« The entire path of the Republic will remain haunted by this propensity for theoretical radicalism based on its practical translation. »

« Between self-love until the expulsion of the rest (narcissism) and the will to abolish oneself in its most varied expressions, between the absolute of being and being nothing, perhaps we will never finish swinging. In any case, this is the nagging, everyday pain that no sacred object will allow us to forget: the unspoing contradiction of the desire inherent in the very desire to be subject. »

« P 122: Representation, in the sense of the public staging of social diversity, tends to become an end in itself, in this new ideal of democracy whose logic is being reconstructed. Who participates, and why, in what capacity, is what matters, rather than what happens to it. We lived, with the classic model of majority democracy, under a certain tyranny of the result to be obtained, the main thing being to achieve a general will, at the risk of the crumpling and ignorance of the interested parties. With the pluralistic-identity-minority model taking hold, under the whiff of a certain tyranny of the path to follow and the procedure to be respected, we pass the spectacle of political discussion and the empowerment of its protagonists taking over its outcome, at the risk of a dilution of the decision and the actual possibility of controlling it. The priority is that the problems are represented, along with those who pose them, not that they are dealt with. The consideration of the community in its unity tended to prevail at the expense of the multiplicity of its components; the consideration of the components tends to prevail at the expense of collective unity, which nevertheless continues to exist, but which passes into the dark, in a way, and evades political control. This means that we exchange a range of difficulties for another and that the new configuration is no less problematic than the previous one. It does not bring the magic formula of democracy. »