Alen

“The entire destiny of modern linguistics is in fact determined by Saussure's inaugural act through which he separates the ‘external’ elements of linguistics from the ‘internal’ elements, and, by reserving the title of linguistics for the latter, excludes from it all the investigations which establish a relationship between language and anthropology, the political history of those who speak it, or even the geography of the domain where it is spoken, because all of these things add nothing to a knowledge of language taken in itself. Given that it sprang from the autonomy attributed to language in relation to its social conditions of production, reproduction and use, structural linguistics could not become the dominant social science without exercising an ideological effect, by bestowing the appearance of scientificity on the naturalization of the products of history, that is, on symbolic objects.”
― Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power

“By giving full expression to the contradiction between civil society and the state, the French Revolution radically transformed both its terms. To put it differently: dualism was not abolished but, rather, displaced within the space delimited by the two poles of the contradiction. This created a new split between 'man', a member of civil society, and the 'citizen', a member of the state. It is only by 'abstracting' from his condition as man and his insertion into the organization of civil society that the political subject can become a citizen and make his entry into the political community: it is only as a 'sheer, blank individual' who accepts the fact that the political is divorced from the social that he can take part in the life of the state, which is based on the freedom and equality of its citizens.
(...)
The political state is 'abstract' in the sense suggested by the etymology of the word; it appears as the residue or the 'precipitate' of the constitutive movement by means of which civil society transcends its own limits to attain political existence, while leaving its internal differences intact, or, rather, transforming them into mere 'differences of social life' 'without significance in political life'.
The state is incapable of substantially affecting the contents of civil society, for it is, precisely, a product of civil society's abstraction from itself.”
― Stathis Kouvelakis, Philosophy and Revolution: From Kant to Marx

“The event, in its emergence, poses its own premises, determining that they were the conditions for its realization. This transition is always the result of a salto mortale, which is a creative act in the sense that it gives the preceding links in the chain of events their meaning.”
― Stathis Kouvelakis, Philosophy and Revolution: From Kant to Marx

“It has been observed that I show hardly any interest in talking about myself. It is hard for me to disentangle my own person from the social processes, the ideas and activities in which it has shared, which matter more than it does and which give it value. I do not think of myself as at all an individualist: rather as a 'personalist', in that I view human personality as a supreme value, only integrated in society and history. The experience and thought of one man have no significance that deserves to last, except in this sense.”
― Victor Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary