We are not optimists; we do not present a lovely vision of the world which everyone is expected to fall in love with. We simply have, wherever we are, some small local task to do, on the side of justice, for the poor. – HERBERT MCCABE, OP.
Literary works quite often ‘know’ things that the reader does not know, or does not know yet, or perhaps will never know.
Literary works are pieces of rhetoric as well as reports. They demand a peculiarly vigilant kind of reading, one which is alert to tone, mood, pace, genre, syntax, grammar, texture, rhythm, narrative structure, punctuation, ambiguity – in fact to everything that comes under the heading of ‘form’.
Characters may lend the action a certain colouring, but it is what happens that comes first. To overlook this while watching a tragedy would be like treating a football game simply as the acts of a set of solitary individuals, or as chance for each of them to display ‘personality’. The fact that some players behave as though this is precisely what football games are about should not distract us from this point.
Marx’s once scandalous thesis that governments are simple business agents for international capital is today an obvious fact.
Instead of seeking fulfilment in an object, the subject must acknowledge that it can flourish only through another of its kind. It is when two free, equal individuals engage in an act of mutual recognition that desire can transcend itself into something rather more edifying.
It is capitalism that sees production as potentially infinite, and socialism that sets it in the context of moral and aesthetic values. Or as Marx himself puts it in the first volume of Capital, “under a form appropriate to the full development of the human race.
It is thus the adventure of poetry, not the closure of philosophy, that most truly reflects the human condition.
The words “I love you” are always at some level a quotation. All language is generalising, including words like “this,” “here,” “unique,” “right now,” and “my utterly special little sweetheart.” The word “individual” originally mean “indivisible,” meaning that to be a person was to be a part of a greater whole. There could never be simply one person, any more than there could simply be one letter or one number.
One of the striking aspects of the lines is the way they make us see a tree, with its pattern of twigs, leaves and branches, as a visual image of the invisible roots of language.
You don’t bring about major political change simply by changing people’s minds. It’s their interests that need to be assailed, not their opinions.
That the death of God involves the death of Man, along with the birth of a new form of humanity, is orthodox Christian doctrine, a fact of which Nietzsche seems not to have been aware.
It may well be that a liking for bananas is a merely private matter, though this is in fact questionable.
People who are both powerful and dissatisfied are peculiarly dangerous.
I hope to show in the process that critical analysis can be fun, and in doing so help to demolish the myth that analysis is the enemy of enjoyment.
Once thought is pulled up short by a yearning that can only be known existentially, it is inevitable that conceptual discourse should give way to the birth of literature...
An English Evangelical bishop wrote in 1991 that clear signs of Satanic possession included inappropriate laughter, inexplicable knowledge, a false smile, Scottish ancestry, relatives who have been coal miners, and the habitual choice of black for dress or car colour. None of this makes sense, but then that’s how it is with evil. The less sense it makes, the more evil it is.
Middle paths in tragedy are in notably short supply.
When the Dublin-born Beckett was asked by a Parisian journalist whether he was English, he replied, ‘On the contrary.
Morality has precious little to do with feeling in any case. The fact that you feel a surge of nausea at the sight of someone with half their head shot away is neither here nor there as long as you try to help them.