Man does not exist prior to language, either as a species or as an individual.
Thus every writer’s motto reads: mad I cannot be, sane I do not deign to be, neurotic I am.
Why is it better to last than to burn?
The skyscraper establishes the block, the block creates the street, the street offers itself to man.
The author enters into his own death, writing begins.
There are people who think that wrestling is an ignoble sport. Wrestling is not sport, it is a spectacle, and it is no more ignoble to attend a wrestled performance of suffering than a performance of the sorrows of Arnolphe or Andromaque.
In an initial period, Photography, in order to surprise, photographs the notable; but soon, by a familiar reversal, it decrees notable whatever it photographs. The ‘anything whatever’ then becomes the sophisticated acme of value.
Ultimately, Photography is subversive, not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is pensive, when it thinks.
Television doomed us to the Family, whose household instrument it has become-what the hearth used to be, flanked by the communal kettle.
A picture is never anything but its own plural description.
One must turn the tongue seven times in the mouth before speaking.
Fashion postulates an achrony, a time which does not exist; here the past is shameful and the present is constantly “eaten up” by the Fashion being heralded.
Tout refus du langage est une mort. Any refusal of language is a death.
Rarely do outside of school remedies work their way into the fabric of the schools or into the teachers lives, and more rarely into the classrooms. Therefore they only offer a modest hope of influencing the basic culture of the school.
The petit-bourgeois is a man unable to imagine the Other. If he comes face to face with him, he blinds himself, ignores and denies him, or else transforms him into himself.
Flaubert had infinite correction to perform.
Painting can feign reality without having seen it.
Every new Fashion is a refusal to inherit, a subversion against the oppression of the preceding Fashion; Fashion experiences itself as a Right, the natural right of the present over the past.
When we look at a photograph of ourselves or of others, we are really looking at the return of the dead.
How does meaning get into the image? Where does it end? And if it ends, what is there beyond?