Freedom of conscience entails more dangers than authority and despotism.
For millenia, man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal with the additional capacity for a political existence; modern man is an animal whose politics places his exitence as a living being in question.
Today, criminal justice functions and justifies itself only by this perpetual reference to something other than itself, by this unceasing reinscription in non-juridical systems.
Chance does not speak essentially through words nor can it be seen in their convolution. It is the eruption of language, its sudden appearance. It’s not a night twinkle with stars, an illuminated sleep, nor a drowsy vigil. It is the very edge of consciousness.
Where can an interrogation lead us which does not follow reason in its horizontal course, but seeks to retrace in time that constant vertically which confronts European culture with what it is not?
Power is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society.
Politics is not what it pretends to be, the expression of a collective will. Politics breathes well only where this will is multiple, hesitant, confused, and obscure even to itself.
At every moment, step by step, one must confront what one is thinking and saying with what one is doing, what one is.
The best moment of love is when the lover leaves in the taxi.
One cannot attend to oneself, take care of oneself, without a relationship to another person.
You know the difference between a real science and a pseudoscience? A real science recognizes and accepts its own history without feeling attacked. When you tell a psychiatrist his mental institution came from a lazar house, he becomes infuriated.
Visibility is a trap.
The language of psychiatry is a monologue of reason about madness.
Unreason is in the same relation to reason as dazzlement to the brightness of daylight itself.
Life itself was only futility, vain words, a squabble of cap and bells.
To work is to undertake to think something other than what one has thought before.
What is constitutive is the action that divides madness, and not the science elaborated once this division is made.
But the guilty person is only one of the targets of punishment. For punishment is directed above all at others, at all the potentially guilty.
There is object proof that homosexuality is more interesting than heterosexuality. It’s that one knows a considerable number of heterosexuals who would wish to become homosexuals, whereas one knows very few homosexuals who would really like to become heterosexuals.
Politics and the economy are not things that exist, or illusions, or ideologies. They are things that do not exist and yet which are inscribed in reality and fall under a regime of truth dividing the true and the false.