art must continue to exist so that its existence is not a surrender to cynicism

He who wishes to know the truth abut life in its immediacy must scrutinize its estranged form, the objective powers that determine individual, the objective powers that determine individual existence even in its most hidden recesses. To speak immediately of the immediate is to behave much as those novelists who drape their marionettes in imitated bygone passions like cheap jewelry and make people who are no more than component parts of machinery act as if they still had the capacity to act as subjects, and as if something depended on their actions. Our perspective of life has passed into an ideology which conceals the fact that there is life no longer.

The communist hypothesis remains the good one, I do not see any other. If we have to abandon this hypothesis, then it is no longer worth doing anything at all in the field of collective action. Without the horizon of communism, without this Idea, there is nothing in the historical and political becoming of any interest to a philosopher. Let everyone bother about his own affairs, and let us stop talking about it. In this case, the rat-man is right, as is, by the way, the case with some ex-communists who are either avid of their rents or who lost courage. However, to hold on to the Idea, to the existence of this hypothesis, does not mean that we should retain its first form of presentation which was centered on property and State. In fact, what is imposed on us as a task, even as a philosophical obligation, is to help a new mode of existence of the hypothesis to deploy itself.

[The detective story] keeps in some sense before the mind the fact that civilisation itself is the most sensational of departures and the most romantic of rebellions... It is the agent of social justice who is the original and poetic figure, while the burglars and footpads are merely placid old cosmic conservatives, happy in the immemorial respectability of apes and wolves. [The police romance] is based on the fact that morality is the most dark and daring of conspiracies.

In language, instead of exerting direct violence on each other, we are meant to debate, to exchange words, and such an exchange, even when it is aggressive, presupposes a minimal recognition of the other party. The entry into language and the renunciation of violence are often understood as aspects of one and the same gesture: 'Speaking is the foundation and structure of socialization, and happens to be characterized by the renunciation of violence,' as a text by Jean-Marie Muller written for UNESCO tells us. Since man is a 'speaking animal,' this means that the renunciation of violence defines the very core of being human: [...] violence is 'indeed a radical perversion of humanity.'

Freud already knew about the link between narcissism and immersion in a a crowed, best rendered precisely by the Californian phrase 'to share an experience.' This coincidence of opposed features is grounded in the exclusion that they share: one not only can be, one is alone in a crowd. Both an individual's isolation and his immersion in a crowd exclude intersubjectivity proper, the encounter with an Other. This is why, as the French philosopher Alain Badiou set out in a perspicuous way, today more than ever one should insist on a focus on love, not mere enjoyment: it is love, the encounter of the Two, which 'transubstantiates' idiotic masturbatory enjoyment into an event proper.

The joke goes: Marx, Engels, and Lenin are asked whether they would prefer to have a wife or a mistress. As expected, Marx, rather conservative in private matters, answers, "A wife!" while Engels, more of a bon vivant, ops for a mistress. To everyone's surprise, Lenin says, "I'd like to have both!" Why? Is there a hidden stripe of a decadent jouisseur behind his austere revolutionary image? No--he explains: "So that I can tell my wife that I am going to my mistress, and my mistress that I have to be with my wife..." "And then, what do you do?" "I go to a solitary place to learn, learn, and learn!"

I think the origin of all this clamour for tonality is not so much the need to sense a relationship to the tonic, as a need for familiar chords: let us be frank and say "for the triad"; and I believe I have good reason to say that just so long as a certain kind of music contains enough such triads, it causes no offence, even if in other ways it most violently clashes with the sacred laws of tonality.

I have never seen faces, but because I have looked people in the eye, only their gazes.

Casi todo el mundo dice que es utopía: es la única cosa que podría salvar el mundo. Anarquía es el mas bonito que hay. Cada cuaba trabajar todo el mundo ni amos ni patrones, y cada cuaba hace lo que tiene en su cabeza -- todo mundo tiene algo dentro.