Both the 18th and the early 20th centuries, however, feature brilliant attacks on originality, and it's no doubt one of the hallmarks of romanticism to care about originality and suppose with a sometimes naive spontaneity that it's all that matters.

I do identify the escape hatch through which Foucault eludes the charge that he himself is an author/authority, hence a tyrant. He establishes the category of "founder of discursivity" for the authors he likes. Slippery, perhaps, but you can see what he means.

I make a distinction between theory and methodology, the latter being the practical deployment of a premise. Theory on the contrary may well be applied, hence becomes methodology without a hitch, but isn't necessarily practical at all.

The basic change in the landscape since my salad days started with the defensive rediscovery of history and politics by all the theoretically-oriented academics in the late seventies and eighties.

Authors we are in danger of accepting as gospel, whereas founders of discursivity provide permeable ideas that we can elaborate upon in a tradition of constructive dialogue.

Although I don't disagree that utterances express desires and try to make complexities precise, I actually don't think at all that any of our efforts to speak and mean things are ultimately why we speak.

The effect of reading literary non-fiction that matters most to me is when the coin drops, and this happens in the company of the great, mercuric, encyclopedic minds: Empson, Kenneth Burke, Northrop Frye.