"Knowledge leads no more to openings than to closures. The idealized quest for knowledge and power makes it often difficult to admit that enlightenment (as exemplified by the West) often brings about endarkenment. More light, less darkness. More darkness, less light. It is a question of degrees, and these are two degrees of one phenomenon. By attempting to exclude one (darkness) for the sake of the other (light), the modernist project of building universal knowledge has indulged itself in such self-gratifying oppositions as civilization/primitivism, progress/backwardness, evolution/stagnation. With the decline of the colonial idea of advancement in rationality and liberty, what becomes more obvious is the necessity to reactivate that very part of the modernist project at its nascent stage: the radical calling into question, in every undertaking, of everything that one tends to take for granted—which is a (pre- and post-modernist) stage that should remain constant. No Authority no Order can be safe from criticism. Between knowledge and power, there is room for knowledge-without-power."
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Women authors from the United StatesWomen academics from the United StatesHarvard University facultyCornell University facultyPeople from Hanoi
Original Language: English
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p. 40
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Trinh_T._Minh-ha
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Trinh T. Minh-ha
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