November 2009
10 posts
“Let us know our reach [portée]. We are something, and not everything… Our intelligence occupies in the order of intelligible the same place as our body in the extent of nature.”
—Blaise Pascal
“In a trivial sense, everybody is an individual, but that is not what I am talking about. To become an individual, as I understand it, is to become someone different from the rest of your world. There is real positive value in not being like everyone else. And when I look at the world, at our history, I see that we value those who stand out, who are different from others in one way or another. That is a historical fact.”
—Alexander Nehamas
“Many considerations of an apparently anthropological nature today tend only to veil objectionable trends, as though they were of an ethnological, quasi-natural character.”
—T. W. Adorno
“Readers are less and less seen as mere non-writers, the subhuman ‘other’ or flawed derivative of the author; the lack of a pen is no longer a shameful mark of secondary status but a positively enabling space, just as within every writer can be seen to lurk, as a repressed but contaminating antithesis, a reader.”
—Terry Eagleton
“There are indeed a great many more things in life than money, but it is money that gives us access to most of them.”
—Terry Eagleton
“The political art we have in postmodernist America is one long exercise in preaching to the converted. As Adam Gopnik pointed out in The New Yorker recently, when reviewing the Carnegie International in Pittsburgh, it consists basically of taking an unexceptionable if obvious idea—”racism is wrong”—or “New York shouldn’t have thousands of beggars and lunatics on the street”—then coding it so obliquely that when the viewer has retranslated it he feels the glow of being included in what we call the “discourse” of the artworld. But the fact that a work of art is about AIDS or bigotry no more endows it with aesthetic merit than the fact that it’s about mermaids and palm trees.”
—Robert Hughes
“To some extent our political past influences our sexual negotiations, but in equal measure sexual pleasure itself is a source of political practice and theory.”
—Leslie Farber
