“There is a kind of serenity in love which is almost a paradise.”

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.

The ethic of truth is the complete opposite of an ‘ethics of communication’. It is an ethic of the Real The ethic of truth is absolutely opposed to opinion, and to ethics in general.

I would say, if you like, that the party is like an out-moded mathematics…that is to say, the mathematics of Euclid.

Truth is a new word in Europe (and elsewhere).

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.

I do not actually DO these things, but I see myself doing them, and that is almost MORE satisfying, because I am also lying down.

I wish I could say I’m an architect and planned it this way, foresaw doing all these things, but honestly, I’ve been lucky that things have come across my path and they’ve worked out well for me.

When I grew up in the ’70s I thought you had to take drugs. It was almost like I didn’t think you had a choice.

What’s interesting to me is drama and conflict. Things aren’t interesting without conflict and resolution of conflict – or striving towards a resolutions of conflict.

I don’t. I almost never get in shape for a movie, even though I know it would be a good career move.

I wanted to be more hands on. Otherwise, every time you finish acting in a movie you have to almost go and beg people for the next job.

Readers are made by readers – it is so obvious it is almost banal to say it.

Relaxing into not knowing is almost like surrendering into a big, comfortable chair; you just fall into a field of possibility.