Politics Is Not What It Pretends To

The Most Defenseless Tenderness And The Bloodiest Of Powers Have A Similar Need Of Confession. Western Man Has Become A Confessing Animal.

Do Not Ask Who I Am And Do Not Ask Me To Remain The Same. More Than One Person, Doubtless Like Me, Writes In Order To Have No Face.

Today, Criminal Justice Functions And Justifies Itself Only By This Perpetual Reference To Something Other Than Itself, By This Unceasing Reinscription In Non-juridical Systems.

To Seek In The Great Accumulation Of The Already-said The Text That Resembles "in Advance" A Later Text, To Ransack History In Order To Rediscover The Play Of Anticipations Or Echoes, To Go Right Back To The First Seeds Or To Go Forward To The Last Traces, To Reveal In A Work Its Fidelity To Tradition Or Its Irreducible Uniqueness, To Raise Or Lower Its Stock Of Originality, To Say That The Port -royal Grammarians Invented Nothing, Or To Discover That Cuvier Had More Predecessors Than One Thought, These Are Harmless Enough Amusements For Historians Who Refuse To Grow Up.

Prison Continues, On Those Who Are Entrusted To It, A Work Begun Elsewhere, Which The Whole Of Society Pursues On Each Individual Through Innumerable Mechanisms Of Discipline.