Term
Authority
used in 221 texts across the archive
“The declarative sentence was always the Name of God, as we can see if we consider that to make a claim about anything is to assume that some authority would, “in the long run,” be able to authenticate that claim, even if no such authority is actually available or imaginable in any concrete way. To utter a statement is to assume you and your interlocutors will be able to continue to speak and/or act in the way licensed by that statement (to look at something, to remedy some situation, to cease some activity), i.e., to understand it; to assume that is to assume something like a guardian of the shared understanding that allows for further discourse and action, i.e., God, even if He hasn’t been named yet and in a more conventional sense never will be.”
In use
“That is not how moral authority is claimed; that is how it is surrendered.”
“Post-ritualistic patriarchal authority is established as a tributary of monarchical authority, which in turn models itself on the former.”
“Institutional position and authority are essentially constitutive gestural elements, situating one person closer to the center or more “vertically” than another.”
Key texts