Do Not Think That One Has To

The Work Of An Intellectual Is Not To Mould The Political Will Of Others; It Is, Through The Analyses That He Does In His Own Field, To Re-examine Evidence And Assumptions, To Shake Up Habitual Ways Of Working And Thinking, To Dissipate Conventional Familiarities, To Re-evaluate Rules And Institutions And To Participate In The Formation Of A Political Will (where He Has His Role As Citizen To Play).

Literature Is A Form Of Language That Breaks With The Whole Definition Of Genres As Forms Adapted To An Order Of Representations, And Becomes Merely A Manifestation Of A Language Which Has No Other Law Than That Of Affirming In Opposition To All Other Forms Of Discourse Its Own Precipitous Existence.

[knowledge Is Governed Not By] A Theory Of Knowledge, But By A Theory Of Discursive Practice.

Politics Is Not What It Pretends To Be, The Expression Of A Collective Will. Politics Breathes Well Only Where This Will Is Multiple, Hesitant, Confused, And Obscure Even To Itself.

[raymond Roussel] Said That After His First Book He Expected That The Next Morning There Would Be A Kind Of Aura Around His Person And That Everyone In The Street Would Be Able To See That He Had Written A Book. This Is The Obscure Desire Harboured By Everyone Who Writes. It Is True That The First Text One Writes Is Neither Written For Others, Nor Because One Is What One Is: One Writes To Become Other Than What One Is. One Tries To Modify One's Way Of Being Through The Act Of Writing.