I'd also say that Whitehead went in this direction. For him, the idea resonated that it's not the abstract that ought to be used to explain, but that it's the abstract that he must explain, and the entire conception of the event stems from this.

On the one hand, if it is true that an Idea has two aspects, differential relations and singular points, the time of actualisation refers to the first, the space of actualisation to the second. On the other hand, if we consider the two aspects of the actual, qualities and extensions,

In any case the virtual and the actual correspond, but do not resemble each other. This is why the search for actual concepts can be infinite, there is always an excess of virtual Ideas which animate them.

Science today is taking the exploration of nature and man further than ever in a particular direction, but it is also taking submission to the ideal and the established order further than ever.

In Hobbes, man in the state of nature wants to see his superiority represented and recognised by others. In Hegel, consciousness wants to be recognised by another and represented as self-consciousness. Even in Adler it is still a matter of the representation of a superiority

The critique of the free thinker is a fundamental theme in Nietzsche's work — because this critique discloses a perspective from which many different ideologies can be attacked at once; positivism, humanism, the dialectic —

The essential characteristics of the free thinker's positivism and humanism are fatalism, interpretative impotence and ignorance of the qualities of force. As soon as something appears as a human force or fact the free thinker applauds it without wondering whether this force is of base extraction,

If it is true that some commentators have found Thomist echoes in Husserl, Heidegger, by contrast, follows Duns Scotus and gives renewed splendour to the Univocity of Being. But does he effectuate the conversion after which univocal Being belongs only to difference

The body without organs is opposed less to organs than to that organization of organs we call an organism. It is an intense and intensive body. It is traversed by a wave that traces levels or thresholds in the body according to the variations of its amplitude.

One can fight against the cliché only with much guile, perseverance, and prudence: it is a task perpetually renewed with every painting, with every moment of every painting.

Either ethics makes no sense at all, or this is what it means and has nothing else to say: not to be unworthy of what happens to us. To grasp whatever happens as unjust and unwarranted (it is always someone else’s fault) is, on the contrary, what renders our sores repugnant—veritable ‘ressentiment’,

Hermann Weyl will state that a law of Nature is necessarily a differential equation. The notion of requisite, one of Leibniz’s most original notions, no longer designates definers but takes on its most rigorous, autonomous meaning by designating conditions, limits, and differential relations

Abstract painting obviously proceeds by code and program, implying operations of homogenization and binarization that are constitutive of a digital code. But the abstractionists often happen to be great painters, which means that they do not simply apply to painting a code

It is obvious that any form is precarious, since it depends on relations between forces and their mutations. We distort Nietzsche when we make him into the thinker who wrote about the death of God. It is Feuerbach who is the last thinker of the death of God:

We must take quite literally the idea that man is a face drawn in the sand between two tides: he is a composition appearing only between two others, a classical past that never knew him, and a future that will no longer know him. There is no occasion either for rejoicing or for weeping.

Strata are historical formations, positivities or empiricities. As ‘sedimentary beds' they are made from things and words, from seeing and speaking, from the visible and the sayable, from bands of visibility and fields of readability, from contents and expressions.

Truth is defined neither by conformity or common form, nor by a correspondence between the two forms. There is a disjunction between speaking and seeing, between the visible and the articulable: ‘what we see never lies in what we say’, and vice versa.

It is not necessary to be someone to produce a statement, and the statement does not refer back to any ‘Cogito’ or transcendental subject that might render it possible, or to any ego that might pronounce it for the first time (or recommence it), or to any Spirit of the Age that could conserve,

In his whole way of living and of thinking, Spinoza projects an image of the positive, affirmative life, which stands in opposition to the semblances that men are content with. Not only are they content with the latter, they feel a hatred of life, they are ashamed of it;

It is transversality that permits us, in the train, not to unify the viewpoints of a landscape, but to bring them into communication according to the landscape's own dimension, in its own dimension, whereas they remain noncommunicating according to their own dimension.

The problem of the work of art is the problem of a unity and a totality that would be neither logical nor organic, that is, neither presupposed by the parts as a lost unity or a fragmented totality nor formed or prefigured by them in the course of a logical development or of an organic evolution.

We shall not ask ‘who’ chooses. Certainly no self, because we ourselves are chosen, because a certain self is chosen each time that “we” choose a person to love, a suffering to experience, and each time this self is no less surprised to live or to relive, and to answer the call, whatever the delay.

Minds communicate to each other only the conventional; the mind engenders only the possible. The truths of philosophy are lacking in necessity and the mark of necessity. As a matter of fact, the truth is not revealed, it is betrayed; it is not communicated, it is interpreted;

An artist “ages" when, "by exhaustion of his brain," he decides it is simpler to find directly in life, as though ready-made, what he can express only in his work, what he should have distinguished and repeated by means of his work.

We cannot interpret the signs of a loved person without proceeding into worlds that have not waited for us in order to take form, that formed themselves with other persons, and in which we are at first only an object among the rest.

As soon as a theory is enmeshed in a particular point, we realise that it will never possess the slightest practical importance unless it can erupt in a totally different area. This is why the notion of reform is so stupid and hypocritical.

I would venture the following hypothesis: the thrust of Marxism was to define the problem essentially in terms of interests (power is held by a ruling class defined by its interests). The question immediately arises: how is it that people whose interests are not being served can strictly support

French capitalism now relies on a "margin" of unemployment and has abandoned the liberal and paternal mask that promised full employment. In this perspective, we begin to see the unity of the forms of repression: restrictions on immigration, once it is acknowledged that the most difficult

The Kantian schemata would take flight and point beyond themselves in the direction of a conception of differential Ideas, if they were not unduly subordinated to the categories which reduce them to the status of simple mediations in the world of representation.

I always am pleading for the necessity of a double reading of great philosophers who must be read philosophically, of course, if one can, but if you might not have the philosophical background to read a great philosopher, you always have perfectly the aesthetic culture and there are musical readings

Now, there can be bad becomings, and it’s what historians did not understand well, and that’s understandable since I believe so strongly in the difference between history and becomings… May ’68 was a becoming-revolutionary without a revolutionary future.

Historians sometimes look for empirical correspondences between the present and the past, but however rich it may be, this network of historical correspondences involves repetition only by analogy or similitude. In truth, the past is in itself repetition,

I never was affected by people who proclaim the death of philosophy, getting beyond philosophy, it's philosophers who say such complicated things as that. All that never affected me or concerned me because I tell myself, ok, what could all that mean?

But what had already emerged fully with Kierkegaard was that the man of true choice was the private thinker. The others, the devout, the man of evil, all of them, all those assistants of the false choice, were public professors, professors of virtues or vices, it amounts to the same thing.

A bare, material repetition (repetition of the Same) appears only in the sense that another repetition is disguised within it, constituting it and constituting itself in disguising itself. Even in nature, isochronic rotations are only the outward appearance of a more profound movement,

Obviously, a code can mean something grotesque—I’m thinking of botched paintings, but you get what I’m trying to… the attempt to reduce the diagram to a maximum—No, minimum! And to replace it with a code…which is what, exactly? It’s an obvious way to define so-called abstract painting.

And is it not necessary to extend to life and to labor under the same condition noticed by Foucault, namely: if literature gathers a being of language, it is not through an alliance with linguistics, but through a compensation for linguistics.

We think that notions such as super-ego are completely worthless and that cogs of power don’t function in this way. So how do they function? And then, some people ask, where does all this lead to? It leads to a choice. To make them function or to make them dysfunctional.

You will not define a body (or a mind) by its form, nor by its organs or functions, and neither will you define it as a substance or a subject. Every reader of Spinoza knows that for him bodies and minds are not substances or subjects, but modes.

We find ourselves in a world where things and words are constantly and necessarily interpreted. And interpretation becomes the fundamental activity of understanding precisely because understanding understands nothing about anything.

It’s noteworthy when critics manage to propose a category—at their own risk and peril, again—if we accept well-founded categories, if we believe in the philosophy of art. I think people are fully justified for rejecting the philosophy of art and opting to talk about painting as little as possible—

Art is not communicative, art is not reflexive, art isn’t, nor is science, nor is philosophy contemplative or reflexive or communicative. It’s creative, that’s all.

The picture of the nineteenth-century proletarian looks like this: the advent of the communist man or the society of comrades, the future Soviet, being without property, family, or nation, has no other determination than that of being man, ‘Homo tantum’. But this is also the picture of the American,

And just as a law is nothing without jurisprudence, that is, without the determination of cases of application, so, too, it is nothing without the decrees of application, that is, the determination of conditions under which…

To say, “he doesn’t agree with Leibniz,” “philosophers contradict one another” is a feeble statement; it’s like saying that Velasquez did not agree with Giotto, right! It’s a non-sense, not even true, it’s nonsensical. It means nothing.

From the Other to the same, never the other way around, never from the same to the Other. From the Distant to the close, never from the close to the Distant.

I cannot establish a requirement of extension and then answer that it’s the extension that realizes the requirement of extension. This would be the worst verbalizing.

Throughout, the variable model of recognition fixes good usage in the form of a harmony between the faculties determined by a dominant faculty under a given common sense. For this reason, illegitimate usage (illusion) is explained solely in the following manner:

There is a famous Spinoza expression that is always quoted, but very often it’s quoted separated from its context. And it’s a shame because when we see the context, we are completely interested. This is the formula, “all determination is negation”; in Latin, omnis determinatio est negatio,

In Adorno, in particular, the failure of the dialectic of knowledge will appear under dramatic conditions. The dialectic of knowledge, instead of producing the rational totality, produces what Adorno calls totalitarian rationality, and the issue then fully emerges: