For millenia, man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal with the additional capacity for a political existence; modern man is an animal whose politics places his exitence as a living being in question.

I believe that political power exercises itself through the mediation of a certain number of institutions which look as if they have nothing in common with the political power, and as if they are independent of it, while they are not.

My point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous, which is not exactly the same as bad.

Maybe the target nowadays is not to discover what we are but to refuse what we are.

Death left its old tragic heaven and became the lyrical core of man: his invisible truth, his visible secret.

Are the prisons overpopulated, or is the population over-imprisoned ?

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.