If life is deprived of any meaningful closure, it will be ended in non-time.

Ritual practices ensure that we treat not only other people but also things in beautiful ways, that there is an affinity between us and other people as well as things.

Depression is a narcissistic malady.

Sovereignty, the freedom unto death, is threatening to a society that is organized around work and production.

An absolute power would be one that never becomes apparent, never pointed to itself, one that rather blended completely into what goes without saying. Power shines in its own absence.

The eros-driven soul produces beautiful things, and, above all, beautiful actions, which have a universal value.

Historical time knows no lasting present.

Sabbath rest does not follow creation; it brings creation to completion.

Often what is absent has more power than what is present.

What is obscene about pornography is not an excess of sex, but the fact that it contains no sex at all.

God functions like a stabilizer of time.

Rituals are also symbolic practices... in the sense that they bring people together to create an alliance, a wholeness, a community.

Eros and depression are opposites.

It is a sign of sovereignty to risk one's life, that is, to turn life into a game.

Power turns pure being into a having.

There is no such thing as data-driven thinking.

Information has no scent.

When we subordinate rest to work, we ignore the divine.

When power is separated from any communicative context, it becomes naked violence.

The pornographic face says nothing. It has no expressivity or mystery.

A farewell does not dilute the presence of the past; it may make an even deeper presence.

Those who devote themselves to rituals must ignore themselves. Rituals produce a distance from the self, a self-transcendence.

Eros, erotic desire, conquers depression. It delivers us from the inferno of the same to the utopia, indeed utopia, of the wholly other.

Following Foucault, we may define the art of life as a practice of suicide, of giving oneself to death, of depsychologizing oneself, of playing.

Violence may capture space, but it does not create space.

Thinking is an expedition into quietness.

Time begins to emit a scent when it gains duration; when it is given a narrative or deep tension; when it gains depth and breadth, even space.

Silent listening unites a people and creates community without communication.

Power is more 'spacious' than violence. And violence becomes power if it 'gives itself more time.' Looked at from this perspective, power rests on an excess of space and time.

The erotic is never free of secrecy.

If things are deprived of memory, they become information or commodities. They are pushed into a time-free, ahistorical place.

Every religious practice is an exercise in attention. A temple is the highest degree of attention.

Violence and freedom are the two endpoints on the scale of power.

Catastrophic fatality abruptly switches over into salvation.

Power tends to reduce openness... Power tries to solidify and stabilize its position by eradicating spaces open to play, or incalculable spaces.

Logos is powerless without the force of eros.

Twenty-first-century society is no longer a disciplinary society, but rather an achievement society.

In contrast to festivals, events do not create community.

Architecture is a way for power to achieve eloquence through form.

Pornography completes the deritualization of love.

Promising, committment, and fidelity, for instance, are genuinely temporal practices.

The 'intense life' advertised by the neoliberal regime is in truth simply a life of intense consumption.

The task of power is to transform the always possible 'no' into a 'yes.'

Eros conquers depression.

An ethos of freedom stops power from solidifying into domination and makes sure it remains an open game.

Rituals are symbolic acts. They represent, and pass on, the values and orders on which a community is based. They bring forth a community without communication; today, however, communication without community prevails.

Disciplinary society is still governed by no. Its negativity produces madmen and criminals. In contrast, achievement society creates depressives and losers.

Capitalism lacks narrativity.

Rather, power is most powerful, most stable, where it creates a feeling of freedom and where it does not need to resort to violence.

The inner music of things sounds only when you close your eyes.