retro-quotes: a series of germane remarks, by others, plucked from all over the place, and from all over the time - #50
"Modernity is often characterized in terms of
consciousness of the discontinuity of time: a break with tradition, a
feeling of novelty, of vertigo in the face of the passing moment. And this
is indeed what Baudelaire seems to be saying [in "The Painter of Modern Life"] when he defines modernity as
'the ephemeral, the fleeting, the contingent.' But, for him, being modern does not lie in recognizing and accepting this
perpetual movement; on the contrary, it lies in adopting a certain
attitude with respect to this movement; and this deliberate, difficult
attitude consists in recapturing something eternal that is not beyond the
present instant, nor behind it, but within it. Modernity is distinct from
fashion, which does no more than call into question the course of time; modernity
is the attitude that makes it possible to grasp the 'heroic' aspect of the
present moment. Modernity is not a phenomenon of sensitivity to the
fleeting present; it is the will to 'heroize' the present" -- Michel Foucault, "What Is Enlightenment?", 1978.
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