Astonishingly, we are saved not by a special apparatus known as religion, but by the quality of our everyday relations with one another.
The fascinating is only a step away from the freakish.
Not all of Derrida’s writing is to everyone’s taste. He had an irritating habit of overusing the rhetorical question, which lends itself easily to parody: ‘What is it, to speak? How can I even speak of this? Who is this “I” who speaks of speaking?
After all, if you do not resist the apparently inevitable, you will never know how inevitable the inevitable was.
Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is ‘The Book of British Birds,’ and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology.
Nations sometimes flourish by denying the crimes that brought them into being. Only when the original invasion, occupation, extermination or usurpation has been safely thrust into the political unconscious can sovereignty feel secure.
People do evil things because they are evil. Some people are evil in the way that some things are coloured indigo. They commit their evil deeds not to achieve some goal, but just because of the sort of people they are.
A socialist is just someone who is unable to get over his or her astonishment that most people who have lived and died have spent lives of wretched, fruitless, unremitting toil.
Deconstruction insists not that truth is illusory but that it is institutional.
Genuine equality means not treating everyone the same, but attending equally to everyone’s different needs.
Schizophrenic language has in this sense an interesting resemblance to poetry.
Men and women do not easily submit to a power that does not weave itself into the texture of their daily existence – one reason why culture remains so politically vital. Civilisation cannot get on with culture, and it cannot get on without it.
The role of the intellectual, so it is said, is to speak truth to power. Noam Chomsky has dismissed this pious tag on two grounds. For one thing, power knows the truth already; it is just busy trying to conceal it. For another, it is not those in power who need the truth, but those they oppress.
Like the rest of us, Tom Paulin is a bundle of contradictions. At its finest, his work is brave, adventurous, original and wonderfully idiosyncratic.