“To recover the comic splendor of The Merchant of Venice now, you need to be either a scholar or an anti-Semite, or best of all an anti-Semitic scholar.”
Harold Bloom
“To recover the comic splendor of The Merchant of Venice now, you need to be either a scholar or an anti-Semite, or best of all an anti-Semitic scholar.”
“Perceivers without concepts, as Kant almost said, are blind”
“[Machiavelli] is not the center of debate [between 1580 to 1650-60] insofar as it takes place because of what he said, but insofar as the debate is conducted through him…. He did not define an art of government, but an art of government will be looked for in what he said. This phenomenon in which one searches in a discourse for what is taking place, while actually seeking to force it to say something, is not unique. From this point of view, Marx is our Machiavelli: the discourse does not stem from him, but it is through him that it is conducted.”
“…an olfactory sensitivity altered by the Reformation, in which stink still signaled the devil, but sweet no longer indicated the presence of the divine.”
“Hi everybody, I’m Archie Bell and the Drells of Houston, Texas. We don’t only sing, but we dance just as good as we want. In Houston, we just thought of a new dance called the “tighten up”. This is the music we tighten up with…”
“If someone suggests to us, in the spirit of Bentham and Mill, that we should guide our own choices by the prospects of our own future pleasure and happiness, the appropriate retort is to enquire: ‘But which pleasure, which happiness ought to guide me?’ For there are too many different kinds of enjoyable activity, too many different modes in which happiness is achieved… The pleasure-of-drinking-Guinness is not the pleasure-of-swimming-at-Crane’s-Beach, and the swimming and the drinking are not two different means for providing the same end-state. The happiness which belongs peculiarly to the way of life of the cloister is not the same happiness as that which belongs peculiarly to military life. For different pleasures and different happinesses are to a large degree incommensurable…. Consequently appeal to the criteria if pleasure will not tell me whether to drink or swim and appeal to those of happiness cannot decide for me between the life of a monk and that of a soldier.”
“Characters are the masks worn by moral philosophies.”
“I would interview the Antichrist.”
“…[T]hose who fail to reread are obliged to read the same story everywhere”
