Literature is like phosphorus: it shines with its maximum brilliance and the moment when it attempts to die.

In front of the photograph of my mother as a child, I tell myself: she is going to die: I shudder, like winnicott's psychotic patient, over a catastrophe which has already occurred. Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe.

The best principals are not heroes; they are hero makers.

Literature is the question minus the answer.

Isn’t desire always the same, whether the object is present or absent? Isn’t the object always absent? —This isn’t the same languor: there are two words: Pothos, desire for the absent being, and Himéros, the more burning desire for the present being.

Isn’t the most sensitive point of this mourning the fact that I must lose a language — the amorous language? No more ‘I love you’s.

I call the discourse of power any discourse that engenders blame, hence guilt, in its recipient.