The imaginary is not formed in opposition to reality as its denial or compensation; it grows among signs, from book to book, in the interstice of repetitions and commentaries; it is born and takes shape in the interval between books. It is the phenomena of the library.

One thing in any case is certain: man is neither the oldest nor the most constant problem that has been posed for human knowledge.

I don't feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am.

What is peculiar to modern societies is not that they consigned sex to a shadow existence, but that they dedicated themselves to speaking of it ad infinitum, while exploiting it as the secret.

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

The 'Enlightenment', which discovered the liberties, also invented the disciplines.

And now, if we try to assign a value, in and of itself, outside its relations to the dream and with error, to classical unreason, we must understand it not as reason diseased, or as reason lost or alienated, but quite simply as reason dazzled.