Mythologies

The petit-bourgeois is a man unable to imagine the Other. If he comes face to face with him, he blinds himself, ignores and denies him, or else transforms him into himself.

Myth is depoliticized speech.

The bourgeoisie is defined as the social class which does not want to be named.

Myth deprives the object of which it speaks of all history. In it, history evaporates.

Bourgeois norms are experienced as the evident laws of a natural order—the further the bourgeois class propagates its representations, the more naturalized they become.

What the public wants is the image of passion, not passion itself.

By reducing any quality to quantity, myth economizes intelligence: it understands reality more cheaply.

The bourgeoisie hides the fact that it is the bourgeoisie and thereby produces myth; revolution announces itself openly as revolution and thereby abolishes myth.