” This is how Eve Sedgwick teaches us to read—not from a paranoid position, but from a reparative position that tries to find “the many ways selves and communities succeed in extracting sustenance from the objects of a culture—even of a culture whose avowed desire has often been not to sustain them.”
” All too often criticism points out dehumanizing aspects of the world only to further depersonalize our experience.”
“Shantideva approaches this question through a position of radical empathy that dissolves the divide between the self and the other. We would do well to try and do the same. Reading deeply is a good place to start.”
“The story of the struggle to find one’s way into philosophy, the struggle to find one’s philosophical voice, is a struggle to find a language ― a point I took rather literally. But the story of that struggle is also one’s intellectual autobiography.”
https://www.abc.net.au/religion/stanley-cavell-philosophy-and-autobiography/10696038
“Marxism is, in Jameson’s view, the only critical approach capable of making sense of human experience as a historical phenomenon.”
“Dialectical thinking, Jameson has said, “requires you to say everything simultaneously, whether you think you can or not,” and there is a strong sense of that in his prose. “We will return to this later,” “meanwhile,” “as we have seen,” are common refrains. Remarking on this element of Jameson’s style in his review of Valences of the Dialectic (2009), Benjamin Kunkel observed that it is “as if everything was present in his mind at once, and it was only the unfortunately sequential nature of language that forced him to spell out sentence by sentence and essay by essay an apprehension of the contemporary world that was simultaneous and total.””
http://jacobin.com/2024/09/fredric-jameson-marxism-literature-theory
“One trait of postmodernism unmentioned by Jameson was the special difficulty critics and thinkers of recent generations have experienced in conveying their thoughts except through the medium of someone else’s; intellectuals today tend to offer their commentary on the world by way of comments on another’s commentary.”
“And you could say that American higher education itself suffered a dialectical reversal somewhere around 1980 – to date, the high-water mark of class mobility in the US – as the universities went from being among the main vehicles of egalitarianism to being the primary means of reproducing class privilege.”
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v32/n08/benjamin-kunkel/into-the-big-tent
Literary Whimsy 