Quotes About History

The politics that enter the university are those that come from history, a retro politics, emptied of substance and legalized in their superficial exercise.

From the holocaust to the hologram: a fine programme.

Nada llegó ni llegará ahora al término de su historia.

All these old ultra-Leftists thwarted (by History), unclear where they are on the Left–Right spectrum, and ending up writing with both hands – from left to right, of course - in the hope of one day painting spaces of freedom for themselves with their toes.

The almost timeless curvature of the space of ideas obeys neither chronology nor history. So the thoughts of Sade and Fourier are like anticipated repercussions of the theories of Marx and Freud, of which they are a much more radical critique avant la lettre than any that were to follow, exerting their effects only posthumously. To reread the world of ideas against the grain of the ideology of the Enlightenment, the ideology of a chronological order of events.

The fragment is like a broken mirror - ideas don't have the time to reflect themselves in it or, as a result, to feel sorry for themselves. They run ahead of their shadows or their reflections. To run ahead is to move towards an unforeseeable outcome, but one whose path is made for it in advance. Birds too run ahead of those who see them. The event also runs ahead of history. It is what opens up untimely perspectives in a world brought totally up to date.

In the face of extreme reality we are defenceless. But this is only a beginning. We are the aborigines, the anthropoids of the Virtual. In terms of world history, we are barely at the stage of the invention of fire and walking upright. Logically, it remains for us to be exploited and colonized by an even greater power.

Todos os grandes esquemas da razão sofreram o mesmo destino. Eles só descreveram sua trajetória, só seguiram o curso de sua história no diminuto topo da camada social detentora do sentido (e em particular do sentido social), mas no essencial somente penetraram nas massas ao preço de um desvio, de uma distorção radical.

The historic time of the event, the psychological time of affects, the subjective time of judgement and will, the objective time of reality - these are all simultaneously thrown into question by real time. If there were a subject of history, a subject of knowledge, a subject of power, these have all disappeared in the obliteration by real time of distance, of the pathos of distance, in the integral realization of the world by information.

Memory is a dangerous function. It retrospectively gives meaning to that which did not have any. It retrospectively cancels out the internal illusoriness of events, which was their originality. But if events retained their original, enigmatic form, their ambiguous, terrifying form, there would doubtless no longer be any history.

Theory does not derive its legitimacy from established facts, but from future events. Its value is not in the past events it can illuminate, but in the shockwave of the events it prefigures. It does not act upon consciousness, but directly on the course of things from which it draws its energy. It therefore has to be dis tinguished from the academic practice of philosophy and from all that is written with an eye to the history of ideas.

The West is seized with panic at the thought of not being able to save what the symbolic order had been able to conserve for forty centuries, but out of sight

La politique qui entre à l'université est celle qui sort de l'histoire, c'est une politique rétro, vidée de sa substance et légalisée dans son exercice superficiel, aire de jeu et terrain d'aventure (…)

Might one suggest to the people that they storm the opera house and tear it down on the symbolic date of 14 July? Might one suggest that they parade the bloody heads of our modern cultural governors on the end of pikestaffs? But we no longer make history. We have become reconciled with it and protect it like an endangered masterpiece. Times have changed.

The traces of the dinosaurs howl in our memories. Had they been alive we would have exterminated them, but we respect their traces. It is the same with the human race: the more we imperil it, the more meticulously we preserve its remains.

His work kept on living, like the watches on the wrists of dead soldiers. [Said of Marcel Proust]

I have always preferred mythology to history. Because history is made up of truths which eventually turn into lies. Mythology is made up of lies that eventually become truths.

You know, he said, when you paint over something, everything that was there before isn't really gone. It's still there. All the layers of color, the scrapes and dents, even the bare wood hiding beneath, they shape what's painted top, inspire it even, but they don't define it. That's up to the painter.

If Sparta and Rome perished, what state can hope to live forever? Hence, if we wish to form a lasting institution, let us not think about making it eternal. In order to succeed we should not attempt the impossible, or flatter ourselves that we are giving the work of men a solidity that does not belong to human things.

There are neither good or bad colonialist: there are colonialists.

Only by judging the Borgias against their own times can they arouse our sympathy, and only if they arouse our sympathy can they be understood. Below

One does not always realize at the time what effect historical events have upon our lives.

Imagine anyone asking Henry VIII or Elizabeth to settle a bill!

Quite like old times,' the room says.