on the possibility of critique

A thinker must be a partisan not only of certain thoughts, but of thought.

Heidegger warned us against forgetting the original meaning of words.  But let us not forget that the truest sense of a word often belongs not to the past but the future.

The poet invokes the muses; the philosopher, reason. Who then does the critic call upon in the act of criticism? Perhaps only a reader who does not yet exist.

Philosophy and poetry, if they speak to each other at all, speak as lovers, and as it always is with lovers, every conversation turns to love. Literature, however, is like a married couple.  It looks upon its youthful effusions and enthusiasms with a gentle bemusement, realizing that they had served an entirely unexpected end.

The critic must allow not only his reason and good sense, but even the tradition, to follow a few steps behind as he escapes from the catastrophies of the present.  Filled with anxiety, he turns to look back — but they have dissapeared.  He retreats to find them again.  In vain. Yet like Aeneas’s wife, they return as ghosts to haunt him: and to show him the way into the future.   

Often the hardest thing for a refined person to grasp is when tact demands vulgarity.

Of all forms of nostalgia, the nostalgia for revolution is perhaps most insidious.  But has there ever been a revolution that was not, from the first, a nostalgia for revolution?  Is nostalgia then revolutionary?

Those who advocate a “Darwinian” turn in literary studies forget that literature begins where Darwin ends: genetic engineering.