“It is thus quite simply false that whereof one cannot speak (in the sense of ‘there is nothing to say about it that specifies it and grants it separating properties’), thereof one must be silent.”

What I mean is that what composes an event is always extracted from a situation, always related back to a singular multiplicity, to its state, to the language that is connected to it, etc.

Let us say in passing that since (philosophical) remedies are often worse than the malady, our age.

Emancipatory politics always consists in making seem possible precisely that which, from within the situation, is declared to be impossible.

There is no ethics in general. There are only-eventually-ethics of processes by which we treat the possibilities of a situation.

It must be said that today, at the end of its semantic evolution, the word ‘terrorist’ is an intrinsically propagandistic term. It has no neutral readability. It dispenses with all reasoned examination of political situations, of their causes and consequences.

In fact, so as not to succumb to an obscurantist theory of creation ex nihilo, we must accept that an event is nothing but a part of a given situation, nothing but a fragment of being.

Quite the contrary; it is the vehicle of savage, destructive nihilism.

In my view, only those who have had the courage to work through Lacan’s anti-philosophy without faltering deserve to be called ‘contemporary philosophers’.

All those who abandon this hypothesis immediately resign themselves to the market economy, to parliamentary democracy-the form of state suited to capitalism-and to the inevitable and ‘natural’ character of the most monstrous inequalities.

If you limit yourself to sexual pleasure it’s narcissistic. You don’t connect with the other, you take what pleasure you want from them.

To believe that the intolerable crime is to burn a few cars and rob some shops, whereas to kill a young man is trivial, is typically in keeping with what Marx regarded as the principal alienation of capitalism: the primacy of things over existence, of commodities over life and machines over workers

These latter institutions [the civil service, trade unions, media of all kinds], notably of course television.

We have the riots we deserve.

Love is not a contract between two narcissists.

What is the world like when it is experienced, developed and lived from the point of view of difference and not identity? That is what I believe love to be.

The cinema is a place of intrinsic indiscernibility between art and non-art.

We fail because when Allah gives us these blessings, we unwittingly turn them into false idols in the heart.

The dawn of knowledge is usually the false dawn.

We have the real self and the false self, there’s nothing wrong with them, and everyone has both of them.

This was once achieved by extensive deprivation. Today in the developed countries it is being achieved by imposing a false standard of what is and what is not desirable.

I’ll give anything for a good copy now, be it true or false, so it be news.

Life is too precious to be spent in this weaving and unweaving of false impressions, and it is better to live quietly under some degree of misrepresentation than to attempt to remove it by the uncertain process of letter-writing.

Leaving behind the false, return to the true: make no discriminations between self and others. In contemplation, one’s mind should be stable and unmoving, like a wall.

Cheerfulness, up to and including delusion and false hope, has a recognized place in medicine.