Discourse Quotes

“We may say then that the contribution of the telegraph to public discourse was to dignify irrelevance and amplify impotence. But this was not all: Telegraphy also made public discourse essentially incoherent. It brought into being a world of broken time and broken attention, to use Lewis Mumford's phrase. The principle strength of the telegraph was its capacity to move information, not collect it, explain it or analyze it. In this respect, telegraphy was the exact opposite of typography.”

“Discourse is not life; its time is not your time; in it, you will not be reconciled to death; you may have killed God beneath the weight of all that you have said; but don't imagine that, with all that you are saying you will make a man that will live longer than he.”

“I call the discourse of power any discourse that engenders blame, hence guilt, in its recipient.”

“Of course, in television's presentation of the "news of the day," we may see the Now...this" mode of discourse in it's boldest and most embarrassing form. For there, we are presented not only with fragmented news but news without context, without consequences, without value, and therefore without essential seriousness; that is to say, news as pure entertainment.”

“Demetrius the grammarian finding in the temple of Delphos a knot of philosophers set chatting together, said to them, “Either I am much deceived,or by your cheerful and pleasant countenances, you are engaged in no very deep discourse.” To which one of them, Heracleon the Megarean, replied: “ ’Tis for such as are puzzled about inquiring whether the future tense of the verb Ballo be spelt with adouble L, or that hunt after the derivation of the comparatives Cheirou and Beltiou, and the superlatives Cheiriotou and Beliotou, to knit their brows whilst discoursing of their science; but as to philosophical discourses, they always divert and cheer up those that entertain them, and never deject them or make them sad.”

“(Love’s atopia, characteristic which causes it to escape all dissertations, would be that *ultimately* it is possible to talk about love only *according to a strict allocutive determination*; whether philosophical, gnomic, lyric, or novelistic, there is always, in the discourse upon love, a person whom one addresses, though this person may have shifted to the condition of a phantom or a creature still to come. No one wants to speak of love unless it is *for* someone.).”

“…This singular reversal may perhaps proceed from the fact that for us the “subject” (since Christianity) is the one who suffers: where there is a wound, there is a subject: die Wunde! die Wunde! says Parsifal, thereby becoming “himself”; and the deeper the wound, at the body’s center (at the “heart”), the more the subject becomes a subject: for the subject is intimacy (“The wound…is of a frightful intimacy”). Such is love’s wound: a radical chasm (at the “roots” of being), which cannot be closed, and out of which the subject drains, constituting himself as a subject in this very draining.”―from_A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments_. Translated by Richard Howard, p. 189”

“It would seem that the author’s name, unlike other proper names, does not pass from the interior of a discourse to the real and exterior individual who produced it; instead, the name seems always to be present, marking off the edges of the text, revealing, or at least characterizing, its mode of being. The author’s name manifests the appearance of a certain discursive set and indicates the status of this discourse within a society and a culture. It has no legal status, nor is it located in the fiction of the work; rather, it is located in the break that founds a certain discursive construct and its very particular mode of being. As a result, we could say that in a civilization like our own there are a certain number of discourses that are endowed with the “author-function”, while others are deprived of it. A private letter may well have a signer_ it does not have an author; a contract may well have a guarantor_ it does not have an author. An anonymous text posted on a wall probably has a writer_ but not an author. The author-function is therefore characteristic of the mode of existence, circulation, and functioning of certain discourses within a society.”

“There can be no religious discourse which is in conflict with its environment and with the world and therefore, we Muslims need to modify this religious discourse. And this has nothing to do with conviction and with religious beliefs, because those are immutable. But we need a new discourse that will be adapted to a new world and which will remove some of the misconceptions.”