The opposite of knowledge is not ignorance, but deceit and fraud.

One can speak of an alterity of desire - a paradigm defined outside the tired, tacitly accepted regime, but one comes up short when attempting to posit a framework of desire beyond available, known desires.

The price we pay for the complexity of life is too high. When you think of all the effort you have to put in -telephonic, technological and relational -to alter even the slightest bit of behavior in this strange world we call social life, you are left pining for the straightforwardness of primitive peoples and their physical work.

Art does not die because there is no more art. It dies because there is too much.

Here in the U.S., culture is not that delicious panacea which we Europeans consume in a sacramental mental space and which has its own special columns in the newspapers - and in people's minds. Culture is space, speed, cinema, technology. This culture is authentic, if anything can be said to be authentic.

The abjection of our political situation is the only true challenge today. Only facing up to this situation in all its desperation can help us get out of it.

In the same way that we need statesmen to spare us the abjection of exercising power, we need scholars to spare us the abjection of learning.