Quotes About Universalizing

Pornography, like marriage and the fictions of romantic love, assists the process of false universalising. Its excesses belong to that timeless, locationless area outside history, outside geography, where fascist art is born. Nevertheless, there is no question of an aesthetics of pornography. It can never be art for art's sake. Honourably enough, it is always art with work to do.

In a way, part of the widespread success of happiness actually lies in that it delivers a legitimate, universalizing and apolitical discourse for individualism - a discourse that conceives one's life as separate from community and which sees the inner life as the cause and root of all behaviors.

There stands the parable; there stands the sacred metaphor of belonging, one heart to another. WIthout the metaphor of memory and history, we cannot imagine the life of the Other. We cannot imagine what it is to be someone else. Metaphor is the reciprocal agent, the universalizing force: it makes possible the power to envision the stranger's heart.