Terry Eagleton
British literary theorist, critic and philosopher, who is regarded as one of the United Kingdom's most influential living literary critics.
The liberal state is neutral between capitalism and its critics until the critics look like they are winning.
"It is important to see that, in the critique of ideology, only those interventions will work which make sense to the mystified subject itself."
There seems to be something in humanity which will not bow meekly to the insolence of power.
It is silly to call fat people “gravitationally challenged”, a self-righteous fetishism of language which is no more than a symptom of political frustration.
"Cultural theory as we have it promises to grapple with some fundamental problems, but on the whole fails to deliver. It has been shamefaced about morality and metaphysics, embarrassed about love, biology, religion and revolution, largely silent about evil, reticent about death and suffering, dogmatic about essences, universals and foundations, and superficial about truth, objectivity and disinterestedness. This, on any estimate, is rather a large slice of human existence to fall down on. It is also, as we have suggested before, rather an awkward moment in history to find oneself with little or nothing to say about such fundamental questions."
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.
When it comes to who exactly should be exploited, the system is admirably egalitarian.
"Man eternally tries to get back to an organic past that has slipped just beyond his reach".