Activity

For instance, in your work in linguistics, you use concepts like ‘freedom’, ‘spontaneity’, creativity’, ‘innovation’ and so on. Is that connected in any way with your political views? Or is it just accidental?

A little of each. It is accidental in that the way these concepts arise in the study…

So this means taking a second alternative. We aim to try and keep control over the laboratories but to try and control also what kind of research is done in them. Of course, this is difficult, because there are limited funds for anything except military research. It brings the problem of establishi…

Is a positive revolutionary culture conceivable today? For me, this is the most difficult problem posed by your question. My frank opinion is that everything within bourgeois culture that will be surpassed by a revolutionary culture will nevertheless ultimately also be preserved by it. I do not bel…

Yes, because plays are something else again. For me the theatre is essentially a myth. Take the example of a petty bourgeois and his wife who quarrel with each other the whole time. If you tape their disputes, you will record not only the two of them, but the petty bourgeoisie and its world, what s…

Reading Flaubert one is plunged into persons with whom one is in complete disaccord, who are irksome. Sometimes one feels with them, and then somehow they suddenly reject one’s sympathy and one finds oneself once again antagonistic to them. Obviously it was this that fascinated me, because it made …