There is no universal clock, but local histories take form beneath our eyes, and begin to regulate themselves, and haltingly are linked to one another and demand to live, and confirm the powerful in the wisdom which the immensity of the risks and the consciousness of their own disorder had given them. The world is more present to itself in all its parts than it ever was.

We must accept at the same time a historical and social explanation of psychoanalysis and a psychoanalysis of the history and social facts.

The idea of tradition is this double movement: being other in order to be the same, forgetting in order to conserve, producing in order to receive, looking ahead in order to receive the entire force of the past.

Revolutions are true as movements and false as regimes.

I do not believe that what one gives to the sciences is taken from philosophy.

There is a kinship between the concepts of nature and radical contingency.

Stiftung is not enveloping thought, but open thought, not the intended and Vorhabe of an actual center, but an ‘off-center’ which will be rectified, not the positing of an end, but the positing of a style, not a frontal grasp but a lateral divergence, algae brought back from the depths.

Rather than a mind and a body, man is a mind with a body, a being who can only get to the truth of things because its body is, as it were, embedded in those things.

What we call ‘natural’ is frequently no more than bad theory.

The wonderful thing about language is that it promotes its own oblivion.