Ben Menghini

"But it seems to me that something more fundamental is occurring, namely, that liberal freedoms are now being understood to rely upon a hegemonic culture, one that is called 'modernity' and that relies on a certain progressive account of increasing freedoms. This uncritical domain of 'culture' functioning as a precondition for liberal freedom in turn becomes the cultural basis for sanctioning forms of cultural and religious hatred and abjection."

"The 'I' is the moment of failure in every narrative effort to give an account of oneself. It remains the unaccounted for and, in that sense, constitutes the failure that the very project of self-narration requires. Every effort to give an account of oneself is bound to encounter this failure, and to founder upon it."

"The infant enters the world given over from the start to a language and to a series of signs, broadly construed, that begin to structure an already operative mode of receptivity and demand. From this primary experience of having been given over from the start, an 'I' subsequently emerges. And the 'I,' regardless of its claim to mastery, will never get over having been given over from the start in this way."

"The means by which subject constitution occurs is not the same as the narrative form the reconstruction of that constitution attempts to provide."

"To intend nothing is all my intention; for I know that to merit so much grandeur no merit can suffice, and it is foolish to act contrary to my understanding."

"It is impossible to attack for long the awe of gods and demons and yet maintain reverence· for the categories and principles of universal morality."

"By the application of the industrial division of labor to the realm of the spirit, scientific reason has been separated from religious truth. Science, as a well-defined profession, sharply demarcated from philosophy, has almost relinquished its prerogative to tackle the most decisive problems of human existence."

"Annihilation threatens from the other side as well when the very transcendence of the social threatens to undermine the social conditions of life itself. After all, no one survives being addressed; no one survives to tell his or her story without being inaugurated into language by being called upon, offered some stories, brought into the discursive world of the story. Only later can one then find one's way in language, only after it has been imposed, only after it has produced a web of relations in which affectivity achieves articulation in some form."

"The 'I' cannot knowingly fully recover what impels it, since its formation remains prior to its elaboration as reflexive self-knowledge."

"I do not mean by this that governmentalization would be opposed, in a kind of inverted contrary affirmation, to 'We do not want to be governed, and we do not want to be governed at all.' What I mean is that in the great anxiety surrounding the way to govern and in the inquiries into modes of governing, one detects a perpetual question, which would be: 'How not to be governed like that, by that, in the name of these principles, in view of such objectives and by the means of such methods, not like that, not for that, not by them?'"

"How to govern: I believe that that was one of the fundamental questions of the fifteenth or sixteenth century. A fundamental question to which the multiplication of all the arts of governing—pedagogical art, political art, economic art, if you will—and of all the institutions of government, in the broad sense that the word government had at this time, responded."

"Practicing how to vacate detachment and still Rightly unwelcomed in the words, I pronounce whatever comes my conviction I know that the horse wading in to soak Holds me in the dream water By letting me see it, I know that when I fill With breath enough to float And fold into those already here, Every inch of altitude surprises, Falling into the mirror the sky is"