Herein, perhaps, lies the secret: to bring into existence and not to judge. If it is so disgusting to judge, it is not because everything is of equal value, but on the contrary because what has value can be made or distinguished only by defying judgment.

It's not a matter of bringing all sorts of things together under one concept but rather of relating each concept to variables that explain its mutations.

Affects aren't feelings, they're becomings that spill over beyond whoever lives through them (thereby becoming someone else).

I have, it's true, spent a lot of time writing about this notion of event: you see, I don't believe in things.

It is not at all the case that revolutions are determined by technical progress. Rather, they are made possible by this gap between the two series, which solicits realignments of the economic and political totality in relation to the parts of the technical progress.

The superior exercise of speech is born when speech is addressed to what can only be spoken. Is there anything that can only be spoken about? We can stop right there, say: no. All right, but if we try: for Blanchot there is something that can only be spoken,

One after the other, the impossibility of a Platonic language and a pre-Socratic language, of an idealistic language and a physical language, of a manic language and a schizophrenic language are exposed.

All of us are deeply incoherent, all. We hold onto something from a tradition, and then we enter into something new. We never stop having, of being unbalanced.

But it’s fantastic: to have no opinion! Ah, but it’s a joy! So then, what are people in power? They are those who do not know that it is a joy to have no opinion.

One thing is certain to me: a philosopher is not someone who contemplates or even reflects. A philosopher is someone who creates, simply that he creates a very special kind of thing. He creates concepts.

Nietzsche distrusted the orientation by height and asked whether, far from representing the fulfilment of philosophy, it marked rather, from Socrates onward, its degeneration and wandering.

Find what you like. Never spend a second criticizing something or someone. Never criticize, never, never, never. And if someone criticizes you, you say, “fine, move along”, eh? Nothing to be done. Find your molecules. If you don’t find your molecules, you cannot even read.

Reactive forces would never prevail without a will which develops the projections, which organises the necessary fictions. The fiction of a world-beyond in the ascetic ideal: this is what accompanies the steps of ‘ressentiment’ and bad conscience,

Misunderstandings are often reactions of malicious stupidity. There are some who can only feel intelligent by discovering “contradictions” in a great thinker.

I’m telling you, it’s certain that we don’t stop seeing things if we are paying attention. And so, as for the pessimistic question, is there a power capable of preventing this creativity, I answer no, no, no power can ever prevent this creativity.

The field of micrology, for me, is creation, but it is daily creation, new habits every day, new habits that are born, right, language habits, the habit of playing, the habit of walking in the street.

What I mean is that, whether they like it or not, philosophers are the ones who really come back to us from the dead.

The succession of philosophers is not an eternal sequence of sages, still less a historical sequence, but a broken succession, a succession of comets. Their discontinuity and repetition do not amount to the eternity of the sky which they cross, nor the historicity of the earth which they fly over.

Everyone can talk about his memories, invent stories, state opinions in his language; sometimes he even acquires a beautiful style, which gives him adequate means and makes him an appreciated writer. But when it is a matter of digging under the stories, cracking open the opinions,

The image of the philosopher is obscured by all his necessary disguises, but also by all the betrayals that turn him into the philosopher of religion, the philosopher of the State, the collector of current values and the functionary of history.

It may be that there is necessarily something mad in every question and every problem, as there is in their transcendence in relation to answers, in their insistence through solutions and the manner in which they maintain their own openness.

I don't personally think the linguistics is fundamental. Maybe Félix, if he were here, would disagree. But then Félix has traced a development that points toward a transformation of linguistics: initially it was phonological, then it was semantic and syntactic,

If you don't constitute a surface on which things can be inscribed, what's not hidden will remain invisible. Surface isn't opposed to depth (from which one resurfaces) but to interpretation. Foucault's method was always opposed to any interpretative method. Never interpret; experience, experiment…

The true dreamer, said Proust, is someone who goes to see something for himself...

Whenever we hear the words "nobody can deny...," “everyone would agree that...," we know a lie or slogan's about to follow.

Generally, it works both ways: no one wants to be my disciple any more than I wanted to have any. A “school” is awful for a very simple reason: a “school” takes a lot of time, one turns into an administrator. Consider philosophers who have their own “school”:

I am not trying to tell you, "Be Spinozists", because I could care less. What I do care about is that you discover what you need, that each of you might find authors that you need, that is, authors that have something to say to you, and to whom you have something to say.

A type can only be defined by determining what the will wants in the examplars of this type. What does the one that seeks truth want?

The idea that science must follow in the footsteps of consciousness, in the same directions, is absurd. We can sense the morality in this idea. In fact there can only be science where there is no consciousness, where there can be no consciousness.

Rather than being concerned with what happens before and after Kant (which amounts to the same thing), we should be concerned with a precise moment within Kantianism, a furtive and explosive moment which is not even continued by Kant, much less by post-Kantianism -

We have no difficulty in understanding that Being, even if it is absolutely common, is nevertheless not a genus. It is enough to replace the model of judgement with that of the proposition.

Repetition is never explained by the form of identity in the concept, nor by the similar in representation. No doubt conceptual blockage gives rise to a bare repetition that we can effectively represent as the repetition of the same. However, ‘who’ blocks the concept, if not the Idea?

It is pointless to claim that a list of categories can be open in principle: it can be in fact, but not in principle. For categories belong to the world of representation, where they constitute forms of distribution according to which Being is repartitioned among beings following the rules

I am stating a platitude, but it’s true, this is how it is. If we see that the relation is inseparable from becoming and change, there I think it becomes much easier to think it.

Once again, all relations are external to their terms, no problem. But there are relations which consist of this: how a given image leads naturally — understand, effortlessly — to another image which is not given, which was not given.

Concrete relations that naturally shift from one image to another image, are they efficient? Not exactly. In Peirce’s vocabulary, we should say that they are put into action, they are put into action, they act, that is not what efficiency is. And abstract relations, they are inefficient,

Information is merely the relative condition whereby the execution of the order corresponds to the order itself. It’s like an inversion of the informatics schema. Actually, it’s even worse.

This first system of signifying redundancy, or redundancy of frequency, inscribes itself on a semiotic wall. And the attempt to pierce this wall… we’ll call this attempt exiting from the signifier, from ‘signifiance’. Just as Gherasim Luca does.

Redundancy is presented as the diminution of theoretical information that is supposedly ‘a priori’ by right. But something else appears at the same time. Redundancy is the only way of fighting against noise.

It’s interesting because the idea that language is by its very nature informative is one that corrupts us to such an extent that… I think of a case like that of Sartre, who at a certain point felt the need to identify what it was that characterised language, or to be precise, poetry or literature.

It is in this sense that it is not simply a form of presentation of what appears, it will be a form of the representation of what appears. The prefix re- indicates here the activity of the concept in opposition to the immediate or passive character of space and time

What incredibly new thing does Kant bring to the history of time? Once it is said that determinations of space and time are irreducible to conceptual determinations, there would be no possible knowledge unless nevertheless and despite everything we were able to establish a correspondence

The individual is neither a quality nor an extension. The individual is neither a qualification nor a partition, neither an organisation nor a determination of species. The individual is no more an ‘infima species’ than it is composed of parts.

When Socratic irony was taken seriously and the dialectic as a whole was confused with its propaedeutic, extremely troublesome consequences followed: for the dialectic ceased to be the science of problems and ultimately became confused with the simple movement of the negative, and of contradiction.

Every time science, philosophy and good sense come together it is inevitable that good sense should take itself for a science and a philosophy (that is why such encounters must be avoided at all costs).

It’s always the same story, if you like. Meaning that to choose is always to choose between choosing and not choosing, given that not choosing is to choose by saying I have no choice.

Everything you do, everything you say, implies a certain mode of existence. Which mode? Discover the modes of existence!

It’s in the scholia that he says what an ethics is, to make an ethics is to make a theory and a practice of powers of being affected, and an ethics is opposed to a satirics. What he calls a satirics is tremendous enough:

I say that, given its organs and functions, this is what the animal is capable of. It seems like these can be reconciled, but in fact, it’s not the logic that matters: the people focused on the organs and functions of animals have never worried about affects,

Let’s try to imagine how Spinoza saw things. He did not see genera, species, he did not see categories, so what did he see? He saw differences of degrees of power… I said broadly that to each thing will correspond a kind of degree of power and that,