Philosophy isn't programmed into us, and a lot of the forces of our culture steadfastly work against it. Philosophy, for me, is a way of resisting the nihilism of the present by making, creating, affirming. By going on.

Peace is nothing more than the regulation of the psycho-political economy of awe and reverential fear, of using the threat of terror in order to bind citizens to the circuit of their subjection.

Any philosophical and theoretical assurance that laughter is unique to the human being becomes somewhat unsure when one turns to the anthropological literature.

We might even define the human as a dynamic process produced by a series of identifications and misidentifications with animality.

We live in a world that is dominated by science. And that's not a bad thing - not at all. But one of the problems with the scientific worldview is that it leads human beings to have an overwhelmingly theoretical relationship to the world. For example, I no longer accept my being in the world practically and then try to describe that or elucidate that; rather, I see the world theoretically as colors and objects and representations which are fed through my retina into the brain.

There are two forms of disappointment that interest me: religious and political disappointment. Religious disappointment flows from the realization that religious belief is not an option for us. Political disappointment flows from the fact that there is injustice - that we live in a world that is radically unjust and violent, where might seems to equal right, where the poor are exploited by the rich, etc.

Philosophy for me is essentially atheistic. Now that's an anxious atheism. It's an atheism that is anxious because it inhabits questions that were resolved religiously in the pre-modern period.