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.
The most defenseless tenderness and the bloodiest of powers have a similar need of confession. Western man has become a confessing animal.
Justice must always question itself, just as society can exist only by means of the work it does on itself and on its institutions.
The court is the bureaucracy of the law. If you bureaucratise popular justice then you give it the form of a court.
One should try to locate power at the extreme of its exercise, where it is always less legal in character.
It is over life, throughout its unfolding, that power establishes its dominion; death is power’s limit, the moment that escapes it; death becomes the most secret aspect of existence, the most private.
If I won a few billion in the lottery, I would create an institute where people who would like to die would come spend a weekend, a week, or a month in pleasure, under drugs perhaps, in order to disappear afterward, as if erased.
Since the Fall, man had accepted labor as a penance and for its power to work redemption. It was not a law of nature which forced man to work, but the effect of a curse.