Death Left Its Old Tragic Heaven And

During The Years 1945-1965 (i Am Referring To Europe), There Was A Certain Way Of Thinking Correctly, A Certain Style Of Politicaldiscourse, A Certain Ethics Of The Intellectual. One Had To Be On Familiar Terms With Marx, Not Let One's Dreams Stray Too Far From Freud.... These Were Therequirements That Made The Strange Occupation Of Writing And Speaking A Measure Of Truth About Oneself And One's Time Acceptable.

[knowledge Is Governed Not By] A Theory Of Knowledge, But By A Theory Of Discursive Practice.

A Critique Does Not Consist In Saying That Things Aren't Good The Way They Are. It Consists In Seeing On Just What Type Of Assumptions, Of Familiar Notions, Of Established And Unexamined Ways Of Thinking The Accepted Practices Are Based... To Do Criticism Is To Make Harder Those Acts Which Are Now Too Easy.

There Are More Ideas On Earth Than Intellectuals Imagine. And These Ideas Are More Active, Stronger, More Resistant, More Passionate Than "politicians" Think. We Have To Be There At The Birth Of Ideas, The Bursting Outward Of Their Force: Not In Books Expressing Them, But In Events Manifesting This Force, In Struggles Carried On Around Ideas, For Or Against Them. Ideas Do Not Rule The World. But It Is Because The World Has Ideas (and Because It Constantly Produces Them) That It Is Not Passively Ruled By Those Who Are Its Leaders Or Those Who Would Like To Teach It, Once And For All, What It Must Think.

To Seek In The Great Accumulation Of The Already-said The Text That Resembles "in Advance" A Later Text, To Ransack History In Order To Rediscover The Play Of Anticipations Or Echoes, To Go Right Back To The First Seeds Or To Go Forward To The Last Traces, To Reveal In A Work Its Fidelity To Tradition Or Its Irreducible Uniqueness, To Raise Or Lower Its Stock Of Originality, To Say That The Port -royal Grammarians Invented Nothing, Or To Discover That Cuvier Had More Predecessors Than One Thought, These Are Harmless Enough Amusements For Historians Who Refuse To Grow Up.