There is a sort of myth of History that philosophers have.... History for philosophers is some sort of great, vast continuity in which the freedom of individuals and economic or social determinations come and get entangled. When someone lays a finger on one of those great themes--continuity, the effective exercise of human liberty, how individual liberty is articulated with social determinations--when someone touches one of these three myths, these good people start crying out that History is being raped or murdered.

It is meaningless to speak in the name of - or against - Reason, Truth, or Knowledge.

From the idea that the self is not given to us, I think there is only one practical consequence: we have to create ourselves as a work of art.

The language of psychiatry, which is a monologue by reason about madness, could only have come into existence in such a silence.

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

Politics and the economy are not things that exist, or illusions, or ideologies. They are things that do not exist and yet which are inscribed in reality and fall under a regime of truth dividing the true and the false.

[L]et us say that we are obliged to produce the truth by the power that demands truth and needs it in order to function: we are forced to tell the truth, we are constrained, we are condemned to admit the truth or to discover it.