If the profane—i.e., the profaner—devours what is sacred, then sacred and profane will merge in an entirely new way that makes it impossible, from then on, to separate them.

At one time, only the incommensurable had value. Now value alone is measurable, whereas nature, which has no value, is once again incommensurable.

Democracy: to extend to everyone the privilege of access to things that no longer exist.

The inevitable political choice that is offered today: to be governed by money or by informers? Oh, how much more amiable and lax is money …

The founding notion of all liberalism has an air of great moderation, and is summed up in a few lines jotted down by Victor Hugo in 1830, an auspicious year for moderate liberalism: “The republic, in my view, is when society is sovereign over society; protected by the national guard; judged by juries; administered by communes; governed by an electoral college.”⁶³⁷ What could be more obvious, convincing, straightforward? Hence the surprise, the helpless consternation when, in the next century, society finally became “sovereign over society” and immediately discovered that it wasn’t a democracy or a republic, as Hugo had hoped, but an experimental theocracy, whose first priestly engineers were called Lenin and Hitler. Many others followed, more inclined to corporate anonymity. All this seems to come from an untested mental mechanism where the word sovereignty carries behind it the whole panoply of gods. And, if the gods can no longer be named, it would carry behind it only the Inquisition in the name of God, which is now the name of sovereignty itself. A disillusioned sovereignty cannot exist, in the same way that arithmetic cannot not contain undecidable propositions. The whole political future depends on such a theory of sovereignty, which is still a long way from appearing evident, convincing, and well defined.