Final ID questions Flashcards
“Thus one could reconsider all the pairs of opposites on which philosophy is constructed and on which our discourse lives, not in order to see opposition erase itself but to see what indicates that each of the terms must appear as the différance of each other, as the other different and deferred in the economy of the same…”
Jacques Derrida— “Différance”
Alex 1.
“So, for the African, living according to the moral law means living according to his nature, composed as it is of contradictory elements but complementary life forces.Thus he gives himself to the stuff of the universe and tightens the threads of the tissue of life. Thus he transcends the contradictions of the elements and works towards making the life forces complementary to one another: in himself first of all, as Man, but also in the whole of human society.”
Léopold Sédar Senghor— “Negritude: A Humanism of the Twentieth Century”
(Alex 2.)
“We must redefine “theory” itself from within our own black cultures, refusing to grant the racist premise that theory is something that white people do, so that we are doomed to imitiate our white colleagues, like reverse black ministrel critics done up in whiteface. We are all heirs to critical theory, but we black critics are heir to the black vernacular critical tradition as well. Our task now is to invent and employ our own critical theory, to assume our own propositions, and to stand within the academy as politically responsible and responsive parts of a social and cultural African-American whole”
Henry Louis Gates Jr.— “Authority, (White) Power and the (Black) Critic: It’s All Greek to Me.”
(Alex 3.)
“The uniqueness of a work of art is inseparable from its being imbedded in the fabric of tradition. This tradition itself is thoroughly alive and extremely changeable.”
Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,”
German 1935
(Wendy 1)
“Since I can count on one hand the number of people attempting to be black feminist literary critics in the world today, I consider it presumptuous of me to invent a theory of how we ought to read. Instead, I think we need to read the works of our writers in our various ways and remain open to the intricacies of the intersection of language, class, race, and gender in the literature. And it would help if we share our process, that is, our practice, as much as possible since, finally, our work is a collective endeavor.”
Barbara Christian, “The Race for Theory,”
English 1987
(Wendy 2)
“’Discipline’ may be identified neither with an institution nor with an apparatus; it is a type of power, a modality for its exercise, comprising a whole set of instruments, techniques, procedures, levels of application, targets; it is a ‘physics’ or an ‘anatomy’ of power, a technology.”
Michel Foucault, “Panopticism” from Discipline and Punish,
French 1975
(Wendy 3)
“Hence the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. So to arrange things that the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action; that the perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary; that this architectural apparatus should be a machine for creating and sustaining a power relation independent of the person who exercises it; in short, that the inmates should be caught up in a power situation of which they are themselves the bearers.”
Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish/ “Panopticism,” French 1977
(Justin 1)
“In the meantime, this ethical question comes into play in matters of nudity and perversity. Woman must be nude because she is not situated, does not situate herself in her place. Her clothes, her makeup, and her jewels are the things with which she tries to create her container(s), her envelope(s). She cannot make use of the envelope that she is, and must create artificial ones.”
Luce Irigaray, “An Ethics of Sexual Difference,”
French 1984.
(Justin 2)
“The mirror stage is a drama whose internal thrust is precipitated from insufficiency to anticipation–and which manufactures for the subject, caught up in the lure of spatial identification, the succession of phantasies that extends from a fragmented body-image to a form of its totality that I shall call orthopaedic–and, lastly, to the assumption of the armour of an alienating identity, which will mark with its rigid structure the subject’s entire mental development.”
Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage (as formative of the function of the I as revealed in psychoanalytic experience,)
French 1949
(Justin 3)
Truth, as the lighting and concealing of beings, happens in being composed. All art, as the letting happen of the advent of the truth of beings, is as such, in essence, poetry. The essence of art, on which both the art work and the artist depend, is the setting-itself-into-work of truth.
Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of a Work of Art,”
German 1935-6
(Seungho 1)
The nation is not only the condition of culture, its fruitfulness, its continuous renewal, and its deepening. It is also a necessity. It is the fight for national existence which sets culture moving and opens to it the doors of creation.
Franz Fanon, “On National Culture” in The Wretched of the Earth,
French 1961
(Seungho 2)
Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies. … Woman must put herself into the text – as into the world and into history – by her own movement.
Helene Cixous “Laugh of the Medusa,”
French 1975
(Seungho 3)
“Too bad for them if they fall apart upon discovering that women aren’t men, or that the mother doesn’t have one. But isn’t this fear convenient for them? Wouldn’t the worst be, isn’t the worst, in truth, that women aren’t castrated, that they have only to stop listening to the Sirens (for the Sirens were men) for history to change its meaning? You only have to look at the Medusa straight on to see her. And she’s not deadly. She’s beautiful and she’s laughing.”
Hélène Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa.
French in 1975,
(Jenna 1)
“To arrive at the constitution of an ethics of sexual difference, we must at least return to what is for Descartes the first passion: wonder. This passion has no opposite or contradiction and exists always as though for the first time. Thus man and woman, woman and man are always meeting as though for the first time because they cannot be substituted one for the other. I will never be in a man’s place, never will a man be in mine. Whatever identifications are possible, one will never exactly occupy the place of the other—they are irreducible one to the other.”
Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference.
French in 1984
(Jenna 2)
“Criticisms of directions in postmodern thinking should not obscure insights it may offer that open up our understanding of African- American experience. The critique of essentialism encouraged by postmodernist thought is useful for African-Americans concerned with reformulating outmoded notions of identity. We have too long had imposed upon us, both from the outside and the inside, a narrow constricting notion of blackness. Postmodern critiques of essentialism which challenge notions of universality and static over-determined identity within mass culture and mass consciousness can open up new possibilities for the construction of the self and the assertion of agency.”
bell hooks, Postmodern Blackness.
English 1990.
(Jenna 3)
