“Insofar as what characterized this semitico-western-modern modernity was basically a negation of the human, I would tend to talk of ‘re-emerging humanisms’ rather than ‘emerging humanisms’. Thus it would be about the re-emergence of something that for a long time had been blanked out, forgotten, even denied. Along with Rafael Argullol, I am also thinking of a form of polytheism, paganism, pantheism, something that connects with what is structurally plural, what is the entirety of being versus schizophrenia, splitting and separation. It is an archaism in its etymological sense: arché in Greek means what is fundamental, primary. Of course we are talking about the archaism that treats the human animal seriously. And when I say ‘human animal’ I am pointing to a semantic closeness between humus and human. In the human there is obviously humus: affects, passions as opposed to what was purely cognitive, purely rational” - Michel Maffesoli, “Utopia or Utopias in the Gaps: From the Political to the ‘Domestic’”

“I cannot say if my background gave me any advantage as a theorist, but it certainly sustained an intellectual sensitivity that made me suspicious of any kind of power, any sort of abstract theory, and any kind of moralism. All of this is consolidated in what Max Weber called “the logic of the duty of being”: a statement of intellectual sensibility that is in synchrony with a common untheoretical anarchism, the knowing in one’s bones that, although the princes can change (ministers of either the Right or Left), they remain agents of power.” - Michel Maffesoli, The Shadow of Dionysus