3-28-13

Upcoming Blog Posts:

- “Why Platonists are more likely to approve of Gay Marriage than are Aristotelians.”

- “Ian Hacking & the (Nominalistic) Politics of Naming.”

“… since all signs were material – quite as material as bodies or automobiles – and since there could be no human consciousness without them, Bakhtin’s theory of language laid the foundations for a materialist theory of consciousness itself. Human consciousness was the subject’s active, material, semiotic intercourse with others, not some sealed interior realm divorced from these relations; consciousness, like language, was both “inside” and “outside” the human subject simultaneously. Language was not to be seen as “expression” or “reflection” or abstract system, but rather as a material means of production, whereby the material body of the sign was transformed by a process of social conflict and dialogue into meaning.” Eagleton, _Literary Theroy_, 102

Note: for more on Bakhtin, see this excellent resource, here.

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“Structuralism is … one more of literary theory’s series of doomed attempts to replace religion with something as effective: in this case, with the modern religion of science.” ibid, 106

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“[In light of the growing pluralism in universities in the late 60's and 70's] it is no wonder … that the Russian Formalists, French stucturalists, and German reception theorists were suddenly in fashion; for all off these approaches ‘denaturalized’ certain traditional literary assumptions in ways congenial to the academic newcomers.” ibid, 191

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“[Feminism] preserves the dissenting energies of an earlier epoch, but combines them with a skepticism of determinate truths and meanings which blended reasonably well with

- a disillusioned liberal sensibility

- … a suspicion of semiotic closure and metaphysical foundations

- a nervousness about the positive or programmatic

- a distaste for notions of historical progress

- a pluralist resistance to the doctrinal.” ibid, 193

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“[Feminism] … made room for much that a male-dominated high theory had austerely excluded: pleasure, experience, bodily life,  the unconscious, the affective, autobiographical and interpersonal, questions of subjectivity an everyday practice.” ibid, 194

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“No man should bring children into the world who is unwilling to persevere to the end in their nature and education.” - Plato.

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“After celebrating Eucharist on 6 December 1273 Thomas [Aquinas] ceased to do theology: ‘I cannot do any more. Everything I have written seems to me so much straw compared with what I have seen.’ To interpret this as meaning that he regarded his writings as entirely worthless would be absurd. It is an expression of the tension throughout his theological work between the labor of reasoning about Christian revelation and the longing for the promised face-to-face vision of God by which his whole life was shaped.” Fergus Kerr, _After Aquinas_, 2.

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“The fallacy of modernity is to think that because something is culturally produced / conditioned / constructed, it is not true.”