Very evil people cannot really be imagined dying.

History does not merely touch on language, but takes place in it.

The task of art today is to bring chaos into order. Artistic productivity is the capacity for being voluntarily involuntary.

The only philosophy that can be practiced responsibly in the face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption. Knowledge has no light but that shed on the world by redemption: all else is reconstruction, mere technique. Perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the world, that reveal its fissures and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will one day appear in the Messianic light.

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.

Not only is the self entwined in society; it owes society its existence in the most literal sense.

The good man is he who rules himself as he does his own property: his autonomous being is modelled on material power.