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“May ‘68 has shown that without project, without conjuration, in the suddenness of a happy meeting, like a feast that breached the admitted and expected social norms, explosive communication could affirm itself (affirm itself beyond the usual forms of affirmation) as the opening that gave permission to everyone, without distinction of class, age, sex or culture, to mix with the first comer as if with an already loved being, precisely because he was the unknown-familiar. [...] “Spontaneous” communication…because of that one could have the presentiment that with authority overthrown or, rather, neglected, a sort of communism declared itself, a communism of a kind never experienced before and which no ideology was able to recuperate or claim as its own.”

“declaration of impotence” [representational politics as declaration of impotence]

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“…evil as ‘the malady of death,’ … concerns first of all the other, and the other — someone else — is the innocent, the child, the sick person, whose complaint echoes as the ‘unheard of’ scandal, because it exceeds understanding, while pledging me to respond to it without my having the power to do so.”

“Everything is decided by an initial ‘you’…”

(Vous devriez ne pas la connaître, l’avoir trouvée partout à la fois, dans un hôtel, dans une rue, dans un train, dans un bar, dans un livre, dans un film, en vous-même, en vous, en toi…)

“Love may be a stuumbling block for ethics, unless love simply puts ethics into question by imitating it. Likewise the distribution of the human between male and female creates problems inthe various versions of the Bible. It is well known, and there was no need to wait for Bizet to learn that ‘love has never known any law.’ Is this therefore a return to the wilderness that does not even transgress prohibitions…cannot be satisfied with a society of two where the reciprocity of the ‘I-you’ would reign, but prefers to invoke the original, precreational chaos, the night without end, the outside, the fundamental unhinging? (For the Greeks, according to Phaedrus, Love is nearly as ancient as Chaos.)”

“…for the ‘I’ and the ‘other’ do not live in the same time, are never togethr (synchronously), can therefore not be contemporary, but separated (even when united) by a ‘not yet’ which goes hand in hand with an ‘already no longer.’”

“A death, by definition, without glory, without consolation, without recourse, which no other disappearance can equal, except perhaps for that disappearance that inscribes itself in writing, when the work which is its drifting is from the onset the renunciation of creating a work, indicating only the space in which resounds, for all and for each, and thus for nobody, the always yet to come words of the unworking.”

(Blanchot)