But the guilty person is only one of the targets of punishment. For punishment is directed above all at others, at all the potentially guilty.

To change something in the minds of people - that's the role of an intellectual.

The way people really think is not adequately analyzed by the universal categories of logic. Between social history and formal analyses of thought there is a path, a lane - maybe very narrow - which is the path of the historian of thought.

In writing, the point is not to manifest or exalt the act of writing, nor is it to pin a subject within language; it is, rather, a question of creating a space into which the writing subject constantly disappears.

Power is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society.

What strikes me is the fact that in our society, art has become something which is only related to objects, and not to individuals, or to life.

Knowledge is not for knowing: knowledge is for cutting.