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“The teacher’s aim “is an attempt to reveal discursive practices in their complexity and density.” To show that to speak is to do something– something other than to express what one thinks; to translate what one knows, and something other than to play with the structures of a language (langue); to show that to add a statement to a preexisting series of statements is to perform a complicated and costly gesture, which involves conditions (and not only a situation, a context, and motives), and rules (not the logical and linguistic rules of construction); to show that a change in the order of discourse does not presuppose ‘new ideas,’ a little invention and creativity, a different mentality, but transformations in a practice, perhaps also in neighboring practices, and in their common articulation. Thus the teacher derives the sovereign subject (or cogito) “of the exclusive and instantaneous right” to change discourse. (I have not denied–far from it–the possibility of changing discourse: I have denied the sovereignty of the subject of the exclusive and instantaneous right to it.)”

“If there is a God, I’d like to look him in the face knowing I’d died as I’d lived. In conscious sin.”