> "There's a world of difference between settling some context for yourself--and discovering 'an identity'. For instance, to be brought up as the child of one set of parents, then much later to stumble upon the fact that these were not one's original parents at all, might well be assumed to generate a 'crisis of identity'. Yet it can do the very opposite--the previous long years of unease become immediately explicable, and the suddenly revealed genealogical lacuna ushers in an illuminating confirmation as to why things were as they were.... This distinction between acquiring historical knowledge about oneself and acquiring a new identity isn't mere semantic fussiness. I underline it because it underpins this example: The promise of an identity was a consolation prise held out to those born in England (under more restrictive terms than Scots law) from knowing anything about their original parentage before the legislative reforms of 1975. But this newly proposed identity involved a prospect of 'being reunited' which could be dashed, while its inevitable disappointments would then become hard to acknowledge in a culture of originary identity which so emphasised its curative powers to heal the torment of blankness. Hard-won realism may dictate a scepticism towards identity, since it may, in all honesty, be able to locate its truest identity only within its dispersal. This is not to imply that to have access to one's personal history isn't crucial. Its earlier legal suppression was certainly a cruelty. But the cruelty lay, not in its refusal of an identity, but in the obliteration of a history."

Denise Riley, The Words of Selves (Stanford University Press, 2000), p. 135.

> "It is the need for love as proof of its existence which makes it so frighteningly destructive, enraged by ingratitude and by attention to its promises rather than to its promise, and which makes it incapable of seeing that it is destructive and frightening. It imagines its evils to come from outside. So it feels watched, isolated in its mounting of waters, denying its shame with mechanical lungs of pride, calling its wrath upon the wrong objects."

Stanley Cavell, "The Avoidance of Love," in Must We Mean What We Say? (Cambridge University Press, 1976), p. 345.

> "The artist will not be so wholly 'in his art', nor will his art have so much hold on him, as in the period of his life when he was too poor to transfer 'its meanest drudgery to others'. When he is above 'this mechanical part' of his business, his art will no longer be 'the delight of his inmost thoughts'--the idea of art as pure still being is particularly strong here. Physical, mechanical drudgery--the plod plod of the workshop--is an essential component of the dynamic of creativity."

Tom Paulin, The Day-Star of Liberty: William Hazlitt's Radical Style (London: Faber & Faber, 1998), 114-115.

> "The historian must react! Here reaction is not a tool of explanation. The word indicates only the task, the spurring of a resistance and the invention of a response. To react is to act spontaneously. Presented in this way, reaction is the movement--once changes that cannot be mastered have been acknowledged, once the weight of what appears to be an established fact has been recognized-- that does not resign itself. Knowing only its opposition, without yet knowing how to manifest this opposition or how to overcome the enormous adversity of the unjust and the inexplicable, it does not consent to having things remain as they stand."

Jean Starobinski, Action and Reaction: The Life and Adventures of a Couple, trans. Sophie Hawkes (New York: Zone Boks, 2003), 364.

> "The work of the philosopher consists in assembling reminders for a particular purpose."

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan, 1953), sec. 127.

> "Democracy requires that at some moments, and in some respects always, one will cease to be. One will be not only ruled and overruled, but made absent. This, like death, comes whether one accepts it or not, to both the willing and the unwilling. In these little daily deaths, one is dissolved back into a common matrix, one becomes material, a resource. One can be, one will be remade. Something--an aspect or a part--will be found useful, the rest superfluous. That which is found useful may be appropriated, but useful or superfluous the disaggregated self will no longer be one's own. This dissolution and remaking is work, moreover, outside one's own will, over which one has no control."

Anne Norton, "Evening Land," in Democracy and Vision: Sheldon Wolin and the Vicissitudes of the Political, ed. Aryeh Botwinick and William E. Connolly (Princeton, 2001), p. 166.