“For a politics of emancipation, the enemy that is to be feared most is not repression at the hands of the established order. It is the interiority of nihilism, and the unbounded cruelty that can come with its emptiness.”

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.

What kind of world does one see when one experiences it from the point of view of two and not one?

let us call it thus, is considered to be archaic or old-fashioned, as though in a way there existed no other definition of what it means to be modern than.

Art is not ideology. It is completely impossible to explain art on the basis of the homological relation that it is supposed to maintain with the real of history.

If the past has been an obstacle and a burden, knowledge of the past is the safest and the surest emancipation.

But when the dawn will come, of our emancipation, from the fear of bondage and the bondage of fear, why, that is a secret.

Lincoln was the spokesman of the rising capitalist class of the North, who viewed the emancipation of Negro slaves as indispensable to the development and triumph of the manufacturers and bankers of the industrial North, East and West over the slave-holder of the South.

It is true that Mr. Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, after which there was a commitment to give 40 acres and a mule. That’s where the argument, to this day, of reparations starts.

The Emancipation Proclamation…can remind us in 2013 of all the mistakes we never want to commit again but it can also motivate us to fulfill to an ever greater degree