In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure and the police take the place of pirates.
Prison continues, on those who are entrusted to it, a work begun elsewhere, which the whole of society pursues on each individual through innumerable mechanisms of discipline.
What I seek is a permanent opening of possibilities.
Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order. At least spare us their morality when we write.
Nature, keeping only useless secrets, had placed within reach and in sight of human beings the things it was necessary for them to know.
Homosexuality appeared as one of the forms of sexuality when it was transposed from the practice of sodomy into a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphroditism of the soul. The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species.
The judges of normality are present everywhere. We are in the society of the teacher-judge, the doctor-judge, the educator-judge, the social worker -judge.
It is meaningless to speak in the name of – or against – Reason, Truth, or Knowledge.
The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body.
Modern society is perverse, not in spite of its puritanism or as if from a backlash provoked by its hypocrisy; it is in actual fact, and directly, perverse.
I don’t feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am.
There is not one but many silences, and they are an integral part of the strategies that underlie and permeate discourses.
Power is tolerable only on condition that it mask a substantial part of itself. Its success is proportional to its ability to hide its own mechanisms.
If repression has indeed been the fundamental link between power, knowledge, and sexuality since the classical age, it stands to reason that we will not be able to free ourselves from it except at a considerable cost.
Madness, in its wild, untamable words, proclaims its own meaning; in its chimeras, it utters its secret truth.
When man deploys the arbitrary nature of his madness, he confronts the dark necessity of the world; the animal that haunts his nightmares and his nights of privation is his own nature, which will lay bare hell’s pitiless truth.
One makes war to win, not because it’s just.
Madness designates the equinox between the vanity of night’s hallucinations and the non-being of light’s judgments.
In writing, the point is not to manifest or exalt the act of writing, nor is it to pin a subject within language; it is, rather, a question of creating a space into which the writing subject constantly disappears.
Psychoanalysis can unravel some of the forms of madness; it remains a stranger to the sovereign enterprise of unreason. It can neither limit nor transcribe, nor most certainly explain, what is essential in this enterprise.