When people have no choice, life is almost unbearable. As the number of available choices increases, as it has in our consumer culture, the autonomy, control, and liberation this variety brings are powerful and positive. But as the number
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“The entire destiny of modern linguistics is in fact determined by Saussure's inaugural act through which he separates the ‘external’ elements of linguistics from the ‘internal’ elements, and, by reserving the title of linguistics for the latter, excludes from it all the investigations which establish a relationship between language and anthropology, the political history of those who speak it, or even the geography of the domain where it is spoken, because all of these things add nothing to a knowledge of language taken in itself. Given that it sprang from the autonomy attributed to language in relation to its social conditions of production, reproduction and use, structural linguistics could not become the dominant social science without exercising an ideological effect, by bestowing the appearance of scientificity on the naturalization of the products of history, that is, on symbolic objects.”
― Language and Symbolic Power
― Language and Symbolic Power

“When words run dry,
he does not try,
nor do I.
We are on par.
He just is,
I just am
and we just are”
― Love & Misadventure
he does not try,
nor do I.
We are on par.
He just is,
I just am
and we just are”
― Love & Misadventure

“Those who suppose they are producing a materialist theory of knowledge when they make knowledge a passive recording and abandon the “active aspect” of knowledge to idealism, as Marx complains in the theses on Feuerbach, forget that all knowledge, and in particular all knowledge of the social world, is an act of construction implementing schemes of thought and expression, and that between conditions of existence and practices or representations there intervenes the structuring activity of the agents, who, far from reacting mechanically to mechanical stimulations, respond to the invitations or threats of a world whose meaning they have helped to produce.”
― Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste
― Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste

“[T]he mere impulse of appetite is slavery, while obedience to a law which we prescribe to ourselves is liberty.”
― The Social Contract
― The Social Contract
Sébastien’s 2024 Year in Books
Take a look at Sébastien’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
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