These years of the Ecole Normale were an ordeal. Nothing was handed to me on the first try.
I have always had school sickness, as others have seasickness. I cried when it was time to go back to school long after I was old enough to be ashamed of such behavior.
A text is not a text unless it hides from the first comer, from the first glance, the law of its composition and the rules of its game. A text remains, moreover, forever imperceptible. Its laws and rules are not, however, harbored in the inaccessibility of a secret; it is simply that they can never be booked, in the present, into anything that could rigorously be called a perception.
It is just that there be law, but law is not justice.
There is no simple answer to such a question.
I know a sentence that is still more terrifying, more terribly ambiguous than “I am alone,” and it is, isolated from any other determining context, the sentence that would say to the other: “I am alone with you.” Meditate on the abyss of such a sentence: I am alone with you, with you I am alone, alone in all the world.
Every text participates in one or several genres, there is no genreless text; there is always a genre and genres, yet such participation never amounts to belonging.
What is certain is that I am not a Marxist, as someone said a long time ago, let us recall, in a witticism reported by Engels. Must we still cite Marx as an authority in order to say “I am not a Marxist”?
The wound can have just one proper name. I recognize that I love you by this: you leave in me a wound I do not want to replace.
Capitalist societies can always heave a sigh of relief and say to themselves: communism is finished since the collapse of the totalitarianisms of the twentieth century and not only is it finished, but it did not take place, it was only a ghost They do no more than disavow the undeniable itself. a ghost never dies, it remains always to come and to come-back.
Infinite responsibility, therefore, no rest allowed for any form of good conscience.
I recognize that I love – you – by this: that you leave in me a wound that I do not want to replace.
Our faith is not assured, because faith can never be, it must never be a certainty.
Be alert to these invisible quotation marks, even within a word.
Everyone must assume their own death, that is to say, the one thing in the world that no one else can either give or take: therein resides freedom and responsibility.
Western philosophy exhibits schemas such as the substance-attributes relation, where substance is the present being which the attributes modify;.
Religion is responsibility or it is nothing at all. Its history derives its sense entirely from the idea of a passage to responsibility.
The blindness that opens the eye is not the one that darkens vision.
In the proper sense of the word, religion exists once the secret of the sacred, orgiastic, or demonic mystery has been, if not destroyed, at least integrated, and finally subjected to the sphere of responsibility.
Speech frightens me because, by never saying enough, I also say too much.
Every revolution, whether atheistic or religious, bears witness to a return of the sacred – in the form of enthusiasm or fervour, otherwise known as the presence of the gods within us.