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:

Attributes no more serve to deny anything than they are themselves denied of essence. Nor are they affirmed of God by analogy. An affirmation by analogy is worth no more than a negation by eminence

Why is it that seeking the conditions of possibility of geometry has nothing to do with seeking the essence of geometry? If you ask Kant “What is the essence of geometry?”, he’ll say that the question doesn’t make sense.

“What is…?” Is it the right question? It’s not enough to ask questions in life, it has to be the right question, you understand? How do you know it’s the right question to ask? Isn’t that what you should be asking?

Even the judgment of knowledge envelops an infinity of space, time, and experience that determines the existence of phenomena in space and time ("every time that ..."). But the judgment of knowledge in this sense implies a prior moral and theological form,

Maybe speech and communication have been corrupted. They're thoroughly permeated by money — and not by accident but by their very nature. We've got to hijack speech. Creating has always been something different from communicating.

A decision is not a judgment, nor is it the organic consequence of a judgment: it springs vitally from a whirlwind of forces that leads us into combat. It resolves the combat without suppressing or ending it. It is the lightning flash appropriate to the night of the symbol.

Judgment did not appear on a soil that, even had it been quite different, would have favored its blossoming. Ruptures and bifurcations were necessary. The debt had to be owed to the gods; it had to be related, no longer to the forces of which we were the guardians,

Artaud presents this "body without organs" that God has stolen from us in order to palm off an organized body without which his judgment could not be exercised.

The world of judgment establishes itself as in a dream. It is the dream that makes the lots turn (Ezekiel's wheel) and makes the forms pass in procession.

You always get the truth you deserve according to the sense of what you say, and according to the values to which you give voice.

Men judge insofar as they value their own lots, and are judged insofar as a form either confirms or dismisses their claim. They judge and are judged at the same time, and take equal delight in judging and being judged. Judgment burst in on the world in the form of the ‘false judgment’

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: