The political and social processes by which the Western European societies were put in order are not very apparent, have been forgotten, or have become habitual. They are part of our most familiar landscape, and we don't perceive them anymore. But most of them once scandalized people.

If I won a few billion in the lottery, I would create an institute where people who would like to die would come spend a weekend, a week, or a month in pleasure, under drugs perhaps, in order to disappear afterward, as if erased.

During the years 1945-1965 (I am referring to Europe), there was a certain way of thinking correctly, a certain style of politicaldiscourse, a certain ethics of the intellectual. One had to be on familiar terms with Marx, not let one's dreams stray too far from Freud.... These were therequirements that made the strange occupation of writing and speaking a measure of truth about oneself and one's time acceptable.

The gaze that sees is the gaze that dominates.

I'm not making a problem out of a personal question; I make of a personal question an absence of a problem.

We have to be there at the birth of ideas, the bursting outward of their force: not in books expressing them, but in events manifesting this force, in struggles carried on around ideas, for or against them.

Prison continues, on those who are entrusted to it, a work begun elsewhere, which the whole of society pursues on each individual through innumerable mechanisms of discipline.