Archives for February 2022

“...it is one thing to understand the meaning of Scripture, and quite another to understand the actual truth.” Spinoza (Tractatus Theologico-Politicus) "But in Shakespeare’s plays, especially after 1600, the life of the piece, of the whole business of personation, is in large part not in the gesture but in the linguistic detail; we want to understand as much of this as we can. We don’t want just to hang on to the general sense as if we were watching an opera in Czech." Frank Kermode (Shakespeare's Language) “As soon as we begin to study the scapegoat, we imagine a deliberate manipulation. We think of skillful strategists who are fully aware of the mechanisms of victimization and who … [Read more...]