Terry Eagleton: Quotes about reason

Terry Eagleton is British writer, academic and educator. Explore interesting quotes on sense.

Terry Eagleton: 114 quotes2 likes

“In conscious life, we achieve some sense of ourselves as reasonably unified, coherent selves, and without this action would be impossible. But all this is merely at the ‘imaginary’ level of the ego, which is no more than the tip of the iceberg of the human subject known to psychoanalysis. The ego is function or effect of a subject which is always dispersed, never identical with itself, strung out along the chains of the discourses which constitute it.”

(2011) Literary Theory: An Introduction. p. 147
2010s

“It is important to see that, in the critique of ideology, only those interventions will work which make sense to the mystified subject itself.”

1990s, Ideology (1991)

“Understanding is always in some sense retrospective, which is what Hegel meant by remarking that the owl of Minerva flies only at night.”

Afterword, p. 190
1980s, Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983)

“What perished in the Soviet Union was Marxist only in the sense that the Inquisition was Christian”

2000s, Preface to the Routledge Classics Edition Marxism and Literary Theory (2002)

“The most compelling confirmation of Marx's theory of history is late capitalist society. There is a sense in which this case is becoming truer as time passes.”

Source: 2010s, Why Marx Was Right (2011), Chapter 5, p. 115

“Schizophrenic language has in this sense an interesting resemblance to poetry.”

Source: 1980s, Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983), Chapter 5, p. 138