“Ultimately, Photography is subversive, not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is pensive, when it thinks.”

Pleasure is continually disappointed, reduced, deflated, in favor of strong, noble values: Truth, Death, Progress, Struggle, Joy, etc. Its victorious rival is Desire: we are always being told about Desire, never about Pleasure.

Language is legislation, speech is its code. We do not see the power which is in speech because we forget that all speech is a classification, and that all classifications are oppressive.

The new is not a fashion, it is a value.

Isn’t desire always the same, whether the object is present or absent? Isn’t the object always absent? -This isn’t the same languor: there are two words: Pothos, desire for the absent being, and Himéros, the more burning desire for the present being.

To try to write love is to confront the muck of language: that region of hysteria where language is both too much and too little, excessive and impoverished.

There are people who think that wrestling is an ignoble sport. Wrestling is not sport, it is a spectacle, and it is no more ignoble to attend a wrestled performance of suffering than a performance of the sorrows of Arnolphe or Andromaque.

Where you are tender, you speak your plural.

Is not the most erotic part of the body wherever the clothing affords a glimpse?

Who speaks is not who writes, and who writes is not who is.

In an initial period, Photography, in order to surprise, photographs the notable; but soon, by a familiar reversal, it decrees notable whatever it photographs. The ‘anything whatever’ then becomes the sophisticated acme of value.

He who reads a story only once is condemned to read the same story his whole life.

Television doomed us to the Family, whose household instrument it has become-what the hearth used to be, flanked by the communal kettle.

Literature is the question minus the answer.

Touch is the most demystifying of all senses, different from sight which is the most magical.

Why is it better to last than to burn?

Language is neither reactionary nor progressive; it is quite simply fascist; for fascism does not prevent speech, it compels speech.