Critical Theory Quotes

“Between love and the automatic garbage chute, young people everywhere have made their choice and prefer the garbage chute. [Entre l'amour et le vide-ordure automatique la jeunesse de tous les pays a fait son choix et préfère le vide-ordure.]”
― Ivan Chtcheglov

“Visibility is a trap.”
― Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison

“There are eyes everywhere. No blind spot left. What shall we dream of when everything becomes visible? We'll dream of being blind.”
― Paul Virilio

“In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.”
― Guy Debord

“Ideas improve. The meaning of words participates in the improvement. Plagiarism is necessary. Progress implies it. It embraces an author's phrase, makes use of his expressions, erases a false idea, and replaces it with the right idea. ”
― Guy Debord

“What can oppose the decline of the west is not a resurrected culture but the utopia that is silently contained in the image of its decline.”
― Theodor W. Adorno

“Against the urgency of people dying in the streets, what in God's name is the point of cultural studies?...At that point, I think anybody who is into cultural studies seriously as an intellectual practice, must feel, on their pulse, its ephemerality, its insubstantiality, how little it registers, how little we've been able to change anything or get anybody to do anything. If you don't feel that as one tension in the work that you are doing, theory has let you off the hook.”
― Stuart Hall

“Tourism, human circulation considered as consumption is fundamentally nothing more than the leisure of going to see what has become banal.”
― Guy Debord

“Freud made the discovery- quite genuinely, simply through working on his own material- that the more deeply one explores the phenomena of human individuation, the more unreservedly one grasps the individual as a self-contained and dynamic entity, the closer one draws to that in the individual which is really no longer individual.”
― Theodor Adorno, Introduction to Sociology

“The more we live as 'free individuals' . . . the more we are effectively non-free, caught within the existing frame of possibilities--we have to be impelled or disturbed into freedom. . . . This paradox thoroughly pervades the form of subjectivity that characterizes 'permissive' liberal society. Since permissiveness and free choice are elevated into a supreme value, social control and domination can no longer appear as infringing on subjects' freedom: they have to appear as (and be sustained by) individuals experiencing themselves as free. There is a multitude of forms of this appearing of un-freedom in the guise of its opposite: in being deprived of universal healthcare, we are told that we are being given a new freedom of choice (to choose our healthcare provider); when we can no longer rely on long-term employment and are compelled to search for a new precarious job every couple of years, we are told that we are being given the opportunity to reinvent ourselves and discover our creative potential; when we have to pay for the education of our children, we are told that we are now able to become 'entrepreneurs of the self," acting like a capitalist freely choosing how to invest the resources he possesses (or has borrowed). In education, health, travel . . . we are constantly bombarded by imposed 'free choices'; forced to make decisions for which we are mostly not qualified (or do not possess enough information), we increasingly experience our freedom as a burden that causes unbearable anxiety. Unable to break out of this vicious cycle alone, as isolated individuals--since the more we act freely the more we become enslaved by the system--we need to be 'awakened' from this 'dogmatic slumber' of fake freedom.”
― Slavoj Žižek

“There is nothing more natural than to consider everything as starting from oneself, chosen as the center of the world; one finds oneself thus capable of condemning the world without even wanting to hear its deceitful chatter.”
― Guy Debord

“For now, we live in the mall, but I think it's closing soon.”
― Grafton Tanner, Babbling Corpse: Vaporwave and the Commodification of Ghosts

“The expressions of those moving about a picture gallery show ill-concealed disappointment that they only find pictures there.”
― Walter Benjamin, One Way Street And Other Writings

“The ultimate form of dehumanization is not to reduce humans to the rank of animals, but to elevate animals to the rank of humans; the ultimate form of depersonalization is not to take away the personhood of subjects, but to give personhood to objects; and the ultimate form of demoralization is not to lower morality to the level of caprice, but to raise caprice to the level of morality.”
― Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski

“A chronicler who recites events without distinguishing between major and minor ones acts in accordance with the following truth: nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history. To be sure, only a redeemed mankind receives the fullness of its past--which is to say, only for the redeemed mankind has its past become citable in all its moments…”
― Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections

“Now, what I call faith in this case is like something that I said about justice and the gift, something that is presupposed by the most radical deconstructive gesture. You cannot address the other, speak to the other, without an act of faith, without testimony. What are you doing when you attest to something? You address the other and ask, “believe me.” Even if you are lying, even in a perjury, you are addressing the other and asking the other to trust you. This “trust me, I am speaking to you” is of the order of faith, a faith that cannot be reduced to a theoretical statement, to a determinative judgment; it is the opening of the address to the other. So this faith is not religious, strictly speaking; at least it cannot be totally determined by a given religion. That is why this faith is absolutely universal.”
― Jacques Derrida, Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida, With a New Introduction

“When democratic, social, and political theories are preposterous, subjecting such knowledge to praxis will only yield undesirable outcomes.”
― Ousainou Bobb

“En réalité, j’ai l’impression que la structure fondamentale du désir se situe justement ici : il est propulsé par l’exigence de mettre à portée quelque chose qui ne l’est pas (encore). Et là se trouve peut-être la clé permettant de nous soustraire au jeu de l’accroissement sans limites auquel se livre la modernité et à son ambition de rendre tout et chacun disponible, de la priver de l’énergie de propulsion dont elle a besoin, de débrancher en quelque sorte sa « prise libineuse ». Ma thèse est que la structure fondamentale du désir humain est un désir de relation : nous voulons atteindre ou rendre atteignable quelque chose qui n’est pas « à notre disposition ». Ce quelque chose peut être, par exemple, une nouvelle guitare ou une tablette tactile, un lac ou un être aimé. Dans tous ces cas, le désir vise à entrer avec ce qui est désiré dans une relation responsive ; de placer la guitare, la personne ou le lac dans un rapport de réponse, ou d’entrer avec la tablette dans des relations responsives avec le monde. Mais dans chaque cas, je l’affirme, le désir s’éteint lorsqu’il n’y a plus rien à « découvrir » sur ou avec le vis-à-vis, si nous maîtrisons et contrôlons toutes ses propriétés, si nous en disposons totalement. Une fois de plus, nous pouvons donc aussi parler de « semi-disponibilité » : nous ne pouvons pas désirer une personne ou une guitare si nous ne savons strictement rien d’elle et si nous ne l’avons jamais vue. Dans la première dimension, l’objet du désir doit donc être au moins partiellement et temporairement disponible, sans quoi il renvoie à une « nostalgie sans nom », dans laquelle l’objet du désir est le désir lui-même. La disposition complète, dans la totalité des quatre dimensions, provoque en revanche l’extinction du désir : le jeu perd son objet, la musique son attrait, l’amour son ardeur. L’indisponibilité complète est dépourvue de sens au regard du désir, mais la disponibilité totale est sans attrait. Cela signifie qu’une relation réussie au monde vise à l’atteignabilité, pas à la disponibilité. Il faut qu’un vis-à-vis soit atteignable sous une forme quelconque, il doit être possible de nouer avec lui un rapport de réponse qui ne soit pas erratique, c’est-à-dire complètement fortuit, mais qui ne soit pas non plus entièrement contrôlable, et qui, à partir de cette structure même, enclenche l’interaction entre l’interpellation, l’efficacité personnelle et la transformation, permettant ainsi l’expérience de la vitalité.”
― Hartmut Rosa, Unverfügbarkeit

“He does not define concepts, he does not analyse them, he does not criticize them: he murders them (but the crime is never perfect).”
― Jean Baudrillard

“The stepping out of (what we experience as)
ideology is the very form of our enslavement to it.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Mapping Ideology

“When some procedure is denounced as ‘ideological par excellence’, one can be sure that its inversion is no less ideological.”
― Slavoj Žižek, Mapping Ideology

“CSJ is fundamentally incompatible with the enlightenment values and scientific worldview of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT).”
― Dr Val Thomas, Cynical Therapies: Perspectives on the Antitherapeutic Nature of Critical Social Justice

“Critical Social Justice (abbreviated in the text as CSJ). CSJ serves as an umbrella term for the set of contemporary Critical Theories and was originally formalised by Robin DiAngelo and Özlem Sensoy. CSJ (or “wokeness” in common parlance) is shorthand for a particularly radical political approach to achieving social justice. Its goal is to uncover the systems of power that are believed to structure society and, by so doing, create the opportunity for a revolutionary transformation into an idealised state. CSJ is characterised by activism that aims to find problems, disrupt and dismantle societal norms, centre the marginalised, privilege subjective over objective truth, and control speech.”
― Dr Val Thomas, Cynical Therapies: Perspectives on the Antitherapeutic Nature of Critical Social Justice

“The material and ethical assertions of [Critical Social Justice] CSJ are controversial. Most people with apparently oppressed identities don’t think about the world through this ideological lens—it is an artifact of academia.”
― Dr Val Thomas, Cynical Therapies: Perspectives on the Antitherapeutic Nature of Critical Social Justice

“A core tenet of CSJ is that emotional harm is comparable to physical harm; when you cause someone to feel a negative emotion, you are causing harm to that individual. Any level of discomfort is considered harmful and, in some cases, the equivalent of violence.”
― Dr Val Thomas, Cynical Therapies: Perspectives on the Antitherapeutic Nature of Critical Social Justice

“A CSJ-driven approach to psychotherapy would exacerbate and worsen problems for individuals seeking psychotherapy. A CSJ-driven approach teaches clients to see their emotional experiences as harmful and blame their emotional experiences on oppression. Clients would learn to be constantly focused on racism, sexism, homophobia, and oppression as the cause of their problems.”
― Dr Val Thomas, Cynical Therapies: Perspectives on the Antitherapeutic Nature of Critical Social Justice

“For [Critical Social Justice] CSJ, people are not individuals as such but rather representatives of particular identity groups located within a matrix of power. Therefore, when two people engage with one another, it is understood primarily as encounters between constellations of intersected identities.”
― Dr Val Thomas, Cynical Therapies: Perspectives on the Antitherapeutic Nature of Critical Social Justice

“Both the client and therapist are not primarily seen as human persons in relation to each other and the socio-cultural world around them. Instead, they are viewed as defined by their intersecting group identities and, importantly, the differences and inequalities these identities create. Dynamics of oppression are at the heart of the CSJ-driven therapy relationship.”
― Dr Val Thomas, Cynical Therapies: Perspectives on the Antitherapeutic Nature of Critical Social Justice

“A presence-based relationship with core characteristics like openness and receptivity where the therapist strives for an attitude of un-knowing cannot manifest where both client and therapist are pre-determined in their identities and their relationship is essentially seen as oppressive from the outset.”
― Dr Val Thomas, Cynical Therapies: Perspectives on the Antitherapeutic Nature of Critical Social Justice

“The phone in your pocket has eyes and ears, the search engines know your inner troubles, and the calendar knows your future while personal smart devices track your body’s biological processes”
― Scott Brodie Forsyth