Catholics From England

"We face a probable future of nuclear-armed states warring over a scarcity of resources; and that scarcity is largely the consequence of capitalism itself. For the first time in history, our prevailing form of life has the power not simply to breed racism and spread cultural cretinism, drive us into war or herd us into labour camps, but to wipe us from the planet. Capitalism will behave antisocially if it is profitable for it to do so, and that can now mean human devastation on an unimaginable scale. What used to be apocalyptic fantasy is today no more than sober realism. The traditional leftist slogan ‘‘Socialism or barbarism’’ was never more grimly apposite."

"The truth is that the past exists no more than the future, even though it feels as though it does."

""In some traditionalist universities not long ago, you could not research on authors who were still alive. This was a great incentive to slip a knife between their ribs one foggy evening, or a remarkable test of patience if your chosen novelist was in rude health and only 34"."

"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."

"In conscious life, we achieve some sense of ourselves as reasonably unified, coherent selves, and without this action would be impossible. But all this is merely at the ‘imaginary’ level of the ego, which is no more than the tip of the iceberg of the human subject known to psychoanalysis. The ego is function or effect of a subject which is always dispersed, never identical with itself, strung out along the chains of the discourses which constitute it."

"There seems to be something in humanity which will not bow meekly to the insolence of power."

"You can tell that the capitalist system is in trouble when people start talking about capitalism."

"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."

"It follows that through its constitution ideology is involved in the functioning of this social-imaginary relation, and is therefore necessarily false; its social function is not to give agents a true knowledge of the social structure but simply to insert them as it were into their practical activities supporting this structure. Precisely because it is determined by its structure, at the level of experience the social whole remains opaque to the agents. In class-divided societies this opacity is over-determined by class exploitation and by the forms which this exploitation takes in order to be able to function in the social whole. Hence, even if it includes elements of knowledge, ideology necessarily manifests an adequation / inadequation vis-à-vis the real."

"What persuades men and women to mistake each other from time to time for gods or vermin is ideology. One can understand well enough how human beings may struggle and murder for good material reasons—reasons connected, for instance, with their physical survival. It is much harder to grasp how they may come to do so in the name of something as apparently abstract as ideas. Yet ideas are what men and women live by, and will occasionally die for."

"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."

"Ideology consist of a specific objective level, of a relatively coherent ensemble of representations, values and beliefs: just as 'men', the agents within a formation, participate in an economic and political activity, they also participate in religious, moral, aesthetic and philosophical activities. Ideology concerns the world in which men live, their relations to nature, to society, to other men and to their own activity including their own economic and political activity. The status of the ideological derives from the fact that it reflects the manner in which the agents of a formation, the bearers of its structures, live their conditions of existence; i.e. it reflects their relation to these conditions as it is 'lived' by them. Ideology is present to such an extent in all the agents' activities that it becomes indistinguishable from their lived experience. To this extent ideologies fix in a relatively coherent universe not only a real but also and imaginary relation: i.e. men's real relation to their conditions of existence in the form of an imaginary relation. This means that in the last analysis ideologies are related to human experience without being thereby reduced to a problematic of the subject—consciousness. This social-imaginary relation, which performs a real practical—social function, cannot be reduced to the problematic of alienation and false consciousness."

"It is important to see that, in the critique of ideology, only those interventions will work which make sense to the mystified subject itself."

"All propaganda or popularization involves a putting of the complex into the simple, but such a move is instantly deconstructive. For if the complex can be put into the simple, then it cannot be as complex as it seemed in the first place; and if the simple can be an adequate medium of such complexity, then it cannot after all be as simple as all that."

"Chaucer was a class traitor Shakespeare hated the mob Donne sold out a bit later Sidney was a nob."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"I do not know whether to be delighted or outraged by the fact that Literary Theory: An Introduction was the subject of a study by a well known U.S. business school, which was intrigued to discover how an academic text could become a best-seller."

"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."

"Language always pre-exists us: it is always already 'in place', waiting to assign us our places within it."

"Any attempt to define literary theory in terms of a distinctive method is doomed to failure."

"Schizophrenic language has in this sense an interesting resemblance to poetry."

"All desire springs from a lack, which it strives continually to fill."

"The truth is that liberal humanism is at once largely ineffectual, and the best ideology of the 'human' that present bourgeois society can muster."

"It is language which speaks in literature, in all its swarming 'polysemic' plurality, not the author himself."

"If we were not called upon to work in order to survive, we might simply lie around all day doing nothing."

"Understanding is always in some sense retrospective, which is what Hegel meant by remarking that the owl of Minerva flies only at night."

"What perished in the Soviet Union was Marxist only in the sense that the Inquisition was Christian"

"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."

"All consciousness is consciousness of something: in thinking I am aware that my thought is 'pointing towards' some object."

"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."

"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."

"If the masses are not thrown a few novels, they may react by throwing up a few barricades."

"Reading is not a straightforward linear movement, a merely cumulative affair: our initial speculations generate a frame of reference within which to interpret what comes next, but what comes next may retrospectively transform our original understanding, highlighting some features of it and backgrounding others."

"Deconstruction... insists not that truth is illusory but that it is institutional."

"Postmodernism is among other things a sick joke at the expense of... revolutionary avant-gardism."

"What was needed was a literary theory which, while preserving the formalist bent of New Criticism, its dogged attention to literature as aesthetic object rather than social practice, would make something a good deal more systematic and 'scientific' out of all this. The answer arrived in 1957, in the shape of the Canadian Northrop Fryes mighty 'totalization' of all literary genres, Anatomy of Criticism."

"Reading a text is more like tracing this process of constant flickering than it is like counting the beads on a necklace."

"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."

"It is difficult to think of an origin without wanting to go back beyond it."

"The last years before her death on 8 April 2013 were spent in increasing isolation, suffering from the tragic onset of dementia. Her funeral was held at St. Paul's Cathedral in London, something accorded only to outstanding national figures. Sir Winston Churchill's in 1965 united practically the whole country. Mrs Thatcher had, however, been a deeply divisive Prime Minister, who had elicited unusually strong devotion, but had also inspired not just dislike, but hatred, at the other end of the spectrum. Attitudes toward her death and subsequent state funeral duly reflected the polarization. More than thirty years after she left 10 Downing Street for the last time, the name Magaret Thatcher still retains the capacity to engender the full range of emotions. The scars felt by the many who had borne the brunt of her government's economic policies are to this day still not healed. Charles Moore concluded his monumental three-volume biography by describing Mrs Thatcher as "the greatest genius ever to direct the affairs of the United Kingdom." The accolade is surely unwarranted. But, like her or loathe her, she was without doubt an extraordinary political leader."

"Franco, it is tempting to think, is too peripheral a figure to be ranked as a 'maker of twentieth-century Europe'- central to Spanish history of the era, naturally, but not necessarily of wider importance. It is, of course, obvious that Franco's wider impact scarcely compares with that of Hitler and Mussolini, or Lenin and Stalin. He presents a case-study in the role and impact of the individual in history at the lower end of the scale. And it is fair to say that for much of the twentieth century Spain was on the periphery of the key developments in Europe. It has been judged that Franco 'at best influenced world history during the 1930s. But the twentieth century would not have been much different without him.' Such an assessment is too dismissive. European as well as Spanish history would certainly, in indefinable ways, have been different had the republic survived after 1936. That it did not survive owed much to Franco's leadership in the Civil War. Moreover, the importance of that war was such that it drew in- in different measure- Europe's major powers and attracted the participation of volunteer fighters from across the continent. Franco's dealings with the Axis powers during the Second World War and then with the West during the Cold War also gave his long dictatorship a significance not confined to Spain. Moreover, the character of the subsequent transition to pluralist democracy, and the impact of Franco's era on Spanish memory and political culture and on the divisive question of regional separatism in one of Europe's biggest countries, additionally make Franco a figure of relevance to European, not just Spanish, history. Not least, Franco demonstrates how an individual with recognized qualities as a military commander but no experience of political leadership could benefit from the historical conditions that made his assumption of power possible in the first place and enabled him to go on to 'make his own history.'"

"The terrible famine of 1932 was still a searing memory. The heavy hand of Stalinist oppression had not receded since then. ... There was, then, good reason for the deep and widespread hatred for the Soviets among the Ukrainian population, and little wonder that the Germans were welcomed as liberators. Only downright idiocy could have converted that into even greater hatred of the Germans than the Soviets. But that is what the German conquerors achieved."

"A history of Hitler has to be a history of his power — how he came to get it, what its character was, how he exercised it, why he was allowed to expand it to break all institutional barriers, why resistance to that power was so feeble. But these are questions to be directed at German society, not just at Hitler."

"Hitler's power was of an extraordinary kind. He did not base his claim to power (except in a most formal sense) on his position as a party leader, or on any functional position. He derived it from what he saw as his historic mission to save Germany. His power, in other words, was 'charismatic', not institutional. It depended on the readiness of others to see 'heroic' qualities in him. And they did see those qualities — perhaps even before he himself came to believe in them."

"For the Socialist and Communist left — with only minor differences between them in this regard — Hitler was portrayed as the hireling of big capitalism, the front-man for the imperialists, the political strike-force of the enemies, of the working class. Such views were to persist after 1933 in the left-wing underground resistance organizations, the underestimation of Hitler they contained hindering clear perceptions of the ideological dynamism of Nazism. For Catholics — the other sub-culture which Nazism found greatest difficulty in penetrating, before and after 1933 — Hitler was above all seen as the head of a ‘godless’, anti-Christian movement. In Protestant church-going circles, impression of Hitler varied. Some looked to the dangers of a neo-heathen movement which had roused the base instincts of the masses. Others saw the potential, at a time when church attendance was dwindling and moral and religious values were allegedly being undermined, of Hitler's 'national renewal' bringing in its wake ethical and religious revival. On the nationalist-conservative Right, the relatively sympathetic treatment of Hitler at the time of the Young Plan Campaign had given way to hostility. Hitler was portrayed for the most part as intransigent and irresponsible, a wild and vulgar demagogue, not a statesman, an obstacle to political recovery, the head of an extreme movement with menacing socialistic tendencies. Against these negative images had to be set the adulation of the third of the population that, despite the setbacks of summer and autumn, still saw in Hitler the only hope for Germany's future."

"The road to Auschwitz was built by hate, but paved with indifference."

"The question of 'historical greatness' was usually implicit in the writing of conventional biography — particularly so in the German tradition. The figure of Hitler, whose attributes — distinguished from his political aura and impact — were scarcely noble, elevating or enriching, posed self-evident problems for such a tradition."

"Never in history has such ruination – physical and moral – been associated with the name of one man. That the ruination had far deeper roots and far more profound causes than the aims and actions of one man has been evident in the preceding chapters. That the previously unprobed depths of inhumanity plumbed by the Nazi regime could draw upon wide-ranging complicity at all levels of society has been equally apparent. But Hitler's name justifiably stands for all time as that of the chief instigator of the most profound collapse of civilization in modern times. The extreme form of personal rule which an ill-educated beerhall demagogue and racist bigot, a narcissistic, megalomaniac, self-styled national saviour was allowed to acquire and exercise in a modern, economically advanced, and cultured land known for its philosophers and poets, was absolutely decisive in the terrible unfolding of events in those fateful twelve years."