't really buy it in order to be healthy; he buys it to regain a kind of solidarity as the one who really cares about nature. He buys a certain ideological stance.

The problem with kitsch is that it is all too profound, manipulating deep libidinal and ideological forces, while true art knows how to remain at the surface, how to subtract it's subject from it's deepest context of historical reality. The same goes for contemporary art, where we often encounter brutal attempts to return to the Real, to remind the spectator or reader that he is perceiving a fiction, to awaken him from a sweet dream.

We have all the freedoms we want. But what we are missing is red ink: the language to articulate our non-freedom. The way we are taught to speak about freedom- war on terror and so on-falsifies freedom.

You could say, in a vulgar Freudian way, that I am the unhappy child who escapes into books. Even as a child, I was most happy being alone. This has not changed.