The court is the bureaucracy of the law. If you bureaucratise popular justice then you give it the form of a court.

What strikes me is the fact that in our society, art has become something which is related only to objects and not to individuals, or to life. That art is something which is specialized or which is done by experts who are artists. But couldn't everyone's life become a work of art? Why should the lamp or the house be an art object, but not our life?

The real political task in a society such as ours is to criticize the workings of institutions that appear to be both neutral and independent, to criticize and attack them in such a manner that the political violence that has always exercised itself obscurely through them will be unmasked, so that one can fight against them.

Freedom of conscience entails more dangers than authority and despotism.

Political power goes much deeper than one suspects; there are centres and invisible, little-known points of support; its true resistance, its true solidity is perhaps where one doesn't expect it.

To punish is the most difficult thing there is. A society such as ours needs to question every aspect of punishment as it is practiced everywhere: in the army, the schools, the factories.

We must uncover our rituals for what they are: completely arbitrary things, tied to our bourgeois way of life; it isgood-and that is the real theater-totranscend them in the manner of play, bymeans of games and irony; it is good to be dirty and bearded, to have long hair,to look like a girl when one is a boy (and vice versa); one must put "inplay," show up, transform and reversethe systems which quietly order us about.