speaking of

"I have no authority whatsoever to talk to you about religion and experience [...] It is from this very impossibility of speaking to my friends and to my own kin about a religion that matters to me, that I want to start tonight: I want to begin this essay by this hesitation, this weakness, this stuttering, by this speech impairment. Religion, in my tradition, in my corner of the world, has become impossible to enunciate."

Bruno Latour, "Thou Shall Not Freeze Frame"

Note Latour's explicit debt to James's sense of deferral, his self-consciousness about speaking at the beginning of Varieties and in the letters, his invocation of Whitman's "To You"; also c.f. William Connolly, "often, though, the differences between liberalism and secularism are those of inflection"; Stanley Cavell, "in philosophy it is the sound which makes all the difference."

the disorder of things

Jacques Rancière, Let Mots de l'histoire (The Names of History):

"The human and social sciences are children of the scientific age: the age of a certain number of decisive revolutions in the fundamental sciences; but also the age of scientific belief, the age that conceives of rationality that has no necessary connection to the revolutions in question. But--we forget this too easily--the age of science is also that of literature, that in which the latter names itself as such and separates the rigor of its own action from the simple enchantments of fiction, as with rules on the division of poetic genres and procedures suited to belles lettres. It is finally--we 'know' this more and more--the age of democracy, the age in which democracy appears, even in the eyes of those who combat or fear it, as the social destiny of modern politics; it is the age of broad masses and great regularities that lend themselves to the calculations of science, but also that of a new disorder and arbitrariness that disturb objective rigors." (8-9)

Eugène Delacroix, "La Liberté guidant le peuple" (1831)