I suppose I inhabit the relatively decentered position of a student in the Humanities.

Nietzsche on the need for a genealogical critique of morals:

“Let  us articulate this new demand: we need a critique of moral values, the value of the values themselves must first be called into question – and for that there is a need knowledge of the conditions and circumstances in which they grew, under which they evolved and changed (morality as a consequence, as symptom, as mask, as tartufferie, as illness, as misunderstanding; but also morality as cause, as remedy, as stimulant, as restraint, as poison), a knowledge of a kind that has never yet existed or even been desired. One has taken the value of these “values” as given, as factual, as beyond all question; one has hitherto never doubted or hesitated in the slightest degree in supposing “the good man” to be greater value than “the evil man,” of greater value in the sense of furthering the advancement and prosperity of man in general (the future of man included). But what if the reverse were true?” (20, Genealogy of Morals)

Foucault on the setting to work of genealogy:

“1. Genealogy is gray, meticulous, and patiently documentary. It operates on a field of entangled and confused parchments on documents that have been scratched over and recopied many times.” (Language, Counter-memory, Practice, 139)

“A genealogy of values, morality, and asceticism, and knowledge will never confuse itself with a quest for their ‘origins,’ will never neglect as inaccessible the vicissitudes of history. On the contrary, it will cultivate the details and accidents that accompany every beginning; it will be scrupulously attentive to their petty malice; it will await their emergence, once umasked, as the face of the other…The genealogist needs history to dispel the chimeras of origin, somewhat in the manner of the pious philosopher who needs a doctor to exorcise the shadow of his soul.” (144)

Gramsci on the study of philosophy:

“Having first shown that everyone is a philosopher, though in her one way and unconsciously, since even in the slightest manifestation of any intellectual activity whatever, in ‘language’, there is contained specific conception of the world, one then moves on to the second level, which is that of awareness and criticism.”

“Note II. Philosophy cannot be separated from the history of philosophy, nor can culture from the history of culture. In the most immediate and relevant sense, one cannot be a philosopher by which I mean have a critical and coherent conception of the world, without having a consciousness of its historicity, of the phase of development which it represents and of the fact that it contradicts other conceptions or elements of other conceptions. One’s conception of the world is a response to certain specific problems posed by reality, which are quite specific and ‘original’ in their immediate relevance.” (324, Prison Notebooks)

Simone de Beauvoir on becoming:

“One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. No biological, psychological, or economic fate determines the figure that the human female presents in society; it is civilization as a whole that produces this creature, intermediate between male and eunuch, which is described as feminine. Only the intervention of someone else can establish an individual as an Other.” (Second Sex, 267)

Frantz Fanon, “The Black Man and Language”

“To speak means being able to use a certain syntax and possessing the morphology and such a language but it means above all assuming a culture and bearing the weight of a civilization.”

“All colonized people – in other words, people in whom an inferiority complex has taken root, whose local cultural originality has been committed to the grave – position themselves in relation to the civilizing language: i.e., the metropolitan culture. The more the colonized has assimilated the cultural values of the metropolis, the more he will have escaped the bush. The more he rejects his blackness and the bush, the whiter he will become. “

“There is a dramatic conflict in what is called the human sciences. Should we postulate a typical human reality and describe its psychic modalities, taking into account only the imperfections, or should we not rather make a constant, solid endeavor to understand man in an ever changing light?” (6, Black Skin White Masks)