Benjamin Britton > Recent Status Updates

“How meager my library is! But i truly have a great love for it, and the day I collect few pesos I propose to pay for some (more) though I still owe money.”

“Renato is and will be perpetually present among us as he will be in the hearts of all Cubans. He embodied idealism, dignity, character, and set an unforgettable example. He knew that those who fall for the causes will never die.”

“It is difficult to keep the mortal hatreds that seek to invade my heart at bay. I don’t know anyone who has suffered more than I have in these past days; they have been a terrible and decisive test, capable of extinguishing the last ounce of kindness and purity in my soul.

“What is important now is to save our principles; everything is saved if our principles are saved ; from the greatest depth of the rot the redeeming ideal will surge will surge forth, purified and clean.”

“What is measured at the hour of battle for freedom is not the number of the enemy’s weapons but the number of virtues of the people...
The masses are ready; all they need is to be shown the true path.”

“It means to see that the personal and social are interconnected, and to understand that if we suffocate our personal longings for recognition, we will suffocate our hope for social transformation as well.”

“Gender polarity deprives women of their subjectivity and men of an other to recognize them. But the loss of recognition between men and women as equal subjects is only one consequence of gender domination.”

“The three pillars of oedipal theory- the primacy of the wish for oneness, the mother’s embodiment of this regressive force, and the necessity of paternal intervention-all combine to create the paradox that the only liberation is paternal domination.”

“But what do we find if we examine the history of political economy? We find thinkers who have merely thought within the limits of their present, unable to run ahead of their times.”


Louis Althusser

“The most serious of these misconstructions is the blinding effect of the question: it has sometimes prevented any perception that Capital really does contain a theory of history which is indispensable for any understanding of the theory of the economy.”

“The two universes, the hyperreal and the infrareal, seem to interpenetrate but are light years away from each other. The deepest misery and conclaves of luxury coexist in the same geographic space”

“The two universes, the hyperreal and the infrareal, seem to interpenetrate but are light years away from each other. The deepest misery and conclaves of luxury coexist in the same geographic space”

“The forces of history, economics, law, police, governments, and leaders have all aligned against Haitian cane cutters. They are scapegoats for the fact that one in eight Dominicans has been forced to seek work and a better life elsewhere. Officially, Haitians and Dominicans can never mix.”

“While Carnival symbolically breaks society’s rules, it also subtly reinforces them. Behind the whole spectacle is an undercurrent of sexual tension, role reversal, and harmless release of violent urges. In theory it is all in fun, but the underlying message is that the voiceless are allowed this luxury only once a year.”

“when rigour is lacking, the more talkative and self-important discourses which deport Marx the philosopher entirely into the very ideology that he fought and rejected depend precisely on this kind of detail. We shall soon see examples of this, where the non-thought of a minute silence becomes the charter for non-thought discourses, i.e., ideological discourses.”

“It was gone.
And in Its wake the silence seemed very loud.”

“Producing scientific knowledge means acting with disorder as if it were an order, using it as an order: this is why the structure of science is never transparent, but opaque, divided, incomplete, material.”