You can be an extreme materialist, thinking that economic development ultimately determines everything; then you are truly ideological.

Come on. I don't have any problem violating my own insights in practice.

Undoubtedly [Beethoven's] music often verges on kitsch

My instinct as a philosopher is that we are effectively approaching a multicentric world, which means we need to ask new, and for the traditional left, unpleasant questions.

The problem with kitsch is that it is all too profound, manipulating deep libidinal and ideological forces, while true art knows how to remain at the surface, how to subtract it's subject from it's deepest context of historical reality. The same goes for contemporary art, where we often encounter brutal attempts to return to the Real, to remind the spectator or reader that he is perceiving a fiction, to awaken him from a sweet dream.

When I really love someone, I can only show it by making aggressive and bad-taste remarks.

The problem for me is not that Schwarzenegger is governor, but the extent to which even politicians who are not actors are functioning like actors.