“But the norm in these matters is rather the campus at the edge of the woods, in conformity with the agrarian mythology of nineteenth-century America, according to which a bucolic setting far from the vices of the city will serve to guarantee probity, force of character, and academic excellence. Many of these campuses have a more or less newly built science building of ‘science center’ and a Gothic-style dormitory, a little valley bright with autumn leaves, and seasonal rites that are off limits to strangers. Student societies – fraternities for boys and sororities for girls – proudly display the Greek letters than name their houses (Kappa Alpha, Sigma Phi) and follow strict internal regulations inherited from the first campus literary salons of the 1820s. In the spring, graduation ceremonies proceed according to unchanging codes, caps and gowns imprinted with the emblem of the campus and the discreet color schemes of the disciplines (navy blue for philosophy, sky blue for education, etc.) The almost systematic internment of the students – this too as a result of English influence – in dormitories that were once under close surveillance is supposed to ensure academic camaraderie and ethical community among the students. But this is a form of commingling to which the campuses also owe the tradition of students’ demands for better living conditions, on the model of the ‘Bad Butter Rebellion’ that shook Harvard in 1766.”

(François Cusset, French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States, trans. Jeff Fort, pp. 34–35.)

“I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle-dove and am still on their trail. Many are the travellers I have spoken concerning them, describing their tracks and what calls they answered to. I have met one or two who had heard the hound, and the tramp of the horse, and even seen the dove disappear behind a cloud, and they seemed as anxious to recover them as if they had lost them themselves.”

(Thoreau, “Economy” in Walden.)

“It follows from this that tauromachy can be taken for the typical example of an art in which the essential condition of beauty is a difference of phase, a deviation, a dissonance. No aesthetic pleasure would thus be possible without there being violation, transgression, excess and sin in relation to an ideal order serving as a rule; nevertheless absolute license, like absolute order, could only ever be an insipid abstraction devoid of meaning. Just as lurking death gives colour to life, so sin, and dissonance (which contains the seeds of, and suggests, possible destruction) confers beauty on the rule, extricates it from its state of fixed norm and turns it into an active, magnetic pole from which we move away or towards which we tend. Just as regret for lost innocence gives flavour and fragrance to vice, so order, the rule (which acts like a force of compression) is as necessary to the fulgurating blossoming of the left-sided element as is a fulcrum to the action of a lever. And so reappearing here and there in the imaginary tangential point (a limit towards which we tend, but which, like the torero, we finally avoid, a total revelation – a complete tangency to the world and to ourselves, a fusion of our entire being with the whole – only able to transpire at the instant of death) are the two ascending and descending branches of the curve, an image of that continual rocking motion which, when we perceive it clearly, strikes us with ecstasy and dizziness because it is, without doubt, the most fitting symbol of what is in truth the bedrock of our passionate life.”

(Michel Leiris, Mirror of Tauromachy, trans. Antony Melville, pp. 43–44.)