“There are too many cogitations on Theory.... it is the malady of the epoch... Into the fire with Levi-Strauss and Michel Foucault!”

— Jean Dubuffet

critical quote in Dubuffet's letter to Jacques Berne, 22October 1970, p. 190; as cited in 'Dubuffet, Lévi-Strauss, and the Idea of Art Brut', Kent Minturn http://www.columbia.edu/cu/arthistory/faculty/Minturn/Dubuffet-Levi-Strauss.pdf, from RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, No. 46, Polemical Objects (Autumn, 2004), p. 256
Dubuffet complains that Levi-Strauss had become too theoretical
1960-70's

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Jean Dubuffet 46

sculptor from France 1901–1985

John Leonard (1939–2008) American critic, writer, and commentator

This Pen For Hire (Doubleday, 1973, ISBN 0-385-03923-9), p. 6
Not Enough Blood, Not Enough Gore, The New York Times, 7 July 1970 http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/03/01/home/vidal-sisters.html

“Henri Poincaré thought the theory of infinite sets a grave malady and pathologic. "Later generations," he said in 1908, "will regard set theory as a disease from which one has recovered.”

Morris Kline (1908–1992) American mathematician

[Morris Kline, Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty, http://books.google.com/books?id=RNwnUL33epsC&pg=PA203, 1982, Oxford University Press, 978-0-19-503085-3, 203]

“So at bottom Foucault's enterprise seems stuck on the horns of a huge epistemological dilemma: if it tells the truth, then all knowledge is suspect in its pretense of objectivity; but in that case, how can the theory itself vouch for its truth? It's like the famous paradox about the Cretean Liar--and Foucault seemed quite unable to get out of it”

José Guilherme Merquior book Foucault

which explains why he didn't even try to face it
Source: Foucault (1985), p. 147

“This book, admirable in so many respects, power in its break and style, is even more intimidating for me in that, having formely had the good fortune to study under Michel Foucault, I retain the consciousness of an admiring and grateful disciple. Now, the disciple's consciousness, when he starts, I would not say to dispute, but to engage in dialogue with the master or, better, to articulate the interminable and silent dialogue which made him into a disciple-this disciple's consciousness is an unhappy consciousness.”

Jacques Derrida book Writing and Difference

Cogito and The History of Madness (Routledge classics edition)
Writing and Difference (1978)

“Let the rabbit of free enterprise out of its velveteen bag and too many people would have to be fired, too much idiocy exposed to the light of judgment or ridicule, too much vanity sacrificed to the fires of efficiency. Such a catastrophe obviously would threaten the American way of life, to say nothing of the belief in free markets.”

Lewis H. Lapham (1935) American journalist

Source: Money And Class In America (1989), Chapter 9, Coined Souls, p. 232

“Historically, Garton Ash belongs to the last levy of the Cold War, a cohort fired by an uncomplicated anti-Communism. His staunchness made him a natural candidate for recruitment to MI6, which propositioned him early on, as it had Ascherson in his time.”

Perry Anderson (1938) British historian

Source: Spectrum: From Right to Left in the World of Ideas (2005), Ch 3. "Dreams of Central Europe, Timothy Garton Ash" (1999), p. 65

“Of all god-gifted dispensers of joy, Johann Strauss is to me the most endearing. I willingly admit to having sometimes conducted the Perpetuum Mobile with far more pleasure than many a four movement symphony.”

Richard Strauss (1864–1949) German composer and orchestra director

Recollections and Reflections

“Too many times we’re looking for ways to get around deep waters and dangerous fires, rather than through them. Has this ever been your experience?”

James MacDonald (1960) American pastor

Source: Always True (Moody, 2011), p. 106

“American institutionalists were not theoretical but anti-theoretical…. Without a theory they had nothing to pass on except a mass of descriptive material waiting for a theory, or a fire.”

Ronald H. Coase (1910–2013) British economist and author

Ronald H. Coase (1984). "The New Institutional Economics." Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics 140 (March): 299-231; p. 230; As cited in: Malcolm Rutherford (1996), Institutions in Economics: The Old and the New Institutionalism. p. 9
1960s-1980s

“Let us recall that formerly, and at no remote epoch… all the unusual phenomena were regarded as so many signs of celestial wrath.”

Pierre-Simon Laplace book Philosophical Essay on Probabilities

p, 125
Philosophical Essay on Probabilities (1902)

“There are too many cogitations on Theory.... it is the malady of the epoch... Into the fire with Levi-Strauss and Michel Foucault!”

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Jean Dubuffet 46

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