In myth, violent death is always justified.

Violence is the divine force that everyone tries to use for his own purposes and that ends by using everyone for its own—the Dionysus of The Bacchae

Men cannot confront the naked truth of their own violence without the risk of abandoning themselves to it entirely. They have never had a very clear idea of this violence, and it is possible that the survival of all human societies of the past was dependent on this fundamental lack ofunderstanding.

The self-proclaimed advocate of impartiality does not want to commit himself to either course of action. If pushed toward onecamp, he seeks refuge in the other. Men always find it distasteful to admit that the “reasons” on both sides of a dispute are equally valid—which is to say that violence operates without reason.Tragedy begins at that point where the illusion of impartiality, as well as the illusions of the adversaries, collapses.

There is no culture without a tomb and no tomb without a culture; in the end the tomb is the first and only cultural symbol. The above-ground tomb does not have to be invented. It is the pile of stones in which the victim of the unanimous stoning is buried. It is the first pyramid.

So long as globalization was slow in coming, everyone hoped and prayed that it would come soon. The unity of the world's nations was one of the great triumphalist themes of modernism. World's fairs were staged in its honor, one after another. Now that globalization is here, however, it arouses more anxiety than pride. The erasing of differences may not portend the era of universal reconciliation that everyone confidently expected.

Being made up of distinctions, language finds it almost impossible to express undifferentiation.

Les représentations théâtrales, elles aussi, sont enracinées dans la violence collective et ce sont des espèces de rites, mais plus nettoyés encore de leur violence que les sacrifices animaux, et plus riches sur le rapport culturel, puisque ce sont toujours, au moins indirectement, des méditations sur l'origine du religieux et de la culture tout entière, des sources potentielles de savoir.

Toujours et partout on peut résumer la situation initiale en termes d'une crise qui fait peser sur la communauté et son système culturel une menace de destruction totale. Cette crise est presque toujours résolue par la violence.