Truth is undoubtedly the sort of error that cannot be refuted because it was hardened into an unalterable form in the long baking process of history.
My point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous, which is not exactly the same as bad.
Maybe the target nowadays is not to discover what we are but to refuse what we are.
Our society is not one of spectacle but of surveillance.
Why should the lamp or the house be an art object but not our life?
A critique is not a matter of saying that things are not right as they are. It is a matter of pointing out on what kinds of assumptions, what kinds of familiar, unchallenged, unconsidered modes of thought the practices that we accept rest.
The gaze that sees is the gaze that dominates.
The soul is the prison of the body.
I’m very proud that some people think that I’m a danger for the intellectual health of students. When people start thinking of health in intellectual activities, I think there is something wrong. In their opinion I am a dangerous man, since I am a crypto-Marxist, an irrationalist, a nihilist.
You may have killed God beneath the weight of all that you have said; but don’t imagine that, with all that you are saying, you will make a man that will live longer than he.
One thing in any case is certain: man is neither the oldest nor the most constant problem that has been posed for human knowledge.
What desire can be contrary to nature since it was given to man by nature itself?
As the archaeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end.
Do not think that one has to be sad in order to be militant, even though the thing one is fighting is abominable.
We are freer than we think.
It might be said that all knowledge is linked to the essential forms of cruelty.
There is no binary division to be made between what one says and what one does not say; we must try to determine the different ways of not saying things.
The lyricism of marginality may find inspiration in the image of the outlaw, the great social nomad, who prowls on the confines of a docile, frightened order.
The intellectual was rejected and persecuted at the precise moment when the facts became incontrovertible, when it was forbidden to say that the emperor had no clothes.
What strikes me is the fact that in our society, art has become something which is only related to objects, and not to individuals, or to life.