Like love, mourning affects the world – and the worldly – with unreality, with importunity. I resist the world, I suffer from what it demands of me, from its demands. The world increases my sadness, my dryness, my confusion, my irritation, etc. The world depresses me.
Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.
I am interested in language because it wounds or seduces me.
Each of us has his own rhythm of suffering.
If I had to create a god, I would lend him a “slow understanding”: a kind of drip-by-drip understanding of problems. People who understand quickly frighten me.
The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.
We know that the war against intelligence is always waged in the name of common sense.
Literature is the question minus the answer.
The new is not a fashion, it is a value.
To try to write love is to confront the muck of language: that region of hysteria where language is both too much and too little, excessive and impoverished.
Is not the most erotic part of the body wherever the clothing affords a glimpse?
The art of living has no history: it does not evolve: the pleasure which vanishes vanishes for good, there is no substitute for it. Other pleasures come, which replace nothing. No progress in pleasures, nothing but mutations.
Someone tells me: this kind of love is not viable. But how can you evaluate viability? Why is the viable a Good Thing? Why is it better to last than to burn?
The incapacity to name is a good symptom of disturbance.
All of a sudden it didn’t bother me not being modern.
I love you is unsubtle. It removes explanations, facilities, degrees, scruples.
Literature is that which he can not read without pain, without choking on truth.
I call the discourse of power any discourse that engenders blame, hence guilt, in its recipient.
He who reads a story only once is condemned to read the same story his whole life.
We don’t forget, but something vacant settles in us.