“Just imagine: hidden behind the profusion of world wars, colonial wars, and nuclear threats, there was, in the twentieth century, that “classic century of war,” another war, also worldwide, also total, also colonial, that we lived through without experiencing it. ”

“There is no cure for the condition of belonging to the world. But, by taking care, we can cure ourselves of believing that we do not belong to it, that the essential question lies elsewhere, that what happens to the world does not concern us. ”

“We can no longer say “this, too, will pass.” We’re going to have to get used to it. It’s definitive. ”

“The difficulty lies in the very expression “relation to the world,” which presupposes two sorts of domains, that of nature and that of culture, domains that are at once distinct and impossible to separate completely. ”

“The concept of “nature” now appears as a truncated, simplified, exaggeratedly moralistic, excessively polemical, and prematurely political version of the otherness of the world to which we must open ourselves if we are not to become collectively mad – alienated, let us say. To sum it up rather too quickly: for Westerners and those who have imitated them, “nature” has made the world uninhabitable. ”