All satire is blind to the forces liberated by decay. Which is why total decay has absorbed the forces of satire.

Culture is only true when implicitly critical, and the mind which forgets this revenges itself in the critics it breeds. Criticism is an indispensable element of culture.

As a constellation, theoretical thought circles the concept it would like to unseal, hoping that it may fly open like the lock of a well-guarded safe-deposit box: in response, not to a single key or a single number, but to a combination of numbers

The recent past always presents itself as if destroyed by catastrophes.

Newness only becomes mere evil in its totalitarian format, where all the tension between individual and society, that once gave rise to the category of the new, is dissipated. Today the appeal to newness, of no matter what kind, provided only that it is archaic enough, has become universal, the omnipresent medium of false mimesis. The decomposition of the subject is consummated in his self-abandonment to an ever-changing sameness.

Life has changed into a timeless succession of shocks, interspaced with empty, paralysed intervals.

The poor are prevented from thinking by the discipline of others, the rich by their own.