“On the contrary, the only possible salvation demands an active and practical involvement with the situation. Man works, produces a world of objects, and inevitably alienates himself to them. But then he rids himself on his alienation by accepting those objects, by committing himself to them, and, instead of annihilating them, by negating them in the name of transformation, aware that at every transformation he will again find himself confronting the same dialectic situation, the same risk of surrendering to the new, transformed reality. (p.129)

“the practical intervention of a “performer”(the instrumentalist who plays a piece of music or the actor who recites a passage) is different from that of an interpreter in the sense of consumer (somebody who looks at a picture, silently reads a poem, or listens to musical composition performed by somebody else). For the purpose of aesthetic analysis, however, both cases can be seen as different manifestation of the same interpretative attitude. Every “reading”, “contemplation”, or “enjoyment” of a work of art represents a tacit or private form of “performance”.(p.251)

” in this sense the author presents a finished product with the intention that this particular composition should be appreciated and received in the same form as he devised it. As he reacts to the play of stimuli and his own response to their patterning, the individual addressee is bound to supply his own existential credentials, the sense conditioning which is peculiarly his own, a defined culture, a set of tastes, personal inclinations, and prejudices…..In fact, the form of the work of art gains its aesthetic validity precisely in proportion to the number of different perspectives from which it can be viewed and understood.(p.3)

“They very fact that we live, work, produce, and form relationships means that we exist in alienation.”(p.128)

“”To Paraphrase Hegel, man cannot remain locked up in himself, in the temple of his own interiority: he must externalize himself in his work and, by so doing, alienate himself in it. For if he chooses instead to withdraw into himself and to cultivate his own purity and spiritual independence, he will find not salvation but annihilation. He cannot transcend alienation by refusing to compromise himself in the objective situation that emerges out of his work.”(p.130)

“And to preserve the purity of its heart, it flees from contact with actuality, and steadfastly perseveres in a state of self-willed impotence to renounce a self which is pared away to the last point of abstraction, and to give itself substantial existence, or, in other words, to transform its thought into being, and commit itself to absolute distinction [ that between thought and being].” (p.130)

“The ‘beautiful soul’, then has no concrete reality; it subsists in the contradiction between its pure self and the necessity felt by this self to externalize itself and turn into something actual; it exists in the immediacy of this rooted and fixed opposition…Thus the ‘beautiful soul,’ being conscious of this contradiction in its unreconciled immediacy, is unhinged, disordered, and runs to madness, wastes itself in yearning, and pines away in consumption.”(p.130)

“So, the avant-garde musician rejects the tonal system not only because it alienates him to a conventional system of musical laws, but also because it alienates him to social ethics and to a given vision of the world. Of course, the moment he breaks away from the accepted system of communication and renounces its advantages, he will invitably appear to be involved in an antihuman activity, whereas in fact he has engaged in it in order to avoid mystifying and deceiving his public. By rejecting a musical model, the avant-garde musician actually rejects (more or less consciously) a social model. ” (p.140)

“The musical system that the avant-garde musician rejects communicates only in appearance. In fact, it is exhausted, dried out. “(140-141)

“the universe we live in is still as orderly and dependable as it used to be-which, of cause, is far from true.”(p.141)

“Thus, the larger the amount of information, the more different its communication; the clearer the message, the smaller the amount of information.” (p.57)

“That is, information is a measure of one’s freedom of choice when one selects a message…Note that it is misleading (although often convent) to say that one or the other message conveys unit information. “(p.57)

” the originality of an aesthetic discourse involves to some extent a rupture with (or a departure from) the linguistic system of probability, which serves to convey established meanings, in order to increase the signifying potential of the message. “(p.58)

“That is, all deviation from the most banal linguistic order entails a new kind of organization, which can be considered as disorder in relation to the previous organization, and as order in relation to the parameters of the new discouse. But whereas classical art violated the conventional order of language within welll-defined limits, contemporary art constantly challenges the initial order by means of an extremely  “impossible” form of organization. In other words, whereas classical art introduced original elements within a linguistic system whose basic laws it substantially respected, contemporary art often manifests its originality by imposing a new linguistic system with its own inner laws.  In sact, one might say that rather than imposing a new system, contemporary art constantly oscillates between the rejection of the traditional linguistic system and its preservation-for if contemporary art imposed a totally new linguistic system, then its discourse would cease to be communicable.”(p.60)

“Every real artist constantly violates the laws of the system within which he works, in order to create new formal possibilities and stimulate aesthetic desire;”(p.79)

“There were reasons for all this: both the formal and the psychological requirements of art were a reflection of the religious, political, and cultural demands of a society based on a hierarchical order, on the notion of absolute authority, on the presumption of an immutable,  univocal truth, crucial to social organization and celebrated by different forms of art.”(p.80)

“In its search for an “openness of the second degree,” in its reliance on ambiguity and information as essential values of a work of art, contemporary poetics rebels against the psychic inertia that has been hiding behind the promise of a recovered order.”(p.80)

“The kind of expectation around by a message with an open structure is less a prediction of the expected than an expectation of the unpredictable. The value of an aethetic experience is determined oday not by the way a crisis is resolved but rather by the way in which, after propelling us into a sequence of known crises determined by improbability, it forces us to make a choice.”(p.80)

“After all, the crisis of contemporary brourgeois civilization is partly due to the fact that the average man has been unable to elude the systems of assumptions that are imposed on him  from the outside, and to the fact that he has not formed himself through a direct exploration of reality. Well-known social illnesses such as conformism, unidirectionism, gregariousness, and mass thinking result from a passive acquisition of those standards of understanding and judgment that are often identified with the “right form” in ethics as well as in politics, in nutrition as well as in fashion, in matters of taste as well as in pedagogical questions.”(p.83)

“But such comparison of itself does not really explain the decision to embrace or reject a certain affect.”(p.126)

” But because the stream of judgments one makes in daily life takes place in the comparison of states of feeling are constantly interrupted by waves of affect.”(p.126)

” we learn the difference between living attention and draining affects”(p.126)

“Murakami’s uniqueness lay in his dialectical thinking, which inspired him to turn negative sonditions of postmodern Japanese society into new methods of creating interpreting a uniquely Japanese art… Murakami utilized these negative conditions [embodied by otaku culture]- childishness and flat social structure –as vehicles to develop a unique artistic, a method of cultural interpretations and rules of artistic operation to bring a revolutionary change in the structure of Japanese art.”

(by Alison M.Gingeras)

“I don’t think of it as straddling. I think of it as changing the line. What I’ve been talking about for years is how in Japan, that line is less defined. Both by the culture and by the post-War economic situation. Japanese people accept that art and commerce will be blended; and in fact, they are surprised by the rigid and pretentious Western hierarchy of ‘high art.’ In the West, it certainly is dangerous to blend the two because people will throw all sorts of stones. But that’s okay—I’m ready with my hard hat.” (by Takashi Murakami)

A question about Japanese art education system when he was a student at Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music was his starting point to seek what art is. He translated Japanese Otaku culture, is low culture, he found originality and Japanese cultural identity to Western art context. There are not many Japanese contemporary artists who could get fame in Western and most of them seem not assumed what how and where they fixed their idea and artworks to Western contemporary art market and history. But Murakami seems certain his expression and planted what he wants to be fulfilled in a reality in Western art context.

Animation and cartoon in Japan are popular entertainment for widespread generations and drawing cartoon characters is not remarkable daily activity. However drawing cartoon characters on canvas as what people do on paper is still taboo in Japanese art system. Murakami questioned Japanese art education, which still emphasizes Western realistic drawing system in 19C.

“for Japanese thinkers it was the potentiality of the everyday that held most interest. To think of the everyday as a (potentially) radical transformation of social life relies on the ability to recognise the present as already undergoing the most extreme forms of transformation. But it also requires a context where the forms that such transformations are taking are as yet undecided (or least appeared to be). It was precisely the revolutionary effects of modernisation that made the everyday a field of possibility for Japanese thinkers (whether this possibility included a rapprochement between tradition and modernisation or more radical overhauling of daily life in the name of scientific rationality).” (p.118)

“through an optics that produced differing effects according to the angle of the lens through which experience was being refracted. These refraction distilled certain intensities in the experience of modern life and privileged others to present a vision of everyday life that was both enabling for the present and promising for a future as of yet unenvisaged. What is important about this activity is the way is centered the category of everyday life- its performativity in the present- as the informing principle of modern life.”( p.119)

“thinkers as diverse as Kon Wajiro and Tosaka Jun saw in the performance of the everyday an escape from a binding past that still managed to lay claim on the present and the full promise of modern life- including the hope for a better future.”(p.119)

“one of the interesting problems of Japan’s modern history that so many thinkers were intensely concerned with the status of everydayness – a concern that often matched and even frequently exceeded European considerations.”p.119

“In Europe, concern for everyday life after World War 1 was dominated by the wiork of two thinkers, George Lukas and Heidegger, in the shadow of Max Weber’s meditations on the identity of modern society.” p.119

“As Lukacs’s understanding of reification was deeply embedded in a particular history of the capitalist present that marked historically, its production.”

“Kracaur’s brilliant essays on everyday life and his critique of the German white-collar class (Die Angeststellten, 1930) went a long way to simply confirming the effects of commodification on the masses and its political and cultural consequences for producing spiritual ‘homelessness’, while only Benjamin seemed willing to envisage a new historical materialist program that could acknowledge the existence of alienation in the everyday brought on by commodification and routine yet at the same time see in the ‘mystery’ of genuine possibility.”(p.119-120)

” constructivists like Boris Arvatov were trying to  conceptualize a socialist everydayness that would make the consumer into a subject free from the commodity fetish by transforming objects into use-value. (p.120)

” the performative present altogether in favor of recalling an indeterminate past.”(p.120)

“With their call to memory of a past age or in their move to poeticize a mode of existence, they appealed to cultural forms and practices that claimed for themselves an as yet unrealized sociotemporality outside of a temporal and temporalizing present. To offset a present that alone gave direction to history, they recalled a historical reason that already prengured the whole history of the race from past to present and forged, therefore, an abstract and fictive continuity between then and now.” (p.120)

“constituted the sign of a historicity of the present, its historical moment, the temporality of modernity.” (p.120)

“To speak of the present, as against merely the modern”(p.121)

“A partial explanation of this inordinate emphasis on everyday life, I believe, but in the discovery of a personal and private world of experience available to large numbers of people for the first time in history now being installed in the 1920s and immediately juxtaposed to the public world of state and social system.” (p.121)

“ Without the rationalization of the ‘means of life’(Kon’s words) and ‘life attitudes’ linked to institution implicated in everyday life, there could be no chance for the development of a democratic subject.” (p.212)

“The appearance of modern life was seen as rational, efficient, and even scientific, requiring at all times the steady flow and circulation of information and knowledge.” (p.212)

“For some, transforming the experience of everydayness to conform more closely to the requirements of rationality constituted the principal condition for remodeling society itself and altering the received political and social relationship in the name of science.” p.122

“The idea of a better life retained the faith in rationality and science but in time developed a political purpose that took precedence and began to visualize new forms of political society.” p.122″

“”Both of its capacity to conceal (and thus induce social forgetting), its enabling conditions of production, and its aptitude for interpellating consumers revealed its role in making the everyday the space of differing historical temporalizations.” p.122

“At the same time the everyday become the only place for producing anew the redemptive power associated with tradition in the time of modernity. If the commodity from produced the ever new in the transform the empty, homogenous time of the Now. It should be recalled that progressive thinkers like Tosaka and even Kon opposed the Now to the present, rather than past to present. The ‘present’ from the now of immediate experience, what Benjamin once described as the ‘now of recognizability.’ “  p.123

“Social thinkers were thus left with the choice of finding a way to break through the commodity from that dominated modern life either to restore its forgotten history (Gonda), or to show how consumption was actually constitutive of a new subject capable of making choices for the first time(Kon), or to transform the daily objects in order to release a new aesthetic consciousness(Murayama), or to conceptualize it into a space that structured its temporality into accumulative layers that could only be disturbed by exploring the possiblities they offered at any given moment(Tosaka). p.123

“put into practice a new discipline devoted to studying the modern (kogengaku), this secondary revision upheld the claims of modernity as the product of a determinate history directed only by the present and a different temporality that would.” p.123

” In fact Japanese in the 1920s were driven to see in the hard commodification of life the promise and design of an even more human order reached not by overcoming modernity (which in the late 1930s was nothing more than an escape route to a national fantasy) but being overcome by it, by bringing it to complection,” p.123

Chapter 1

“Separation Perfected”

“The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.”(4)

Separation is itself part of the unity of the world, of the global social praxis split upinto reality and image.”(7)

“The spectacle is affirmation of appearance and affirmation of all human life, namely social life, as mere appearance.”(10)

“The spectacle inherits all the weaknesses of the Western philosophical project which undertook to comprehend activity in terms of the categories of seeing; furthermore, it is based on the incessant spread of the precise technical rationality which grew out of this thought. The spectacle does not realize philosophy, it philosophizes reality. The concrete life of everyone has been degraded into a speculative universe.”(19)

“The most earthly life thus becomes opaque and unbreathable. It no longer projects into the sky but shelters within itself its absolute denial, its fallacious paradise. The spectacle is the technical realization of the exile of human powers into a beyond; it is separation perfected within the interior of man.”(20)

“The concentration of “communication” is thus an accumulation, in the hands of the existing system s administration, of the means which allow it to carry on this particular administration.”(24)

“The sacred has justified the cosmic and ontological order which corresponded to the interests of the masters; it has explained and embellished that which society could not do.”(25)

“The economic system founded on isolation is a circular production of isolation.”(28)

“The spectacle reunites the separate, but reunites it as separate.”(29)

“the more he contemplates the less he lives; the more he accepts recognizing himself in the dominant images of need, the less he understands his own existence and his own desires. The externality of the spectacle in relation to the active man appears in the fact that his own gestures are no longer his but those of another who represents them to him. This is why the spectator feels at home nowhere, because the spectacle is everywhere.”(30)

“Separated from his product, man himself produces all the details of his world with ever increasing power, and thus finds himself ever more separated from his world. The more his life is now his product, the more lie is separated from his life.”(33)

Chapter 2

“Commodity as Spectacle”

The abundance of commodities, namely, of commodity relations, can be nothing more than increased survival.”(40)

“As soon as society discovers that it depends on the economy, the economy, in fact, depends on society.”(52)

Chapter 3

“Unity and Division Within Appearance”

“Celebrities exist to act out various styles of living and viewing society unfettered, free to express themselves globally. They embody the inaccessible result of social labor by dramatizing its by-products magically projected above it as its goal: power and vacations, decision and consumption, which are the beginning and end of an undiscussed process. In one case state power personalizes itself as a pseudo-star; in another a star of consumption gets elected as a pseudo-power over the lived. But just as the activities of the star are not really global. they are not really varied.”(61)

“If every Chinese must learn Mao, and thus be Mao, it is because he can be nothing else.”(64)

“In the image of the society happily unified by consumption, real division is only suspended until the next non-accomplishment in consumption.”(69)

Chapter 4

“The Proletariat as Subject and as Representation”

“The subject of history can be none other than the living producing himself, becoming master and possessor of his world which is history, and existing as consciousness of his game. By being thrown into history, by having to participate in the labor and struggles which make up history, men find themselves obliged to view their relations in a clear manner.”(74)

“The class struggles of the long revolutionary epoch inaugurated by the rise of the bourgeoisie, develop together with the thought of history,the dialectic, the thought which no longer stops to look for the meaning of what is, but rises to a knowledge of the dissolution of all that is, and in its movement dissolves all separation.”(75)

“Thus philosophy, which dies in the thought of history, can now glorify its world only by renouncing it, since in order to speak, it must presuppose that this total history to which it has reduced everything is already complete, and that the only tribunal where the judgment of truth could be given is closed.”(76)

“History become real no longer has an end.”(80)

“Of all the instruments of production the greatest productive power is the revolutionary class itself.”(80)

“Proletarian revolution depends entirely on the condition that, for the first time, theory as intelligence of human practice be recognized and lived by the masses.”(123)

Chapter 5

“Time and History”

“Inversely, this “natural history” has no actual existence other than through the process of human history, the only part which recaptures this historical totality, like the modern telescope whose sight captures, in time, the retreat of nebulae at the periphery of the universe. History has always existed, but not always in a historical form. The temporalization of man as effected through the mediation of a society is equivalent to a humanization of time.”(125)

“There, all knowledge, confined within the memory of the oldest, is always carried by the living.”(126)

“Writings are the thoughts of the State; archives are its memory” (Novalis).(131)

“The victory of the bourgeoisie is the victory of profoundly historical time, because this is the time of economic production which transforms society, continuously and from top to bottom.”(141)

“With the development of capitalism, irreversible time is unified on a world scale. Universal history becomes a reality because the entire world is gathered under the development of this time.”(145)

Chapter 6

“Spectacular Time”

“The spectacle, as the present social organization of the paralysis of history and memory, of the abandonment of history built on the foundation of historical time, is the false consciousness of time.”(158)

“The spectator’s consciousness, immobilized in the falsified center of the movement of its world, no longer experiences its life as a passage toward self-realization and toward death. One who has renounced using his life can no longer admit his death. Life insurance advertisements suggest merely that he is guilty of dying without ensuring the regularity of the system after this economic loss;”(160)

“This social absence of death is identical to the social absence of life.”(160)

“Time, as Hegel showed, is the necessary alienation, the environment where the subject realizes himself by losing himself, where he becomes other in order to become truly himself.”(161)

“The world already possesses the dream of a time whose consciousness it must now possess in order to actually live it.”(164)

“The city is the locus of history(176)”

“But when this peasantry, which was the unshakable foundation of “Oriental despotism” and whose very fragmentation called for bureaucratic centralization reemerges as a product of the conditions of growth of modern state bureaucracy, its apathy must now be historically manufactured and maintained; natural ignorance has been replaced by the organized spectacle of error. The “new towns” of the technological pseudo-peasantry clearly inscribe on the landscape their rupture with the historical time on which they are built; their motto could be: “On this spot nothing will ever happen, and nothing ever has.”It is obviously because history, which must be liberated in the cities, has not yet been liberated, that the forces of historical absence begin to compose their own exclusive landscape.”(177)

Chapter 8

“Negation and Consumption Within Culture”

“The struggle between tradition and innovation, which is the principle of internal cultural development in historical societies, can be carried on only through the permanent victory of innovation.”(181)

“But this “first condition of any critique” is also the first obligation of a critique without end. When it is no longer possible to maintain a single rule of conduct, every result of culture forces culture to advance toward its dissolution. Like philosophy at the moment when it gained its full autonomy, every discipline which becomes autonomous has to collapse, first of all as a pretention to explain social totality coherently, and finally even as a fragmented tool which can be used within its own boundaries.”(182)

“In the case of knowledge, the accumulation of branches of fragmentary knowledge, which become unusable because the approval of existing conditions must finally renounce knowledge of itself, confronts the theory of praxis which alone holds the truth of them all since it alone holds the secret of their use.”(185)

“When art, which was the common language of social inaction, becomes independent art in the modern sense, emerging from its original religious universe and becoming individual production of separate works, it too experiences the movement that dominates the history of the entirety of separate culture. The affirmation of its independence is the beginning of its disintegration.”(186)

“The loss of the language of communication is positively expressed by the modern movement of decomposition of all art, its formal annihilation. This movement expresses negatively the fact that a common language must be rediscovered no longer in the unilateral conclusion which, in the art of the historical society, always arrived too late, speaking to others about what was lived without real dialogue, and admitting this deficiency of life but it must be rediscovered in praxis, which unifies direct activity and its language. The problem is to actually possess the community of dialogue and the game with time which have been represented by poetico-artistic works.”(187)

“What followed the general path of the baroque, from romanticism to cubism, was ultimately an ever more individualized art of negation perpetually renewing itself to the point of the fragmentation and complete negation of the artistic sphere.”(189)

“Once this “collection of souvenirs” of art history becomes possible, it is also the end of the world of art. In this age of museums, when artistic communication can no longer exist, all the former moments of art can be admitted equally, because they no longer suffer from the loss of their specific conditions of communication in the current general loss of the conditions of communication.”(189)

“the communication of the incommunicable.”(192)

“and here all communication is joyously proclaimed absent.”(192)

“It does not know that conflict is at the origin of all things in its world.”(195)

“Nevertheless, the false despair of non-dialectical critique and the false optimism of pure advertising of the system are identical in that they are both submissive thought.”(196)

“Because history itself haunts modern society like a spectre, pseudo-histories are constructed at every level of consumption of life in order to preserve the threatened equilibrium of present frozen time.”(200)

“Just as one cannot appraise the value of a man in terms of the conception he has of himself, one cannot appraise–and admire–this particular society by taking as indisputably true the language it speaks to itself; “…we cannot judge such epochs of transformation by their own consciousness;”(202)

Chapter 9

“Ideology Materialized”

“The spectacle is materially “the expression of the separation and estrangement between man and man.” Through the “new power of fraud,” concentrated at the base of the spectacle in this production, “the new domain of alien beings to whom man is subservient… grows coextensively with the mass of objects.” It is the highest stage of an expansion which has turned need against life. “The need for money is thus the real need produced by political economy, and the only need it produces” (Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts).”(215)

“The removal of praxis and the anti-dialectical false consciousness which accompanies it are imposed during every hour of daily life subjected to the spectacle; this must be understood as a systematic organization of the “failure of the faculty of encounter” and as its replacement by a hallucinatory social fact: the false consciousness of encounter, the “illusion of encounter.”(217)

“The spectacle obliterates the boundaries between self and world by crushing the self besieged by the presence-absence of the world and it obliterates the boundaries between true and false by driving all lived truth below the real presence of fraud ensured by the organization of appearance.”(219)

“This “historical mission of installing truth in the world” cannot be accomplished either by the isolated individual, or by the atomized crowd subjected to manipulation, but now as ever by the class which is able to effect the dissolution of all classes by bringing all power into the dealienating form of realized democracy, the Council, in which practical theory controls itself and sees its own action. This is possible only where individuals are “directly linked to universal history”; only where dialogue arms itself to make its own conditions victorious.”(221)

“The great obsession of the nineteenth century was , as we know, history:with its themes of development and of suspension, of crisis and cycle, themes of the ever-accumulating past, with its great preponderance of dead men and the menacing glaciation of the world.“(p.22)

“Structuralism, or at least that which is grouped under this slightly too general name, is the effort to establish, between elements that could have been as juxtaposed, set off against one another, implicated by each other-that makes them appear, in short, as a sort of configuration. Actually, structuralism does not entail a denial of time; it does involve a certain manner of dealing with what we call time and what we call history.”(p/22)

“Yet it is necessary to notice that the space which today appears to form the horizon of our concerns, our theory, our systems, is not an innovation; space itself has a history in Western experience and it is not possible to disregard the fatal intersection of time with space.”(p.22)

“The space in which we live, which draws us out of ourselves, in which the erosion of our lives, our time and our history occurs, the space that claws and knaws at us, is also, in itself, a heterogeneous space. “(p.23)

“I am interested in certain ones that have the curious property of being in relation with all the other sites, but in such a way as to suspect, neutralize, or invert the set of relations that they happen to designate, mirror or reflect. These space, as it were, which are linked with all the others, which however contradict all the other sites, are of two main types.”(p.24)

“In the mirror, I see myself there where I am not, in an unreal, virtual space that opens up behind the surface; I am over there, there where I am not, a sort of shadow that gives my own visibility to my self, that enables me to see myself there where I am absent:such is the utopia of the mirror. But it is also a heterotopia in so far as the mirror does exist in reality, where it exerts a sort of counteraction on the position that I occupy.”

“Starting from this gaze that is, as it were, directed toward me, from the ground of this virtual space that is on the other side of the glass, I come back toward myself; I begin again to direct my eyes toward myself and to reconstitute myself there where I am. “(p.24)

” For girls, there was, until the middle of the twentieth century, a tradition called the “honeymoon trip” which was an ancestral theme. The young women’s deflowering could take place “nowhere”and, at the moment of its occurence the train or honeymoon hotel was indeed the place of this nowhere, this heteroyopia without geographical markers.”(p.24-25)

“it is only from that start of the nineteenth century that cemeteries began to be located at the outside of cities. In correlation with the individualization of death and the bourgeois appropriation of the cemetery, there arises an obsession with death as an “illness”.(p.25)

“The garden is the smallest parcel of the world and then it is the totality of the wprld.”(p.26)

“From a general standpoint, in a society like ours heterotopias and heterochronies are structured and distributed in a relatively complex fashion. First of all, there are heterotopias of indefinitely accumulating time, for example museum and libraries.”(p.26)

“Museums and libraries have become heterotopias in which time never stops building up and topping its own summit, whereas in the seventeenth century, even at the end of the century, museums and libraries were the expression of an individual choice. By contrast, the idea of accumulating everything, of establishing a sort of general archive, the will to enclose in one place all times, all epochs, all forms, all tastes, the idea of constituting a place of all times that is itself outside of time and inaccessible to its ravages, the project of organizing in this way a sort of perpetual and indefinite accumulation of time in an immobile place, this whole idea belongs to our modernity. The museum and the library are heterotopias that are proper to western culture of the nineteenth century.”(p.26)

“There are others, on the contrary, that seem to be pure and simple openings, but that generally hide curious exclusions. Everyone can enter into thew heterotopic sites, but in fact that is only an illusion- we think we enter where we are, by the very fact that we enter, excluded.”(p.26)

“Now these bedrooms were such that the individual who went into them never had access to the family’s quarter the visitor was absolutely the guest in transit, was not really the invited guest. This type of heterotopia, which has practically disappeared from our civilizations, could perhaps be found in the famous American motel rooms where a man goes with his car and his mistress and where illicit sex is both absolutely sheltered and absolutely hidden, kept isolated without however being allowed out in the open.“(p.26)

“they have a function in relation to all the space that remains. This function unfolds between two extreme poles. Either their role is to create a space of illusion that exposes every real space, all the sites inside of which human life is partitioned, as still more illusory (perhaps that is the role that was played by those famous brothels of which we are now deprived).”(p.27)

“of the first wave of colonization in the seventeenth century, of the Puritan societies that the English had founded in America and that were absolutely perfect other places.”(p.27)

“Christianity marked the space and geography of the American world with its fundamental sign.”(p/27)

“the boat is a floating piece of space, a place without a place, that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself and at the same time is given over to the infinity of the sea and that, from port to port, from tack to tack, from brothel to brothel, it goes as far as the colonies in search of the most precious treasures they conceal in their gardens, you will understand why the boat has not only been for our civilization, from the sixteenth century until the present, the great instrument of economic development”(p.27)