When one emphasizes, as Jacques Derrida once remarked, one always overemphasizes.
The government spokesman announces that there is no truth in the charges of widespread corruption within the Cabinet; nobody believes him; he knows that nobody believes him, we know that he knows it, and he knows it too.
It is important to see that, in the critique of ideology, only those interventions will work which make sense to the mystified subject itself.
Modern capitalist nations are the fruit of a history of slavery, genocide, violence and exploitation every bit as abhorrent as Mao’s China or Stalin’s Soviet Union.
Man eternally tries to get back to an organic past that has slipped just beyond his reach.
All consciousness is consciousness of something: in thinking I am aware that my thought is ‘pointing towards’ some object.
Evil may be ‘unscientific’ but so is a song or a smile.
As far as belief goes, postmodernism prefers to travel light: it has beliefs, to be sure, but it does not have faith.
If history moves forward, knowledge of it travels backwards, so that in writing of our own recent past we are continually meeting ourselves coming the other way.
Scratch a schoolboy and you find a savage.
Like all the best radical positions, then, mine is a thoroughly traditionalist one.
If we were not called upon to work in order to survive, we might simply lie around all day doing nothing.
The present is only understandable through the past, with which it forms a living continuity; and the past is always grasped from our own partial viewpoint within the present.
If the masses are not thrown a few novels, they may react by throwing up a few barricades.
The truth is that liberal humanism is at once largely ineffectual, and the best ideology of the ‘human’ that present bourgeois society can muster.
Poetry is the most subtle of the literary arts, and students grow more ingenious by the year at avoiding it. If they can nip around Milton, duck under Blake and collapse gratefully into the arms of Jane Austen, a lot of them will.
I value my Catholic background very much. It taught me not to be afraid of rigorous thought, for one thing.
Universities are no longer educational in any sense of the word that Rousseau would have recognised. Instead, they have become unabashed instruments of capital. Confronted with this squalid betrayal, one imagines he would have felt sick and oppressed.
Most poetry in the modern age has retreated to the private sphere, turning its back on the political realm.
I say that virtue is really all about enjoying yourself, living fully; but of course it is far from obvious what living fully actually means.