The Culture of Literacy Quotes

“Ideology is the arrogance of the finite subject who speaks as if he were the ultimate legislator, as if she had been appointed the final judge. The best prevention against the inveiglement of ideology is the practice of reading, in which the calculable well-formedness of various logics is constantly being fractured by a pervasive textuality.”
― Wlad Godzich, The Culture of Literacy

“De Man's challenge to modernity was to put forward a new mode of subject constitution, not one that relied upon the foundational operation of Cartesian radical doubt, but one that emerged in the act of reading itself, an act in which the subject, far from establishing his or her autonomy through the mastery of the text or the imposition of meaning on it, discovers the radical otherness of this text and his or her unredeemable indebtedness to it. The vaunted autonomy of the subject is, for de Man, but the forgetfulness of its foundational heteronomy.”
― Wlad Godzich, The Culture of Literacy