« Between Euroland and Clochemerle, the door is narrow. »

« In the past, men hated each other according to what they thought. The fact that they now hate each other according to who they are is an undeniable regression. Tutsi or Flemish, Hutu or Walloons. It is the revenge of the barbarian, that ugly part of ourselves that our ideals had left in the dark, and our moralists in the blind spots of the University. By refusing to venture into this "dangerous terrain", a rationalism that has become pudibond arouses a pathological inability to understand the present other than as pathological. The triumph of the visceral over the thoughtful and the epidemic of community reflexes among our great consciences gives us a camouflage of which the Enlightenment man may be morally ashamed, but whose reasons he should instead draw on the day if he does not want to give in turn in exorcism or euphemism. Prelude to a moral capitulation where the white flag would advance behind the banner "democracy and modernity". »

« (From the opposition between artist vision and genetic vision, p. 133, chap. 4, Towards a religious materialism) We know the dialogue of the deaf between the charismatic proliferation of the "art effect", without the value of knowledge, and the knowledge, without grace or sensitivity, of its causes and objective factors. Connoisseurs and artists reject as cooks and philistines those who renew the work of art to its external conditions, in the name of an intuitive, incommunicable and intimate experience which they assure is the true of art. Each work, they say, is unique. The kingdom of the individual, art excludes any generalization, admits only monograph, and judgment on a case-by-case basis. Nothing can be explained, everything must be interpreted. Sociologists and historians, on the other hand, welcome the often verbose effusions of the ineffable as the symptoms of what they denounce. The work of art, they say, is a social artifact, and the aesthetic denial of this social conditioning is itself a social fact. Behind this game of crossed disdain, these mutual accusations of terrorism, perhaps there is an antinomy of aesthetic reason, an embarrassment without a similar solution to the dilemma of the ethnologist caught between the desire to participate and the need to distance himself. »