Nations sometimes flourish by denying the crimes that brought them into being. Only when the original invasion, occupation, extermination or usurpation has been safely thrust into the political unconscious can sovereignty feel secure.
Interpretation
This quote discusses how nations can prosper by ignoring their own dark histories of violence and oppression, achieving a false sense of security in their sovereignty.
Terry Eagleton's quote reflects on the troubling tendency of nations to prosper while conveniently forgetting the injustices and crimes that led to their formation. By relegating these historical transgressions to the 'political unconscious,' nations can maintain a facade of strength and unity, but this obscured truth creates a precarious security for their sovereignty, highlighting the complex relationship between power and memory in political life.
In practice
In a political debate about national identity, one might cite this quote to emphasize the importance of acknowledging historical injustices.
One side-effect of the so-called war on terror has been a crisis of liberalism. This is not only a question of alarmingly illiberal legislation, but a more general problem of how the liberal state deals with its anti-liberal enemies.
All communication involves faith; indeed, some linguisticians hold that the potential obstacles to acts of verbal understanding are so many and diverse that it is a minor miracle that they take place at all.
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Poetry is the most subtle of the literary arts, and students grow more ingenious by the year at avoiding it. If they can nip around Milton, duck under Blake and collapse gratefully into the arms of Jane Austen, a lot of them will.
Works of art cannot save us. They can simply render us more sensitive to what needs to be repaired.
For thousands of years, we have gained the power to control the world outside us but not to control the world inside. You could stop a river from flowing, but you could not stop your body from becoming old. You could kill mosquitoes, but you could not kill annoying thoughts buzzing inside your head.
Let us live in as small a circle as we will, we are either debtors or creditors before we have had time to look around.
Men build society and society builds men.
I sat in the gradually chilling room, thinking of my whole past the way a drowning man is supposed to, and it seemed part of the present, part of the gray cold and the beggar woman without a face and the moulting birds frozen to their own filth in the Orangerie. I know now I was in the throes of some small glandular crisis, a sublimated bilious attack, a flick from the whip of melancholia, but then it was terrifying...nameless...
In the affluent society, no useful distinction can be made between luxuries and necessities.
According to the estimate of a prominent advertising firm, above 90 per cent, of the earning capacity of the prominent nostrums is represented by their advertising. And all this advertising is based on the well-proven theory of the public's pitiable ignorance and gullibility in the vitally important matter of health.
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