45 quotes
If we were not called upon to work in order to survive, we might simply lie around all day doing nothing.
Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983)
Language always pre-exists us: it is always already 'in place', waiting to assign us our places within it.
Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983)
The most compelling confirmation of Marx's theory of history is late capitalist society. There is a sense in which this case is becoming truer as time passes.
Why Marx Was Right (2011)
Chaucer was a class traitor
Shakespeare hated the mob
Donne sold out a bit later
Sidney was a nob.
Against The Grain (1986)
You can tell that the capitalist system is in trouble when people start talking about capitalism.
Why Marx Was Right (2011)
All consciousness is consciousness of something: in thinking I am aware that my thought is 'pointing towards' some object.
Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983)
Literary texts do not exist on bookshelves: they are processes of signification materialized only in the practice of reading. For literature to happen, the reader is quite as vital as the author.
Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983)
The present is only understandable through the past, with which it forms a living continuity; and the past is always grasped from our own partial viewpoint within the present.
Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983)
If history moves forward, knowledge of it travels backwards, so that in writing of our own recent past we are continually meeting ourselves coming the other way.
Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983)
Modern capitalist nations are the fruit of a history of slavery, genocide, violence and exploitation every bit as abhorrent as Mao's China or Stalin's Soviet Union.
Why Marx Was Right (2011)
Writing seems to rob me of my being: it is a second hand mode of communication, a pallid, mechanical transcript of speech, and so always at one remove from my consciousness.
Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983)
Deconstruction... insists not that truth is illusory but that it is institutional.
We live in a society which on the one hand pressurizes us into the pursuit of instant gratification, and the other hand imposes on whole sectors of the population and endless deferment of fulfillment.
Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983)
Postmodernism is among other things a sick joke at the expense of... revolutionary avant-gardism.
It is important to see that, in the critique of ideology, only those interventions will work which make sense to the mystified subject itself.
Ideology (1991)
As opposed to science ideology has the precise function of hiding the real contradictions and of reconstituting on an imaginary level a relatively coherent discourse which serves as the horizon of agents' experience.
Ideology (1991)
Capitalism is the sorcerer's apprentice: it has summoned up powers which have spun wildly out of control and now threaten to destroy us. The task of socialism is not to spur on those powers but to bring them under rational human control.
Why Marx Was Right (2011)
Post-structuralism is among other things a kind of theoretical hangover from the failed uprising of ‘68, a way of keeping the revolution warm at the level of language, blending the euphoric libertarianism of that moment with the stoical melancholia of its aftermath.
Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language, deviates systematically from everyday speech. If you approach me at a bus stop and murmur "Thou still unravished bride of quietness," then I am instantly aware that I am in the presence of the literary.
Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983)
"I wish your revolt well, my friend," said Bakhtin, "but beware that you don't end up merely repeating the same old story. The state abhors only one thing in the end, and that's the sound of laughter. Violence it can understand."