书
…all advocate for certain forms of erasure over memory precisely because memorialization has a tendency to tidy up disorderly histories (of slavery, the Holocaust, wars, etc.). Memory is itself a disciplinary mechanism that Foucault calls “a ritual of power”; it selects for what is important (the histories of triumph), it reads a continuous narrative into one full of ruptures and contradictions, and it sets precedents for other
“memorializations.”
书
It may well be that the reflexes that put in play similarity and dissimilarity, analogy, and contrast are fundamental to the human psyche and to the possibility of the intelligible.
书
Our recursion, upstream, to the sources of saying is, almost always, partial.
书
… both understanding and pleasure derive from the tensed imbalance between the expected and the shock of the new, which is itself, at its finest, a shock of recognition, a déjà vu
书
Humbled but also
exhilarated by the complexity of our local and far-flung
worlds, we read classics and contemporaries in the few
languages we can muster, and we modestly depend on
translations for other traditions that allow us only hints at
the riches we will never attain.