Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by Robert Lane Greene

Quote by Robert Lane Greene

Work

You Are What You Speak: Grammar Grouches, Language Laws, and the Politics of Identity

Browse quotes and source details for this work. more

Author

Robert Lane Greene

Browse famous quotes and profile details for Robert Lane Greene. more

You May Also Like

“And it is, indeed, to the more general problem of fetishism that this new twist brings us: after the becoming-sign of the object, the becoming-object of the sign. In the sexual register, the fetish is no longer a sign but a pure object, meaningless in itself - a banal accessory, but one of absolute value, for which there can be no possible exchange. It is that object and no other. But this banal singularity means that any object whatever can become a fetish. Its potentiality is total, precisely because it lies beyond any sexual reference or metaphor. It is the perfect object of sex, its perfect realization, insofar as it substitutes for any real sex - just as Virtual Reality substitutes itself for the real world and in that way becomes the universal form of our modern fetishism. Modern man's immense panoply of information technology has become his true object of (perverse?) desire. Fetishism being, as the name indicates (Feiticho), linked to abstraction and artifice, it is all the more radical for the abstraction being total. If it was possible, in the past, to speak of the fetishism of the commodity, of money, of the simulacrum and the spectacle, that was still a limited fetishism (related to sign-value). There stretches beyond this for us today the world of radical fetishism, linked to the de-signification and limitless operation of the real - to the sign's becoming pure object once again, before or beyond any metaphor.”

LiteralismFetishism
Book:The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact
Create image

“One of the variants of this lethal accomplishment, of this acting-out, is the realization of all metaphors - the collapse of the metaphor into the real. Here, again, we have the phantasm of materializing all that is parable, myth, fable and metaphor. Romain Gary: 'All humanity's metaphors end up becoming realities. I am coming to wonder whether the real aim of science is not a validation of metaphors.”

LiteralismLiteralness
Book:The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact
Create image

“You mustn't take anybody's words too literally, not even mine. Look at what literalism has done to the fundamentalists. I don’t want you to make the same mistake as them. And more importantly, I don’t want to be the cause of the horrors brought along by such mistake.”

IgnoranceReasoningBigotryExtremismRational ThinkingFreethinkerFreethoughtReligious FundamentalismFreethinkingLiteralism
Book:Mucize Misafir Merhaba: The Peace Testament
Create image

“No literature is infallible, but while errors in scientific literature are proudly mended by later scientists, errors in religious literature are rarely mended - they are interpreted, reinterpreted, and justified in a million ways, but never questioned, as very few persons of faith have got the brain and backbone to acknowledge errors, let alone correct them - this is not holiness, it's blindness most primitive.”

ScriptureTheologyBigotryFundamentalismIndoctrinationBlind FaithScience Vs ReligionReligious DogmaHoly BookLiteralism
Book:Iftar-e Insaniyat: The First Supper
Create image

“No literature is infallible, but while errors in scientific literature are proudly mended by later scientists, errors in religious literature are rarely mended - they are interpreted, reinterpreted, and justified in a million ways, but never questioned, as very few persons of faith have got the brain and backbone to acknowledge errors, let alone correct them - this is not holiness, it's blindness most primitive. Reverence without revision isn't sanctity, it's stagnation - and stagnation might feel honorous, but it leads to devolution. Just because it's habit doesn't make it holy - admission of error is the beginning of enlightenment.”

EnlightenmentScriptureFundamentalismIndoctrinationBlind FaithScience Vs ReligionReligious FanaticsReligious DogmaLiteralism
Book:Iftar-e Insaniyat: The First Supper
Create image