Divided Subjects epigraphs
I have had to remove these from my book manuscript because I do not have copyright permission for them and it is too late to get it. Traps for young players. But I didn’t want to let them go to waste...
The history of the world is not the theatre of happiness. Periods of happiness are blank pages; for they are periods of harmony, when the contradiction is missing.
- G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History
What can be termed the truth of each society is its truth in history, for itself but also for all the others, for the paradox of history consists in the fact that every civilization and every epoch, because it is particular and dominated by its own obsessions, manages to evoke and to unveil new meanings in the societies that preceded or surround it. But they can never exhaust or permanently fix their object, even if only because they themselves sooner or later become the object of interpretation.
- Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society
Past, present and future are strung together . . . on the thread of the wish that runs through them.
- Sigmund Freud, “Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming”
The task to be accomplished is not the conservation of the past, but the redemption of the hopes of the past.
- Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, The Dialectic of Enlightenment
I . . . want history as a source of a liberating certainty that anything could happen.
- Meaghan Morris, Too Soon Too Late: History in Popular Culture
It is a peculiarity of revolutionary moments that they force us to revise our sense of time, stretching us between past and future more acutely than usual, as we comb backwards for the seeds, the first signs of the upheaval, and look forwards, in exhilarated and terrified anticipation, to see what is to come.
- Jacqueline Rose, Women in Dark Times
