Blase J. Cupich Quotes

Critics and academics often employ theories and philosophers in order to help them understand and dissect movies and books.

I like Jacques Derrida; I think he's funny. I like my philosophy with a few jokes and puns. I know that that offends other philosophers; they think he's not taking things seriously, but he comes up with some marvellous puns. Why shouldn't you have a bit of fun while dealing with the deepest issues of the mind?

The discourse on the Text should itself be nothing other than text, research, textual activity, since the Text is that social space which leaves no language safe, outside, nor any subject of the enunciation in position as judge, master, analyst, confessor, decoder. The theory of the Text can coincide only with a practice of writing.

As soon as we cease to believe in such an engineer and in a discourse which breaks with the received historical discourse, and as soon as we admit that every finite discourse is bound by a certain bricolage and that the engineer and the scientist are also species of bricoleurs , then the very idea of bricolage is menaced and the difference in which it took on its meaning breaks down.

I question: do we really understand the differences between modernist and postmodernist?

I don't read novels, but my semiotics study influenced everything about the way I read and edit and write.

The book is not simply the object that one holds in one's hands, and it cannot remain within the little parallelpiped that contains it: its unity is variable and relative. As soon as one questions that unity, it loses its self-evidence; it indicates itself, constructs itself, only on the basis of a complex field of discourse.

Poststructuralism. . . . is a form of literary criticism that uses elaborate wordplay to prove its central premise, that all language is internally contradictory and has no fixed meaning.

Being that can be understood is language.

I hate intellectual discussion. When I hear the words 'phenomenology' or 'structuralism', I reach for my buck knife.

Given Loughner's obsession with meaninglessness and language, maybe Foucault & Derrida deserve some fault here, too.

We are symbols, and inhabit symbols.

When does an object become a symbol? All I know is you cannot force it.

I'm interested in philosophical psychology, people like Nietzsche, Freud, Alcan, Foucault, Derrida.

I confess I take perverse delight as a theologian in the controversies surrounding postmodernism.

When I was in college, I was a semiotics major, which is this hopelessly pretentious body of French literary theory.

Literary theory has become a parody of science, generating its own arcane jargon. In the process, tragically, it discourages love of literature for its own sake.

I used to teach at Yale, which was at one time a center of postmodernist literary theory. Derrida was there. Paul de Man was there.

One of the reasons I like Barthes more than other writers of that ilk is because he had a literary quality.

Jacques Derrida is a very important thinker and philosopher who has made serious contributions to both philosophy and literary criticism. Roland Barthes is the one I feel most affinity for, and Michel Foucault, well, his writing influenced my novel, 'Middlesex.'

I grew up in the heat of '70s postmodern fiction and post-Godard films, and there was this idea that what mattered was the theory or meta in art.

Revelation and the nature of truth must be viewed in reference to the structure of language.

I always wanted to put a sign up on the road to Yale saying, 'Beware: Deconstruction Ahead.'

Symbols are important. It depends on how they're used.

Liberation from meaning leaves us skeptical of truth itself, comfortable only to acknowledge 'your truth' and 'my truth,' confident only in the reality of subjective feeling rather than objective fact.