4 Quotes by Gilles Châtelet

In a state of perfect competition, there is no longer any competition, and the promise of a ‘purely informational’ world of thermostat-citizens is a phantasm just as puerile as the perpetual motion machine!

Resplendent in the Sunday best of human rights and free will, our tapeworm-citizens flatter themselves with having driven out ‘barbarism’, with having finally attained the ideal of the weak, the slave morality of which Nietzsche says that it ‘first has to have an opposing, external world, it needs, physiologically speaking, external stimuli in order to act at all,—its action is basically a reaction’.

It is not quite correct that a higher rate of participation is always favourable for democracy…. A growth in the rate of participation can indicate a weakening of social cohesion which will lead democracy to its death; inversely, the widespread opinion that ‘voting can’t change much’, by diminishing participation, can contribute to the stability of the regime.

Bergson shows firstly that any theory of knowledge that wishes to be consequent will have to start out by destroying the type of superstition that leads us to imagine that there could be no order at all.