Something in the world forces us to think. This something is an object not of recognition but of a fundamental encounter.
According to Beckett’s or Kafka’s law, there is immobility beyond movement: beyond standing up, there is sitting down, and beyond sitting down, lying down, beyond which one finally dissipates.
To affirm is not to bear, carry, or harness oneself to that which exists, but on the contrary to unburden, unharness, and set free that which lives.
Photography, if there is photography, is already snapped, already shot, in the very interior of things and for all points of space.
The instinct of revenge is the force which constitutes the essence of what we call psychology, history, metaphysics and morality. The spirit of revenge is the genealogical element of our thought, the transcendental principle of our way of thinking.
Far from being a psychological trait, the spirit of revenge is the principle on which our whole psychology depends.
Can you harness the power of drugs without them taking over, without turning into a dazed zombie?
The plane of consistency is the abolition of all metaphor; all that consists is Real.
Only thought is capable of inventing the fiction of a State that is universal by right, of elevation the State to the level of de jure universality.
One of the principal motifs of Nietzsche’s work is that Kant had not carried out a true critique because he was not able to pose the problem of critique in terms of values.
Nietzsche’s break with Schopenhauer rests on precisely this point; it is a matter of knowing whether the will is unitary or multiple.
An image of thought called philosophy has been formed historically and it effectively stops people from thinking.
Psychoanalysts are bent on producing man abstractly, that is to say ideologically, for culture. It is Oedipus who produces man in this fashion and who gives a structure to the false movement of infinite progression and regression.
Philosophy is not in a state of external reflection on other domains, but in a state of active and internal alliance with them, and it is neither more abstract nor more difficult.
What interests us in operations of striation and smoothing are precisely the passages or combinations: how the forces at work within space continually striate it, and how in the course of its striation it develops other forces and emits new smooth spaces.
Let us create extraordinary words, on condition that they be put to the most ordinary use and that the entity they designate be made to exist in the same way as the most common object.
The aim of critique is not the ends of man or of reason but in the end the Overman, the overcome, overtaken man. The point of critique is not justification but a different way of feeling: another sensibility.
I believe strongly that philosophy has nothing to do with specialists.
The philosopher creates, he doesn’t reflect.
The shadow escapes from the body like an animal we had been sheltering.
You never walk alone. Even the devil is the lord of flies.