Theory & Practice

by Michelle de Kretser

She had Aristotle’s categorisation of human activities in mind, she said. ‘He distinguishes theoria, which increases knowledge, from praxis, which is action-for-itself. In between those two comes poiesis, which is action-for-making. Poiesis is creative. Make a film, paint, write a poem. Write back to Woolf.’

What politics asked of us was to care about people we couldn’t see into, and the difficulty of that was the difficulty of life.