The True Life

But today there is something far more ominous, which is the fear of youth’s disorientation.

The processes of dismantlement, privatization, social segregation, and educational inadequacy are going to accelerate. Why? Because we no longer require schools to deliver shared knowledge or even proper worker training to the broad masses. We require them – and this will increasingly be their role – to separate out and protect the deserving bodies

At the other extreme, there is the sacrificed body. This is a body trying desperately to bring tradition back.

We’ll be guided, as we always are in moments of confusion in thought and life, by what remains in terms of new truths, or, in my terminology, of generic procedures made possible by some event.

either the passion for burning up your life or the passion for building it.

And this dialectic breaks down not because its constitutive figures disappear but because they gradually become separated or detached.

its consistency derives from a mimetic separation.

Simply put, it seems as though the most common feature of youth, at least in our world, the world known as the West, is that it is a freer youth.

Essentially, to corrupt youth means only one thing: to try to ensure that young people don’t go down the paths already mapped out, that they are not just condemned to obey social customs, that they can create something new, propose a different direction as regards the true life.