Democracy is the menopause of Western society, the Grand Climacteric of the body social. Fascism is its middle-aged lust.
Everywhere one seeks to produce meaning, to make the world signify, to render it visible. We are not, however, in danger of lacking meaning; quite the contrary, we are gorged with meaning and it is killing us.
Every woman is like a time-zone. She is a nocturnal fragment of your journey. She brings you unflaggingly closer to the next night.
Sadder than destitution, sadder than a beggar is the man who eats alone in public. Nothing more contradicts the laws of man or beast, for animals always do each other the honor of sharing or disputing each other’s food.
Man has lost the basic skill of the ape, the ability to scratch its back. Which gave it extraordinary independence, and the liberty to associate for reasons other than the need for mutual back-scratching.
In the same way that we need statesmen to spare us the abjection of exercising power, we need scholars to spare us the abjection of learning.
The secret of theory is that truth does not exist.
Animals have no unconscious, because they have a territory. Men have only had an unconscious since they lost a territory.
Driving is a spectacular form of amnesia. Everything is to be discovered, everything to be obliterated.
Genius is childhood recaptured.
Philosophy leads to death, sociology leads to suicide.
The desert is a natural extension of the inner silence of the body.
A negative judgment gives you more satisfaction than praise, provided it smacks of jealousy.
In our culture, futility plays the role of transgression and fashion is condemned for having within it the force of the pure sign which signifies nothing.
We are all hostages, and we are all terrorists. This circuit has replaced that other one of masters and slaves, the dominating and the dominated, the exploiters and the exploited. It is worse than the one it replaces, but at least it liberates us from liberal nostalgia and the ruses of history.
The desert is no longer a landscape, it is a pure form produced by the abstraction of all others.
It is the task of radical thought, since the world is given to us unintelligibly, to make it more unintelligible, more enigmatic, more fabulous.
Challenge, and not desire, lies at the heart of seduction.
It is exciting to hear one of your fondest ideas formulated in one fell swoop, better than you could have done yourself.
The era of the political was one of anomie: crisis, violence, madness and revolution. The era of the trans-political is that of anomaly: an aberration of no consequence, contemporaneous with the event of no consequence.