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?

We can not accept the alternative which thoroughly compromises psychology, cosmology, and theology: either singularities already comprised in individuals and persons, or the undifferentiated abyss.

It appears at first as though language were incapable of finding a sufficient foundation in the states of the one who expresses herself, or in the denoted sensible things, and that such a foundation were to be located only in the Ideas which offer language a possibility of truth or falsity.

Syntactic creation or style — this is the becoming of language. The creation of words or neologisms is worth nothing apart from the effects of syntax in which they are developed.

I have always felt like an empiricist, or a pluralist. What does this empiricism-pluralism equivalency mean? It derives from the two traits Whitehead used to define empiricism: 1) abstraction does not explain but must be explained,

The way people talk about abstraction is amazing, they have absolutely no idea what it is. Philosophy has a kind of technique and a terminology like mathematics. Generally the word abstract is used for things in which there is no abstraction.

We just need for one little thing to suddenly become concrete, we mustn't demand continuous concreteness. There is the concrete and the opposite of the concrete, the true opposite of the concrete is not the abstract, it's the discrete. Discretion is the moment of thought.

Artaud pursues in all this the terrible revelation of a thought without image, and the conquest of a new principle which does not allow itself to be represented. He knows that ‘difficulty’ as such, along with its cortège of problems and questions, is not a ‘de facto’ state of affairs but a ‘de jure’

We said above that representation was defined by certain elements: identity with regard to concepts, opposition with regard to the determination of concepts, analogy with regard to judgement, resemblance with regard to objects.

Artaud said that the problem (for him) was not to orientate his thought, or to perfect the expression of what he thought, or to acquire application and method or to perfect his poems, but simply to manage to think something.

Critique has everything — a tribunal of justices of the peace, a registration room, a register — except the power of a new politics which would overturn the image of thought. Even the dead God and the fractured I are no more than a passing bad moment, the speculative moment:

There are two kinds of people who are wrong: those who say that the real battle is on the outside; the people who say that are the traditional Marxists: in order to change man, let's change the external world. And then there are the priests or the moralists who say: the real battle is on the inside:

Collective representations are not of the same nature as individual representations, and sociology is the science of collective representations. Okay. I am simplifying a great deal. But the notion of collective representation is fundamental… I can say that it is typical of molar sociology.

Repetition is never a historical fact, but rather the historical condition under which something new is effectively produced. It is not the historian's reflection which demonstrates a resemblance between Luther and Paul, between the Revolution of 1789 and the Roman Republic, etc.

In brief, the option of the psychologist may be expressed paradoxically as follows: one must be a moralist, sociologist, or historian ‘before’ being a psychologist, ‘in order to’ be a psychologist.

I would not say that the reasonable man is worth more than the insane one. I cannot, I have no way of saying that: each has a power of action, each realizes as much power of action as there is in him. This is natural right; this is the world of nature. Fine, from this point of view,

You see, for as long as there’s been thought, philosophy has never in the least way ‘contained’ the sciences. I mean, the Greeks never confused a philosopher with a mathematician…

The noblest games such as chess are those that organize a combinatory system of places in a pure spatium infinitely deeper than the real extension of the chessboard and the imaginary extension of each piece. Or when Althusser interrupts his commentary on Marx to talk about theatre,

Not long ago we used to ask: What is existentialism? Now we ask: What is structuralism? These questions are of keen interest, provided they are timely and have some bearing on work actually in progress.

When Marx also criticizes the abstract false movement or mediation of the Hegelians, he finds himself drawn to an idea, which he indicates rather than develops, an essentially “theatrical” idea; to the extent that history is theatre, then repetition, along with the tragic and the comic

It may well be that two negations are not too many to produce a phantom of affirmation. But how would affirmation result from negation unless it conserved that which is denied? Accordingly, Nietzsche indicates the terrifying conservatism of such a conception.

All that is negative and all that denies, all those average affirmations which bear the negative, all those pale and unwelcome 'Yeses' which come from 'Nos', ‘everything which cannot pass the test of eternal return’ — all these must be denied.

Already, the resemblance varies, the judgment of resemblance varies according to the society. That’s the non-specific code for judging resemblance. But how is the resemblance attained by the painter? Let’s say that the portrait of the woman is an iconic, analogical image.

I start again, you mustn’t confuse languages with codes. Metz said this right from the start, that language, made up of a double articulation with two kinds of elements, distinctive elements and meaningful elements, is not a code.

Pragmatism is misunderstood when it is seen as a summary philosophical theory fabricated by Americans. On the other hand, we understand the novelty of American thought when we see pragmatism as an attempt to transform the world, to think a new world or new man insofar as they create themselves.

And philosophy is an aggregate of problems, with its own consistency, but it does not pretend to deal with all problems, thank God.

We may add that the mistake made by logicians, when they speak of nonsense, is that they offer laboriously constructed, emaciated examples fitting the needs of their demonstration, as if they had never heard a little girl sing, a great poet recite, or a schizophrenic speak.

When we talk about authors like, for example, like Proust who multiplies the subordinate clauses, you see clearly that not only do the subordinates refer to other tenses than the main one, but they refer to other levels of depth, to other effects of perspective…

You never say that a philosopher contradicts himself; you will ask about a particular page, in what sequence to put it, at what level of the sequence.

The problem is not to render everything coherent, the question is to know where you’re going to put the accent.

In the Pangymnasticon, there are machines: no system without machines, a system, rigorously speaking, is a structural unity of machines, so much so that one must burst the system to reach the machines.

In all this, we are bathing in the negative. Clichés everywhere, clichés that float, that turn into mental clichés and then turn back into physical clichés. And so what happens? You have to evaluate words, you have to evaluate images by their weight.

But decision-making centers constitute the center, okay. But precisely, the center is becoming less and less geographical. And it is because the center is deterritorialized that the territorial acceptation they had, center and periphery, tends to lose its relevance,

You will ask me: what will that change? Well, it is this alone which explains, it seems to me, the reversal of movement that we have just seen, namely that at the center, at the same time as the investment of constant capital increases, a force of labor is produced …

We will say: what was it that allowed this displacement of a highly developed economic sector in the Third World? This is even what would distinguish, in what is called the Third World from the former colonies: in the former colonies, there was an undeveloped economy.

But capitalism in its present form is no longer directed toward production, which is often transferred to remote parts of the Third World, even in the case of complex operations like textile plants, steelworks, and oil refineries. It's directed toward metaproduction.

Let us consider the interpretation of Marxism by Althusser and his collaborators: above all the relations of production are determined as differential relations that are established, not between real men or concrete individuals, but between objects and agents which first of all have a symbolic value

It has nothing to do with a ‘form’: for structure is not at all defined by an autonomy of the whole, by a preeminence of the whole over its parts, by a ‘Gestalt’ which would operate in the real and in perception. Structure is defined, on the contrary, by the nature of certain atomic elements

There is good reason to ascribe the origin of structuralism to linguistics: not only Saussure, but the Moscow and Prague schools. And if structuralism then migrates to other domains, this occurs without it being a question of analogy, nor merely in order to establish methods "equivalent" to those

The writer returns from what he has seen and heard with bloodshot eyes and pierced eardrums. What health would be sufficient to liberate life wherever it is imprisoned by and within man, by and within organisms and genera?

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.