We never know how someone learns; but whatever the way, it is always by the intermediary of signs, by wasting time, and not by the assimilation of some objective content.

I get the impression that constantly in Spinozism, in Spinoza, there is a kind of functionalism; what interests him is really the functions, how things can work. So, signs, which by their function, which by their nature would be signs, this would be quite paradoxical:

Generally speaking, the ideal for thought is precisely not to think what it wants, meaning to be forced to think something. Before a painting, a Rembrandt, say, you can’t think what you want, it’s unfortunate but that’s the way it is.

The outside is what provokes thought, what prompts thought. All the more reason for me to reiterate, restate my warning: it is not a form of exteriority, it is not an external world. It is the most distant. This is what prompts thought, this absolutely distant. This is what prompts thought,

There are people who do not have the right to critique representation because, when they critique representation, it is really lip-service, and they critique representation while claiming to represent something or someone. I would say that this is the academic critique of representation.

I make, remake and unmake my concepts along a moving horizon, from an always decentred centre, from an always displaced periphery which repeats and differenciates them. The task of modern philosophy is to overcome the alternatives temporal/non-temporal, historical/eternal and particular/universal.

There are no universals, only singularities. Concepts aren't universals but sets of singularities that each extend into the neighborhood of one of the other singularities.

What logicians call a "real definition," you understand, is a definition that not only defines its object, but, at the same time, shows the possibility of what's being defined. That is, it implies a rule of construction, for example, in mathematics.

Leibniz doesn't at all distinguish between a deep Self and a superficial Self. He distinguishes between a clear and distinct portion of what the Self expresses and an obscure and confused portion. But for him, this is neither deep nor superficial, it is something else.

A manner of being is a mode of being. I am not a substance. You understand, a substance is a person. Well no, I am not a substance. I am a manner of being. Maybe this is a lot better! We don’t know!

The question, I assure you, regarding philosophy texts, the question is not at all: do you understand? Because the question is above all: what appeals to you in the texts? You may very well feel that something appeals to you without yet understanding it.

The thing is, I became more and more aware of the possibility of distinguishing between becoming and history. It was Nietzsche who said that nothing important is ever free from a "nonhistorical cloud." This isn't to oppose eternal and historical, or contemplation and action:

For a long time philosophy offered you a particular alternative: God or man — or in philosophical jargon: infinite substance or the finite subject. None of that is very important any more: the death of God, the possibility of replacing God with humanity, all the God-Human permutations, etc.

I see François Ewald's work to reestablish a philosophy of law as quite fundamental. What interests me isn't the law or laws! (the former being an empty notion, the latter uncritical notions), nor even law or rights, but jurisprudence.

In vain, however, does one search for ‘the human sciences’, allegedly created in the eighteenth-century. The preceding analysis in fact shows that ‘the human does not exist and cannot exist’ in this classical space of representation. Again, it's the king's place:

However, if one examines not the letter of Marx or Freud, but the becoming of Marxism and the becoming of Freudianism, we see, paradoxically, Marxists and Freudians engaged in an attempt to recode Marx and Freud: in the case of Marxism, you have a recoding by the State

We're saying: there is no ideology, the concept itself is an illusion. That's why it suits the Communist Party and orthodox Marxism so well. Marxism has given such emphasis to the theme of ideologies precisely to cover up what was going on in the USSR: a new organization of repressive power.

As long as we're content with criticizing the "false," we're not bothering anyone (true critique is the criticism of true forms, not false contents. You don't criticize capitalism or imperialism by denouncing their "mistakes").

For Nietzsche there is a kind of dissolution of the self. The reaction against oppressive structures is no longer done, for him, in the name of a “self” or an “I”. On the contrary, it is as though the “self” and the “I” were accomplices of those structures.

A theory has to be used, it has to work. And not just for itself. If there is no one to use it, starting with the theorist himself who, as soon as he uses it ceases to be a theorist, then a theory is worthless, or its time has not yet arrived.

By itself, representation is given up to an extrinsic relation of resemblance or similitude only. But its internal character, by which it is intrinsically "distinct," "adequate," or "comprehensive," comes from the manner in which it encompasses, or envelops an expression,

Kierkegaard and Nietzsche are among those who bring to philosophy new means of expression. In relation to them we speak readily of an overcoming of philosophy. Furthermore, in all their work, movement is at issue. Their objection to Hegel is that he does not go beyond false movement —

A thought's logic isn't a stable rational system. Foucault, unlike the linguists thought that even language was a highly unstable system. A thought's logic is like a wind blowing us on, a series of gusts and jolts. You think you've got to port but then find yourself thrown back out onto the open sea

Being well spoken has never been either the distinctive feature or the concern of great writers.

Good sense is the ideology of the middle classes who recognise themselves in equality as an abstract product. It dreams less of acting than of constituting a natural milieu, the element of an action which passes from more to less differenciated:

The natural object of social consciousness or common sense with regard to the recognition of value is the fetish. Social problems can be grasped only by means of a ‘rectification’ which occurs when the faculty of sociability is raised to its transcendent exercise and breaks the unity of fetishistic

Recognition is a sign of the celebration of monstrous nuptials, in which thought ‘rediscovers’ the State, rediscovers ‘the Church’ and rediscovers all the current values that it subtly presented in the pure form of an eternally blessed unspecified eternal object.

Revolution never proceeds by way of the negative. We could not have established the first determination of the negative, as ‘shadow of the problem as such’, without already being embarked upon a second determination: the negative is the ‘objective field of the false problem’, the fetish in person.

What seems most important to me is this new way in which Kant interprets the question “how?”. And Leibniz, when he contents himself with asking “what is?”, does he obtain anything other than definitions which he himself calls nominal?

Well this history of intentionality was very curious because, you see, it was created to fully break with psychologism and naturalism. I'm saying this all very quickly for those who know...And intentionality typically fell back into another psychology, another naturalism.

If we do not discover its target the whole of Nietzsche's philosophy remains abstract and barely comprehensible. The question "against whom" itself calls for several replies. But a particularly important one is that the concept of the Overman is directed against the dialectical conception of man,

Stirner has no difficulty in showing that idea, consciousness or species are no less alienations than traditional theology. Relative re-appropriations are still absolute alienations. Competing with theology, anthropology makes me the property of Man.

While it is thought which must explore the virtual down to the ground of its repetitions, it is imagination which must grasp the process of actualisation from the point of view of these echoes or reprises. It is imagination which crosses domains, orders and levels, knocking down the partitions

I would say about Spinoza's common notions, these are above all not abstract ideas, and in fact, in Spinoza — He has this in common with the purest empiricists — you find quite explicitly a radical critique of the abstract idea; this even gives him a laugh, the hypothesis of abstract ideas;

In the second place, recognition is insignificant only as a speculative model. It ceases to be so with regard to the ends which it serves and to which it leads us. What is recognised is not only an object but also the values attached to an object (values play a crucial role in the distributions

There is only a single case where the designated stands alone and remains external to sense: precisely the case of those singular propositions arbitrarily detached from their context and employed as examples. Here too, however, how can we accept that such puerile and artificial textbook examples

That's what it means to be a genius in literature: making a new syntax. And those who define a great writer as a guardian of syntax clearly only measure their own mediocrity. There is no great writer who didn't create a syntax, starting with Mallarmé.

The eternal return is indeed Coherence, but it is a coherence which does not allow my coherence, the coherence of the world and the coherence of God to subsist.

One could pose this problem: under what conditions can two things, two beings or any two things whatever be said to form a machinic connection: what is necessary and under which circumstances are such connections formed?

It seems to me that all the theories of individuation before Leibniz had a catastrophic presupposition. Their catastrophic presupposition was that individuation comes afterwards, after the specification.

If it is true that intensities are opposed to the world of representation at the level of the strata, multiplicities are slightly different. They are opposed to extensive quantities or to qualitative forms which also in turn make up part of the strata at several levels,

Klossowski's thesis, with the new critique of reason that it implies, takes on therefore its full significance: it is not God but rather the Anti-christ who is the master of the disjunctive syllogism.

Framing is always constituting a certain number of objects in an artificially closed set. This is worthless, that is, this is a kind of aesthetics if this closed system remains closed; at that point, this is arbitrary.

What I’m telling you is, you know, Hegel didn’t invent dialectics, you know that. He hardened it enormously, he hardened it enormously, because the dialectic in Schelling is something with transitions, soft aspects… It’s not there. Hegel made a dialectic of war.

Qualitative contrariety is only the reflection of the intense, a reflection which betrays it by explicating it in extensity.

And once again, this runs through all the physics of the Middle Ages, all these attempts to make a science of intensive quantities. We had a kind of mixture that we must take in a very muddled way and that revolved around a kind of thought of degrees of power, of the assemblages

Descriptions are not statements, they are visibilities. On my side, I have some very eminent logicians, Bertrand Russell, for example, who in his book that founded modern logic, ‘Principles of Mathematics’, already indicated the difference in nature between propositions and descriptions.

The theorem, the demonstration as a concatenation of definitions, can appeal to syllogistic form; but we go by "enthymemes”, which hold only for syllogisms, and which work by means of "inner suppressions," ellipses, and problematic shortcuts.

Gilbert Simondon makes no small display of intellectual power with a profoundly original theory of individuation implying a whole philosophy. Simondon begins from two critical remarks: 1) Traditionally, the principle of individuation is modeled on a completed individual, one who is already formed.

And the disputes between great philosophers of the Middle Ages appear to me less of the kind “And what about your syllogism?” than the kind “How do you distinguish this or that?” That is, fine, God is three persons in one. What kind of distinction? What is this?