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.
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.