I knew it pleased her

"Laugh, laugh at me!" I exclaimed in intoxication, because I was terribly pleased with this whole conversation and the direction it had taken. "From you it only gives me pleasure. I love your laughter, Anna Andreevna! You have this feature: you keep silent and suddenly burst out laughing, instantly, so that even an instant earlier one couldn't have guessed it by your face. I knew a lady in Moscow, distantly, I watched her from a corner. She was almost as beautiful as you are, but she couldn't laugh the way you do, and her face, which was as attractive as yours—lost its attraction; but yours is terribly attractive . . . precisely for that ability . . . I've long been wanting to tell you."
  When I said of the lady that "she was as beautiful as you are," I was being clever: I pretended that it had escaped me accidentally, as if I hadn't even noticed; I knew very well that women value such "escaped" praise more highly than any polished compliment you like. And as much as Anna Andreevna blushed, I knew it pleased her. And I invented the lady; I didn't know any such lady in Moscow, it was only so as to praise Anna Andreevna and please her.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Adolescent (2003: 240-241)

armed at all points

Familiarity had modified in some degree her first impression of Madame Merle, but it had not essentially altered it; there was still much wonder of admiration in it. That personage was armed at all points; it was a pleasure to see a character so completely equipped for the social battle. She carried her flag discreetly, but her weapons were polished steel, and she used them with a skill which struck Isabel as more and more that of a veteran. She was never weary, never overcome with disgust; she never appeared to need rest or consolation. She had her own ideas; she had of old exposed a great many of them to Isabel, who knew also that under an appearance of extreme self-control her highly-cultivated friend concealed a rich sensibility. But her will was mistress of her life; there was something gallant in the way she kept going. It was as if she had learned the secret of it—as if the art of life were some clever trick she had guessed. Isabel, as she herself grew older, became acquainted with revulsions, with disgusts; there were days when the world looked black and she asked herself with some sharpness what it was that she was pretending to live for. Her old habit had been to live by enthusiasm, to fall in love with suddenly perceived possibilities, with the idea of some new adventure. As a younger person she had been used to proceed from one little exaltation to the other; there were scarcely any dull places between. But Madame Merle had suppressed enthusiasm; she fell in love nowadays with nothing; she lived entirely by reason and by wisdom. There were hours when Isabel would have given anything for lessons in this art; if her brilliant friend had been near she would have made an appeal to her. She had become aware more than before of the advantage of being like that—of having made one's self a firm surface, a sort of corselet of silver.

Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady (1976:401)

their logic and intonation

As the title of his essay ['Is Technological Civilization Decadent, and Why?'] indicates, Patočka asks why technological civilization is in decline. The answer seems clear: this fall into inauthenticity indicates a return of the orgiastic or demonic. Contrary to what is normally thought, technological modernity doesn't neutralize anything; it causes a certain form of the demonic to re-emerge. Of course, it does neutralize also, through indifference and boredom, but because of that, and precisely to the same extent, it allows the return of the demonic. There is an affinity, or at least a synchrony, between a culture of boredom and an orgiastic one. The domination of technology encourages demonic irresponsibility, and the sexual force of the latter does not need to be emphasized. All that occurs against the background of this boredom, that acts in concert with a technological leveling effect. Technological civilization produces a heightening of mobilization of the orgiastic, with the familiar accompanying effects of aestheticism and individualism, but only to the extent that it also produces boredom, for it "levels" or neutralizes the mysterious or irreplaceable uniqueness of the responsible self. The individualism of technological civilization relies precisely on a misunderstanding of the unique self. It is the individualism of a role and not of a person. In other words it might be called the individualism of a masque or persona, a character [personnage] and not a person. Patočka reminds us of interpretations&#151especially that of Burckhardt&#151according to which modern individualism, as it has developed since the Renaissance, concerns itself with the role that is played rather than with this unique person whose secret remains hidden behind the social mask.
&#160 The alternatives are confused: individualism becomes socialism or collectivism, it simulates an ethics or politics of singularity, liberalism joins socialism, democracy joins totalitarianism, and all these figures share the same indifference concerning anything but the objectivity of the role. Equality for all, the slogan of bourgeois revolution, becomes the objective or quantifiable equality of roles, not of persons.
&#160 This critique of the mask clearly harks back to a tradition, especially when it is part of a denunciation of technology in the name of an originary authenticity. Patočka is doubtless somewhat insensitive to how consistent a tradition it is, its logic seeming to continue unperturbed from Plato to Heidegger. And just as the role played hides the authenticity of the irreplaceable self behind a social mask, so the civilization of boredom produced by a techno-scientific objectivity hides mystery: "The most sophisticated inventions are boring if they do not lead to an exacerbation of the Mystery concealed by what we discover, what is revealed to us."
&#160 Let us outline the logic of this discourse. It criticizes an inauthentic dissimulation (that is the sense common to technology, role-playing, individualism, and boredom) not in the name of a revelation or truth as unveiling, but in the name of another dissimulation that, in what it holds back, keeps the mystery veiled. Inauthentic dissimulation, that of the masked role, bores to the extent that it claims to unveil, show, expose, exhibit, and excite curiosity. By unveiling everything, it hides that whose essence resides in its remaining hidden, namely the authentic mystery of the person. Authentic mystery must remain mysterious, and we should approach it only by letting it be what it is in truth, namely veiled, withdrawn, dissimulated. Authentic dissimulation is inauthentically dissimulated by the violence of unveiling. The words "mystery" or "fundamental mystery" appear a number of times in the final pages of the article, and their logic and intonation, at least, seem more and more Heideggerian.
&#160 Yet another concept could well represent the most decisive recourse here, that of force. Everything Patočka tends to discredit&#151inauthenticity, technology, boredom, individualism, masks, roles&#151derives from a "metaphysics of force." Force has become the modern figure of being. Being has allowed itself to be determined as a calculable force; and man, instead of relating to the being that is hidden under this figure of force, represents himself as quantifiable power. Patočka describes this definition of being as force by means of a schema that is analogous to that employed by Heidegger in his texts on technology:

Humans have ceased to be a relation to Being and have become a force, a mighty one, one of the mightiest [This superlative (jednou z nejmocnějších) indeed signifies that man has placed himself in a homogeneous relation with the forces of the world, but simply as the strongest among those forces.] Especially in their social being, they became a gigantic transformer, releasing cosmic forces accumulated and bound over the eons. It seems as if humans have become a grand energy accumulator in a world of sheer forces, on the one hand making use of those forces to exist and multiply, yet on the other hand themselves integrated into the same process, accumulated, calculated, utilized, and manipulated like any other state of energy.

This description might at first seem Heideggerian, as do a number of other formulations such as "Hidden within force there is Being" or "Thus force manifests itself as the highest concealment of Being." The same can be said for the interpretation of the dissimulation of being as force, and the dissimulation of being in the entity. One might say that Patočka doesn't shy away from such a reading even if the only explicit reference to Heidegger takes a strangely encrypted form. Heidegger is merely alluded to as though, for one reason or another, he is not to be named (whereas others like Hannah Arendt are named, in the same context and to make a similar point). For example: "A great contemporary thinker presented this vision of being absorbed in what is in his work without being trusted or noted." Heidegger is there, but he is not paid any attention. He is visible but not seen. Heidegger is there like a purloined letter, he seems to say, although not in so many words.

Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death (2008: 36-39)

she fixed them hard

It was almost unnecessary to cultivate doubt of one's self as to cultivate doubt of one's best friend: one should try to be one's own best friend and to give one's self, in this manner, distinguished company. The girl had a certain nobleness of imagination which rendered her a good many services and played her a great many tricks. She spent half her time in thinking of beauty and bravery and magnanimity; she had a fixed determination to regard the world as a place of brightness, of free expansion, of irresistible action: she held it must be detestable to be afraid or ashamed. She had an infinite hope that she should never do anything wrong. She had resented so strongly, after discovering them, her mere errors of feeling (the discovery always made her tremble as if she had escaped from a trap which might have caught her and smothered her) that the chance of inflicting a sensible injury upon another person, presented only as a contingency, caused her at moments to hold her breath. That always struck her as the worst thing that could happen to her. On the whole, reflectively, she was in no uncertainty about the things that were wrong. She had no love of their look, but when she fixed them hard she recognized them. It was wrong to be mean, to be jealous, to be false, to be cruel; she had seen very little of the evil of the world, but she had seen women who lied and who tried to hurt each other. Seeing such things had quickened her high spirit; it seemed indecent not to scorn them. Of course the danger of a high spirit was the danger of inconsistency—the danger of keeping up the flag after the place had surrendered; a sort of behavior so crooked as to be almost a dishonour to the flag. But Isabel, who knew little of the sorts of artillery to which young women are exposed, flattered herself that such contradictions would never be noted in her own conduct. Her life should always be in harmony with the most pleasing impression she would produce; she would be what she appeared, and she would appear what she was. Sometimes she went so far as to wish that she might find herself some day in a difficult position, so that she should have the pleasure of being as heroic as the occasion demanded.

Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady (1976: 40-41)