Poststructuralism Quotes & Sayings

Enough already of Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault poured like ketchup over everything. Lacan: the French fog machine; a grey-flannel worry-bone for toothless academic pups; a twerpy, cape-twirling Dracula dragging his flocking stooges to the crypt. Lacan is a Freud T-shirt shrunk down to the teeny-weeny Saussure torso. The entire school of Saussure, inluding Levi-Strauss, write their muffled prose of people with cotton wool wrapped around their heads; they're like walking Q-tips. Derrida: a Gloomy Gus one-trick pony, stuck on a rhetorical trope already available in the varied armory of New Criticism. Derrida's method: masturbating without pleasure. It's a birdbrain game for birdseed stakes. Neo-Foucaldian New Historicism: a high-wax bowling alley where you score points just by knockng down the pins. — Camille Paglia

Perhaps the nearest one could get to a common characteristic of poststructuralism would be a radical suspicion of reason, order and certainty as governing principles of knowledge and existence...the absurd and the irrational can no longer be distinguished from the real and the rational — Margaret Maclure

Ah, Caviar! I keep on eating it, but can never get my fill. Like olives. It's a lucky thing it's not salty. — Anton Chekhov

Poststructuralism ... is a form of literary criticism that uses elaborate wordplay to prove its central premise, that all language is internally contradictory and has no fixed meaning. — Naomi Wolf

I have never met an ugly woman. — David Bailey

How many people make a career out of writing anyway?' Cath snapped. She felt like everything inside her was snapping. Her nerves. Her temper. Her esophagus. 'I'll write because I love it, the way other people knit or ... or scrapbook. And I'll find some other way to make money. — Rainbow Rowell

I'm off to save the universe again. It's a tough job but someone has to do it, and I'm glad it's me. — Lexa Doig

Get in touch with your intuitive and creative powers, bring your desires to life in order to create a life of bliss. — Steven Redhead

Brahms once remarked that the mark of an artist is how much he throws away. Nature, the great creator, is always throwing things away. A frog lays several million eggs at a sitting. Only a few dozen of these become tadpoles, and only a few of those become frogs. We can let imagination and practice be as profligate as nature. — Stephen Nachmanovitch

Actually, I have another record I made with them in 1976, but I've had such a bad experience with record companies, because I keep my head so much in music and not in business. — Ornette Coleman

There at least is a first affirmation, I mean negation, on which to build. — Samuel Beckett

We Americans, who invented traffic, are always being startled by the forms into which it has evolved around the world. — P. J. O'Rourke

The diameter of the earth is greater than the diameter of the moon and the diameter of the sun is greater than the diameter of the earth. — Archimedes