Today, criminal justice functions and justifies itself only by this perpetual reference to something other than itself, by this unceasing reinscription in non-juridical systems.

If I open a book and see that the author is accusing an adversary of "infantile leftism" I shut it again right away. That's not my way of doing things; I don't belong to the world of people who do things that way. I insist on this difference as something essential: a whole morality is at stake; the one that concerns the search for truth and the relation to the other.

As the archaeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end.

It might be said that all knowledge is linked to the essential forms of cruelty.

Literature is a form of language that breaks with the whole definition of genres as forms adapted to an order of representations, and becomes merely a manifestation of a language which has no other law than that of affirming in opposition to all other forms of discourse its own precipitous existence.

[Knowledge is governed not by] a theory of knowledge, but by a theory of discursive practice.

If those arrangements [the fundamental arrangements of knowledge] were to disappear as they appeared... then one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.