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.

Domination delegates the physical violence on which it rests to the dominated.

He who stands aloof runs the risk of believing himself better than others and misusing his critique of society as an ideology for his private interest.

There is something embarrassing in... the way in which, ... turning suffering into images, harsh and uncompromising though they are, ... wounds the shame we feel in the presence of the victims. For these victims are used to create something, works of art, that are thrown to the consumption of a world which destroyed them.

Everything about art has become problematic; its inner life, its relation to society, even its right to exist.

What can oppose the decline of the west is not a resurrected culture but the utopia that is silently contained in the image of its decline.

The body's habituation to walking as normal stems from the good olddays. It was the bourgeois form of locomotion: physicaldemythologization, free of the spell of hieratic pacing, rooflesswandering, breathless flight. Human dignity insisted on the right towalk, a rhythm not extorted from the body by command or terror. Thewalk, the stroll, were private ways of passing time, the heritage ofthe feudal promenade in the nineteenth century.