"I'm going to close with the notion of 'utopian interruptions.' What I'm talking about is always tied to failure. It's no accident that the figures that I invoke - Beckett has an aesthetic for failure, doesn't he? So does Chekhov. So does Kafka. That wonderful letter that Benjamin writes to Gershom Scholem, July 1938: 'You'll never understand the purity and the beauty of Kafka if you don't view him as a failure.' […] Prophetic religion is an individual and collective performative praxis of maladjustment to greed, fear, and bigotry. For prophetic religion the condition of truth is to allow suffering to speak. Yet it is always tied to some failure - always. [...] because the powers-that-be are not just mighty, but they're very clever and they dilute and incorporate in very seductive ways - or sometimes they just kill you!"
Cornel West, "Prophetic Religion and the Future of Capitalist Civilization" in The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere, ed. Eduardo Mendieta and Jonathan Vanantwerpen (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 99.
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