“If anyone else had published the second and third volumes of the History of Sexuality, they would have had little to no impact on the theoretical domains of literary and cultural theory in the U.S. academy.”
Amanda Anderson, 2006, The Way We Argue Now: A Study in the Cultures of Theory. Princeton, Princeton University Press, p. 121.
“Democracy is a fragile, agnostic, doxic form of political life, where fragility is the price to be paid for the refusal of all forms of immanentism. Democracy is the politics of difficulty, opacity, and dirty hands, of the fact that the social is not a complete, transparent oeuvre, that political action is always taken on an open, undecidable terrain.”
Simon Critchley, 1992, The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas, Blackwell.
“Neoliberals, like socialists, must compromise with power realities to achieve any of their goals. So within what is often called the neoliberal movement I distinguish four tendencies: principled neoliberalism elevating markets and individualism, the interests of capitalists, the interests of political elites, and a conservatism that uses the state to enforce morality, law and order, nationalism, and militarism. Though there is overlap among all of these, it is useful analytically to separate them.”
Michael Mann, 2013, The Sources of Social Power: Volume 4, Globalizations, 1945-2011, Cambridge University Press.
“I only want to say that the evidence of my relation to a theological heritage does not bother me, as long as one recognizes the methodological difference of the discourses: that is, as long as the philosophical discourse conforms to the distinctive demands of justificatory speech. In my view, a philosophy that oversteps the bounds of methodological atheism loses its philosophical seriousness.”
Jürgen Habermas, 2002, Religion and Rationality: Essays on Reason, God, and Modernity, Polity Press.
“Democratic procedure, which establishes a network of pragmatic considerations, compromises, and discourses of self-understanding and of justice, grounds the presumption that reasonable or fair results are obtained insofar as the flow of relevant information and its proper handling have not been obstructed.”
Jürgen Habermas, 1996, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, Polity Press.
“The history of modern social ideas has misled us into associating piecemeal change with disbelief in institutional reconstruction, and a commitment to such reconstruction with faith in sudden and systematic change.”
Roberto Mangabeira Unger, 2005, What Should the Left Propose?,Verso.
I’ve only just come across the International Geographical Union (IGU) YouTube channel – seems to be about 6 months old. It’s got a bunch of interviews with geographers of a certain significance, shall we say – David Harvey, from 1984, on historical-geographical materialism; Derek Gregory from 1983, Torsten Hagerstrand, Dick Chorley and Michael Chisholm in discussion with Anne Buttimer (and lots of other interviews chaired by her and one with her). Wonderful stuff in a nerdy ‘history and philosophy of geography’ kind of way).
“From certain people we are grateful for anything. From others, great men, great women, we expect everything. May it always be so.”
David Hare, 2005, Obedience, Struggle and Revolt: Lectures on Theatre, Faber and Faber.
“One need not capitulate to a view of the world as a host of incommensurable rationalities to recognize that the criteria of what counts as correctness or well-foundedness in, say, anthropology are not the same as in art history.”
Terry Eagleton, 2009, Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debates, Yale University Press.
“Philosophy counts two, speaking of and speaking to, but regardless of what happens in the bosom of the one, they always come back under the regulation of the truth that governs speaking of. […] Austin’s invention consists in counting three.”
Barbara Cassin, 2014, Sophistical Practice: Toward a Consistent Relativism, Fordham University Press.
Pop Theory 