History, according to Foucault, circumscribes us and sets limits, it doesn't determine what we are, but what we're in the process of differing from; it doesn't fix our identity, but disperses it into our essential otherness. That's why Foucault deals with recent short historical series

I believe it is always my purpose to tell you as well: find yourself, if possible, find yourself in something that has not been created.

What I don’t see in Greek philosophy is a distinction between language and language system. Not that they lacked one, it’s their own business, but they didn’t need it, that’s just the way it is. Now we move on to language system.

One almost wants to ask, what is a bad philosopher, or a great philosopher? The bad one creates no concepts, is someone who uses ready-made ideas. So, he puts forth opinions then and does not do philosophy….

At the level of the problem of Being and the One, it’s true that philosophers in their attempt at conceptual creation about the relations of Being and the One are going to re-establish a sequence. In my view the first great sequences in philosophy at the level of concepts, are those Plato constructs

Spinoza says a thousand times, “God never made any signs; he sends expressions.” And what does that mean about expressions that precisely are univocal? It does not send a sign which would refer to a signification or a signifier; this is not a matter of any signifier whatsoever —

My first problem, then, is this question of narration, because my question is: is narration a given of the cinematographic image, even if it is historically acquired? Is it an apparent given of the cinematographic image?

Remember what Thom said? That stability is assured in catastrophe by a barrier that assures a discontinuity in behavior. It’s a question of assuring stability. So I’d say that it’s a local temporary stabilizer, but it’s not only that. There’s a whole other aspect to it,

In Guillaume’s work, what’s important is that for him, oppositions do not constitute the linguistic relations; these stem from the relative positions of the sign. The sign or signs traverse relative positions. You see why this is the direct outcome.

According to Guillaume, all the different meanings of the indefinite article “a” or the definite article “the” are points of view on the movements of particularization and the movements of generalization, which, themselves, are signifieds of power.

Linguistics confronts the object of language on the ruins of the classical world model. But at the same time as the positive sciences devote themselves to these three figures, there is something more profound that, in Foucault’s view, makes these positive sciences possible

Kant will criticize the cosmological proof, saying: but after all, this is a pure logical error, this proof, it is a pure logical error because you can never consider an indefinite series as if it were a set — a successive indefinite series — as if it were an infinite set of coexistence.

To speed things up, what would this imply? I find all this very interesting. It means that ‘history never ceases being traversed by semi-aleatory mechanisms’. Or, if you prefer, Ruyer has a lovely phrase in his book ‘The Genesis of Living Forms’: “History is not ‘logos’, it’s gibberish.”

One doesn’t write, one doesn’t paint, one doesn’t make films “about” a subject.

We cannot say that the struggle against a system is totally independent of the manner in which this system was characterized. It is difficult to consider that the struggle of socialism against capitalism in the 19th century was independent of the theory of surplus value,

There’s a text by Charles Darwin, a letter by Darwin, which I think is brilliant, where Darwin as a young, actually not so young, man recounts how he is constantly being asked: If life had simply begun, then why couldn’t it begin again today?

If the world we've broken away from, with which we are at odds, this sort of window-world, is a world of paving-stones, then to rediscover reasons to believe in the world is to rediscover life,

What is this rupture between man and world? That’s where, last time, I started by saying too many things at once. Obviously, this doesn’t mean that man is outside nature. It doesn’t mean that man has a suprasensible destiny. It makes no difference whether we are part of nature or not.

The more human this world becomes, the more we are at odds with it, and the less reason we have to believe in it. This is our painful condition as creatures of modernity.

From the point of view of modality, cinema forced thought out of the realm of mere possibility, the possibility of thinking, and subjected it to a necessity: you cannot avoid thinking. What happened? What happened that these great authors are now treated as naive, or considered ingenuous?

What’s the point of all this? The important thing is this aspect of the cry, and indeed, “I think therefore I am” claims to do what? It claims to give us a new type of definition of man, against Aristotle’s. For Aristotle, man is a rational animal. Descartes says that this is discourse.

We run the risk of missing the point, of having the idea that philosophy is a dead thing, if we equate it solely with the discourse it elaborates. A philosophical cry can always be translated in terms of discourse. But then something resists, and if you have the slightest taste for philosophy,

You will tell me, the mistral is, it is, still it’s a concept, it’s an abstract concept, so this is a whole other problem … Not at all. Not at all. It’s a singularity, the mistral. We can make a concept out of it, of course; we can derive a concept from everything. But a wind is a singularity.

Notice I’m not talking about forms or subjects. An individual is neither a form nor a subject; something is individuated when we can determine its longitude and latitude, longitude meaning its ratios of motion and rest, speed and slowness, which provide its composing particles, its parts of parts—

Intensities are fundamentally non-representative, they represent nothing, and it is in this sense that they will be a fundamental element in the machine of experimentation, as opposed to the machine of interpretation. I am restituting intensities as fundamental.

Notice that in Leibniz, shadow is neither a privation, nor an opposition with light. Shadow is truly the relation of the luminous to the ‘fuscum’, to the dark depths, and the dark depths are not privation at all.

When I said that desiring machines were the ‘objet a’, all I meant was that, even in Lacan, a structure can only function if he sneaks in a machinic element, and the ‘objet a’ is ultimately a machinic element, and not a structural one.

Concepts are words, and the problem of logic is the rules of usage in words. You see? A Nominalism of this sort perfectly existed – it still abounds today – perfectly existed in Leibniz’s era. For example, you find elements of it in works by a very great philosopher named Hobbes.

I am pointing out to you – and with this, I am taking a bit of a risk – it’s only apparently that Leibniz speaks of genus and species. In fact, the individual is not an infinitely continued specification. The true line – and we will see why – Leibniz’s true line,

You see, in order to form my corpus of sentences, of propositions, of words, it is necessary that I have a rule that does not presuppose words, sentences, and propositions— a rule that is directed to another dimension.

Pluralism sometimes appears to be dialectical — but it is its most ferocious enemy, its only profound enemy. This is why we must take seriously the resolutely anti-dialectical character of Nietzsche's philosophy.

Hence the reversal carried out by Foucault: it is not the institution that explains power, but power that explains the institution to the extent that power relations are integrated in institutions. What, therefore, is the role of the institution?

There is no being of the negative. There, this is very simple. It is very simple and very difficult at the same time.

In fact we are not yet done with it since the ancient figure of the intellectual as guardian of values was to be reawakened,resuscitated in the form of the intellectual as guardian of the rights of man. But Foucault was able to think at a certain moment that this figure of the intellectual had died.

When it’s suggested to us that what creates our deepest singularities, the fact that I am this and not that, this is something quantitative, what can this possibly mean?

What literature serves to gather in its movement of ascent to the brute being of language is thus neither language, nor the organization of language, nor even the epistemic spaces of language, but precisely the language of the outside as the outside of language.

Forms are always the forms of knowledge, the forms of the archive. Everything that is formed is already archived, a matter of strata… Well, the forms are subject to history. Forces are instead subject to a mutation, subject to the diagram;

And interpretation becomes the fundamental activity of understanding precisely because understanding understands nothing about anything. It’s a situation, if you will, that is tragic: you interpret when you understand nothing. What a lesson!

Institutions are forms, they are forms that integrate the micro-relations of power. So that if it was necessary to designate by a name the relations of power, the relations of forces, then the name “State” would be not at all suitable.

For Feuerbach, the changing of forms ends with man; man is the bearer of the universal. Thus, in a struggle which is that of history itself, man replaces God. And there we are, in Nietzsche, you have the protest, an equivalent of the Marxist protest, but in a completely different sense –

A problem can be posed in several successive ways, and that has an urgent appeal, like a huge gust of wind, a call for the necessity always to create and re-create new concepts. So, history of philosophy cannot be reduced to sociological influence…

Writing means necessarily pushing language – and pushing syntax, since language is syntax – up to a certain limit, a limit that can be expressed in several ways: it can be just as well the limit that separates language from silence, or the limit that separates language from music…

Any time we’re dealing with difference, what matters to me is the number of terms involved. If there are two terms at play, it seems to me it would inherently depend on anthropomorphic representation—

We want, we demand a root of incompossibility that consists in what? To show us how incompossibility is another relation than just contradiction. And this is essential, even from the point of view of logic.

One of Kant’s most beautiful texts is: “What does it mean: to orient oneself in thinking?” In this very beautiful text he develops a whole geographical conception of thought; he even has a new orientation, we must go further,

Do not complain, never complain, because ultimately the affects you have, whether they are unhappiness or joy, etc., you deserve them, not at all in the sense that you have done everything necessary for you to have them, but that’s not even it. But it’s in a cleverer sense, a much subtler sense,

Only by spreading ressentiment the tyrant forms allies, namely slaves and servants. The revolutionary alone is free from the ressentiment, by means of which one always participates in, and profits by, an oppressive order.

Foucault did not stop ripping open the straitjacket, if we can say so, inside the straitjacket where logic and linguistics had put us, which consists in imposing on us a choice between intrinsic constants or extrinsic variables.

What is an event? An event? Death, is that an event? What is it? And what is the rapport between the event and the person? A wound, is that an event? Yes, if I’m wounded, a wound is an event. It’s the expression of something that happens

What’s so terrible about clichés? Well, we can say, and in fact people do say that, after all, painters are currently worse than before, and if we had to comment, it’s true in a way. I don’t want to repeat those analyses on the existence of a world of simulacra, authors like Klossowski,