To whom could I put this question (with any hope of an answer)? Does being able to live without someone you loved mean you loved her less than you thought…?
As soon as someone dies, frenzied construction of the future (shifting furniture, etc.): futuromania.
The text you write must prove to me that it desires me. This proof exists: it is writing. Writing is: the science of the various blisses of language, its Kama Sutra (this science has but one treatise: writing itself).
Boredom is not far from bliss: it is bliss seen from the shores of pleasure.
We don’t forget, but something vacant settles in us.
The incapacity to name is a good symptom of disturbance.
The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.
Literature is that neuter, that composite, that oblique into which every subject escapes, the trap where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes.
Literature is like phosphorus: it shines with its maximum brilliance and the moment when it attempts to die.
Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.
Don’t say mourning. It’s too psychoanalytic. I’m not mourning. I’m suffering.
Paradoxically (since people say: Work, amuse yourself, see friends) it’s when we’re busy, distracted, sought out, exteriorized, that we suffer most. Inwardness, calm, solitude makes us less miserable.
I transform “Work” in its analytic meaning (the Work of Mourning, the Dream-Work) into the real “Work” – of writing.
In this manner , we are told, the system of the imaginary is spread circularly, by detours and returns the length of an empty subject.
What right does my present have to speak of my past? Has my present some advantage over my past? What “grace” might have enlightened me? except that of passing time, or of a good cause, encountered on my way?
Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire
Absence is the figure of privation; simultaneously, I desire and I need. Desire is squashed against need: that is the obsessive phenomenon of all amorous sentiment.
As a general rule, desire is always marketable: we don’t do anything but sell, buy, exchange desires. . . . And I think of Bloy’s words: “there is nothing perfectly beautiful except what is invisible and above all unbuyable.
If I had to create a god, I would lend him a “slow understanding”: a kind of drip-by-drip understanding of problems. People who understand quickly frighten me.
Language is neither reactionary nor progressive; it is quite simply fascist; for fascism does not prevent speech, it compels speech.
Don’t bleach language, savour it instead. Stroke it gently or even groom it, but don’t “purify” it.
Today there is no symbolic compensation for old age, no recognition of a specific value: wisdom, perceptiveness, experience, vision.
Are not couturiers the poets who, from year to year, from strophe to strophe, write the anthem of the feminine body?
When we define the Photograph as a motionless image, this does not mean only that the figures it represents do not move; it means that they do not (i)emerge(i), do not (i)leave(i): they are anesthetized and fastened down, like butterflies.
In an initial period, Photography, in order to surprise, photographs the notable; but soon, by a familiar reversal, it decrees notable whatever it photographs. The ‘anything whatever’ then becomes the sophisticated acme of value.
The (i)studium(i) is ultimately always coded, the (i)punctum is not)…
A photograph is always invisible, it is not it that we see.
We know that the war against intelligence is always waged in the name of common sense.
To make someone wait: the constant prerogative of all power, “age-old pastime of humanity”.
The author enters into his own death, writing begins.
I call the discourse of power any discourse that engenders blame, hence guilt, in its recipient.
What I claim is to live to the full the contradiction of my time, which may well make sarcasm the condition of truth.
There is only one way left to escape the alienation of present day society: to retreat ahead of it.