Take a bite but let us know which bite

So many starting points, so many directions. Take one, comment, and we'll go from there.


"The focus of subjectivity is a distorting mirror. The self-awareness of the individual is only a flickering in the closed circuits of historical life. That is why the prejudices of the individual, far more than his judgments, constitute the historical reality of his being."

-Hans Georg Gadamer ; "A Theory of Hermeneutic Experience"


" . . .the subject's production by himself of a discourse in which his own truth could be read is one of the major forms of our obedience."

- Frederic Gros on Michel Foucault's course entitled "The Hermeneutics of the Subject"


" . . .as soon as on no longer knows who speaks or writes, the text becomes apocalyptic."

-Jacques Derrida; "An Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy"


"Jaspers was the first to advise us of the principles that every interpretation of Nietzsche must respect, if it does not wish to make him complicitous with the forces he did not cease to combat. The essential movement of Nietzsche's thought consists in self-contradiction; each time it affirms, the affirmation must be put in relation with the one opposing it: the decisive point of each of its certitudes passes through contestation, goes beyond it, and returns to it. Such contraddiction does not proclaim some sort of caprice or confusion in Nietzsche's mind; no oue could be less skeptical or more further removed from tranquil negation; becuase of the terrible seriousness of the constant will of the Yes - this will that goes in search of the true in the depths where truth is no stranger to contradiction - everything must at a certain moment turn around."

- Maurice Blanchot; "The Infinite Conversation"


"What destroys people, wears them down, is the meaning they give their acts."

-Jean Baudrillard; "Seduction"


"It seems to me that I will always be happy in the place where I am not."

-Baudelaire


" . . . the critique of capitalism is a result of capitalism's own idealogical dynamics, not of our measuring it according to some external standard."

-Slavoj Zizek