The Curious Case of Dassoukine's Trousers

WORKS CITED DISLOCATION

1. “Philosophers have only interpreted the world; the point is to change it.”

MARX, KARL. “Theses on Feuerbach.” Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works, Volume One. Trans. W. Lough. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1969. 13–15.

2. “This one went forth in quest of truth as a hero, and at last got for himself a small decked-up lie: his marriage he calleth it.”

NIETZSCHE, FRIEDRICH. Thus Spake Zarathustra: A Book for All and None. Trans. Thomas Common. Mineola: Dover Publications, 1999.

3. “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.”

PASCAL, BLAISE. Pensées. Trans. W. F. Trotter. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1958.

4. “To the eyes of the world still intact / It feels grow and weep, unspoken, / Its sharp, underlying crack / Do not touch, it is broken.”

PRUDHOMME, SULLY. “Le Vase Brisé.” Stances et Poèmes. Paris: Alphonse Lemerre, 1866.

Translated by Emma Ramadan.

KHOURIBGA, OR THE LAWS OF THE UNIVERSE

1. “Under the torrents of a tropical sun…which spreads heat over our fallow lands.”

FLAUBERT, GUSTAVE. Madame Bovary. Trans. Raymond N. MacKenzie. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2009.

2. “The spokes of the wheels converge at the hub. They converge toward the empty space. And it’s thanks to the empty space that the chariot advances…The vase is made of clay but it’s the empty space that makes it a vase.”

Paraphrase of Chapter 11 of the Tao te Ching, a Chinese classic text attributed to LAO TZU.

Emma Ramadan’s translation of Fouad Laroui’s French.

FIFTEEN MINUTES AS PHILOSOPHERS

1. “When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the little space which I fill, and even can see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I am ignorant, and which know me not, I am frightened, and am astonished at being here rather than there; for there is no reason why here rather than there, why now rather than then. Who has put me here? By whose order and direction have this place and time been allotted to me?…The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.”

PASCAL, BLAISE. Pensées. Trans. W. F. Trotter. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1958.

2. “One day, or one night, a demon will wake you and say to you: this life, as you now live it and have lived it, well, you will have to live it once more, in all its details, even the most minuscule; every joy, every sorrow…every thought and every sigh…in the same succession, from beginning to end. The same inescapable sequence! And then you will have to start over, again and again… Indefinitely!”

Paraphrase of: NIETZSCHE, FRIEDRICH. The Gay Science. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage, 1974.

3. “The last act is bloody, however pleasant all the rest of the play is: a little earth is thrown at last upon our head, and that is the end forever.”

BLAISE, PASCAL. Pensées. Trans. John Warrington, ed. Louis Lafuma and H.T. Barnwell. London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1931.

4. “What is life? An illusion, a shadow, a fiction… All of life is nothing but a dream, and dreams are nothing but dreams.”

CALDERÓN DEL LA BARCA, PEDRO. La vida es sueño. Madrid: Ediciones Catédra, 2004.

Emma Ramadan’s translation of Fouad Laroui’s French.

5. “I cannot fear death for as long as I am here, it is not here. And when it will be here, I will no longer be here. Thus, I will never meet death. Thus, I do not need to be afraid of it…”

Paraphrase of: “Death, therefore, the most awful of evils, is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are, death is not come, and, when death is come, we are not.”

EPICURUS, Letter to Menoeceus. Trans. R. D. Hicks. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1910.

Emma Ramadan’s translation of Fouad Laroui’s French.

6. “Don’t aspire, oh my soul, to immortal life. But exhaust the field of the possible.”

PINDAR, Pythian III.

Emma Ramadan’s translation of Fouad Laroui’s French.

7. “The day is rising, we must try to live!”

Paraphrase of: VALÉRY, PAUL. “Le Cimetière marin.” Le Cimetière marin et autres poèmes. Paris: Larousse, 2016.

Emma Ramadan’s translation of Fouad Laroui’s French.

8. “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

CAMUS, ALBERT. The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays. Trans. Justin O’Brien. New York: Vintage, 1942.

9. “We who perhaps one day shall die, proclaim man as immortal at the flaming heart of the instant.”

PERSE, SAINT-JOHN. Selected Poems. Ed. Mary Ann Caws. New York: New Directions, 1982.

10. “The whole world are actors.”

“Quod fere totus mundus exerceat histrionem.”

Commonly attributed to: PETRONIUS. Policraticus.

11. “…d’en soi et de pour soi, being-in-itself and being-for-itself.”

SARTRE, JEAN-PAUL. Being and Nothingness. Trans. Hazel E. Barnes. New York: Washington Square Press, 1993.