« The more you expropriates consciences, through the dream or information industry, the more you give them the desire to build a separate cabin, through handmade crafts, as is literature. Every literary language is asocial in that it is more than a means of communication. It transcends its instrumental function, becomes a form in itself, capable of surviving the disappearance of its subject, the wear and tear of political passions, the evanescence of motives. "Journalist" is the one who delivers his message, and leaves; "writer", the one who, in order to remain, is as interested in manner as in matter. Logic of collective demand versus logic of personal supply. By which the man of the media reassures, if the writer offends. The former gives pledges to his group of affiliations because it presents the real in its judged form; the second puts us in front of reality, but each for himself, nothing is decided (...) by unmasking language, by deindustrializing culture. By encouraging us, by the force of example, to take a step back from the environment, to make our own glasses. To deliver the man from his tribe, to give back his own voice to each one, to remove him even for a moment from the collective purr and need, to signal to him that there is somewhere of the unsubstitute, is exactly what the media cannot do for the simple reason that they have the function of doing the opposite: to plunge the fish back into the jar. The emancipatory force of a work on words is in short measured by its virtue of disengagement. It alone can break moral intimidation as a method of thought, repelling the violence of general ideas that violate the singularity, beings and situations, dissolved in the agreed emphasis of the mercantile agit-prop. Literature would then unconsciously produce chronic misfits for mass consumption. An immoral mission, if one wishes, in the light of consensus, but deeply ethical, in the light of consciences. This ability to depoliticize depends on the treatment, not the subject. When a Nabokov writes about butterflies, he helps us take the government of ourselves. When a follicular pity on the bottom miners, its agreed lamentos prolong alienation. Both Nabokov has readers, and the author of bestsellers a clientele. (page 129-130) »

« "In a century of politics yesterday, a myriad of revolutionaries without revolution; in a century shaken by Tech, today, a string of revolutions without revolutionaries" »

« Philosophers are fortunate to have Minerva as a protective goddess. His owl takes flight at dusk. Happy coincidence, that's where I am. This volatile, just before nightfall, lends us its plunging view of the string of chance that made us grow. We can then rewind the film and discern as a curve connecting our seasons to each other. I am sorry for the over-ability, but it seemed to me that the parable of a French "intellectual", having known more than one country and some misbehaviour, could, like a document among others, contribute to the mapping of a very turbulent era, under the shock of a landslide worthy of consideration. »