The negative is an illusion, no more than a shadow of problems. We have seen how problems were necessarily hidden by possible propositions corresponding to cases of solution: instead of being grasped as problems, they can then appear as no more than hypotheses or series of hypotheses.

Considering symptoms abstractly, making the movement of appearance into the genetic law of things and retaining only an inverted image of principle — the whole dialectic operates and moves in the element of ‘fiction’. How could its solution not be fictitious when its problems themselves are?

But there are various ways of looking at concepts. For ages people have used them to determine what something is (its essence). We, though, are interested in the circumstances in which things happen: in what situations, where and when does a particular thing happen, how does it happen, and so on?

Socrates say it several times: no one would claim to be a cobbler. There are cobblers, and I’m not a cobbler, and I don’t claim to be one. And he says, but in politics, that’s not the way it is – and this disturbs him. In politics, everyone will say: I’m good at politics. And he asks why this is.

Philosophers and literary writers are in the same situation. There are things we manage to see, and in some ways, literally, we never recover, never return.

You’ve noticed that while the common notions are not abstract, they are collective, they always refer to a multiplicity, but they’re no less individual for that.

The problem is to have an impossible ear, to make forces audible through a complex material, forces which would not be audible in themselves. In philosophy, it is not a question of an impossible ear, but of an impossible thought, that is, to make forces thinkable by a very complex thought material,

Like the gold coin, you stick some acid on it. Ah, this is the test! This is not a judgment, it’s a test. What can the gold coin do? We don’t know what “the body can do”. What can the gold coin do, the one I just received? It endures testing with acid; if it’s authentic gold, it endures it.

Nietzsche questions the concept of truth, he denies that the true can be an element of language. What he is contesting is the very notions of true and false. Not because he wants to "relativize" them like an ordinary skeptic. In their place he substitutes sense and value as rigorous notions:

It seems to me that any introduction, even indirectly, of chains of foreclosure, of lack, of the name of the father, would fall back onto an anthropomorphic representation of sex. So, I’m not all that receptive to the question of “sexual undifferentiation.” It’s not a real problem…

But people who have discovered what their concerns are, what they have to deal with, are rare. I think they’re very rare. They brighten up the day. People would be a lot happier if they knew what their real concerns were, what they have to deal with.

We have seen all that this valorisation of the negative signified, including the conservative spirit of such an enterprise, the platitude of the affirmations supposed to be engendered thereby, and the manner in which we are led away from the most important task, that of determining problems

The negative is an illusion because the form of negation appears with propositions which express the problem on which they depend only by distorting it and obscuring its real structure.

I only have to draw some conclusions: a common notion is necessarily univocal. We are completely out of the equivocity of the sign. When you’ve reached the domain of compositions of relations, you have reached univocity.

It is pointless to claim that a list of categories can be open in principle: it can be in fact, but not in principle. For categories belong to the world of representation, where they constitute forms of distribution according to which Being is repartitioned among beings

Such is the world of ‘representation’ in general. We said above that representation was defined by certain elements: identity with regard to concepts, opposition with regard to the determination of concepts, analogy with regard to judgement, resemblance with regard to objects.

That’s a butcher’s idea, to say that the hand is a partial object. It’s pure Frankenstein. Or that the eyes are partial objects. It makes no sense. It’s no good, it’s for those who chop people up into pieces, the anatomists.

In this, as we shall see, there is a confusion that compromises the whole of ontology; the history of a ‘long error’ whereby the command is mistaken for something to be understood, obedience for knowledge itself, and Being for a ‘Fiat’.

I mean, it’s obvious that an event is not individuated. There is an individuation of the event, of which a possible date for the event bears witness, a particular year this occurred, a particular day. I am saying that it goes without saying that an event’s individuation is not the kind

I'd also say that Whitehead went in this direction. For him, the idea resonated that it's not the abstract that ought to be used to explain, but that it's the abstract that he must explain, and the entire conception of the event stems from this.

On the one hand, if it is true that an Idea has two aspects, differential relations and singular points, the time of actualisation refers to the first, the space of actualisation to the second. On the other hand, if we consider the two aspects of the actual, qualities and extensions,

In any case the virtual and the actual correspond, but do not resemble each other. This is why the search for actual concepts can be infinite, there is always an excess of virtual Ideas which animate them.

Science today is taking the exploration of nature and man further than ever in a particular direction, but it is also taking submission to the ideal and the established order further than ever.

In Hobbes, man in the state of nature wants to see his superiority represented and recognised by others. In Hegel, consciousness wants to be recognised by another and represented as self-consciousness. Even in Adler it is still a matter of the representation of a superiority

The critique of the free thinker is a fundamental theme in Nietzsche's work — because this critique discloses a perspective from which many different ideologies can be attacked at once; positivism, humanism, the dialectic —

The essential characteristics of the free thinker's positivism and humanism are fatalism, interpretative impotence and ignorance of the qualities of force. As soon as something appears as a human force or fact the free thinker applauds it without wondering whether this force is of base extraction,

If it is true that some commentators have found Thomist echoes in Husserl, Heidegger, by contrast, follows Duns Scotus and gives renewed splendour to the Univocity of Being. But does he effectuate the conversion after which univocal Being belongs only to difference

The body without organs is opposed less to organs than to that organization of organs we call an organism. It is an intense and intensive body. It is traversed by a wave that traces levels or thresholds in the body according to the variations of its amplitude.

One can fight against the cliché only with much guile, perseverance, and prudence: it is a task perpetually renewed with every painting, with every moment of every painting.

Either ethics makes no sense at all, or this is what it means and has nothing else to say: not to be unworthy of what happens to us. To grasp whatever happens as unjust and unwarranted (it is always someone else’s fault) is, on the contrary, what renders our sores repugnant—veritable ‘ressentiment’,