Arrogative

But I am not seeing humility and self-denyall and acknowledgement of their own unworthinesse of such things as they aimed at, nor mortification, not of the body (for that's sufficiently insisted upon) but of the more spiritual arrogative life of the soul, that subtill ascribing that to our selves that is Gods, for all is Gods; […]

Those who have passed the middle of life, and are entitled by the experience of years to comment and criticise, if not to judge and counsel, often yield this privilge to younger censors arrogative of pretensions very willingly relinquished by their seniors; for a long acquaintance with human nature oftener inspires diffidence than self-reliance, when we have learnt how insufficient is worldly knowledge, not only to predict human conduct, but to interpret it.

Proper – property – appropriate: signally an emphasis on self-identity, self-aggrandizement and arrogative dominance, these words aptly characterize the logic of the proper according to Cixous.

And he does so in order to counterbalance the arrogative human assumption of being among living creatures the only creature with a rational soul.

At first glance, the sheer size of the docklands project—its self-consciously monumental aesthetic and the arrogative way in which it was developed with little concern for the historical patterns of identity, habitation and territoriality that already existed there – recalls a totalising, Corbusian approach to urban space.

Adoption was either before the pretor or the people (7), and either arrogative, as where the adopted has no natural father, in which case the parties mutually asked each other if they were willing, the one to be the father, the other to become the son, and the assent confirmed it; or, adoptive, where one father bestowed his son upon another.

Yet pace Arendt, strictly speaking, political action as freedom applies only to the moment of arrogative creation and initiation. For although the ur- political act is in one sense unconstrained and willed, it is simultaneously unavoidable, and its enactment does not guarantee the subsequent freedom Arendt aimed at.

Life is finally loose, one could say, liberated from its social constrains and sincere in its necessities, its insistence and its arrogative demands, but McCarthy also reveals the implications of life's liberation and, by the same token, unmasks any misplaced romanticisations regarding its disavowal in the polis: