One of the two epigraphs to David Foster Wallace's early story, "Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way", is as follows: "As we are all solipsists, and all die, the world dies with us. Only very minor literature aims at apocalypse -- Anthony Burgess" (from p. 232 of Girl With the Curious Hair). What a great, and rich, quotation. So, when I doing some doodling around with parts of that story, I wanted to see the context for the Burgess quotation, and I couldn't find an original reference. But, I am not terribly well oriented with Burgess' work, so I thought I would put this out to the rest of you: Does this quotation exist?
I own a t-shirt that has the following quotation from Adorno: "Auschwitz begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they're only animals." One of my favorite things about this quotation is that it doesn't exist. Adorno never said it (though he said a few things like it). According to Witt-Stahl, the false quotation attributed to Adorno comes from PETA's Holocaust On Your Plate campaign, and the only justification given being poor organization by PETA researchers. (h/t to the Witt-Stahl article goes to this wonderful article by Marco Maurizi). Anyway, in some of my early grad school conference papers, I used this false quotation, and I have been a little hyper sensitive ever since then.
The agony of the rat or the slaughter of a calf remains present in thought not through pity but as the zone of exchange between man and animal in which something of one passes into the other. - Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?
