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Book by Jean Baudrillard · 50 quotes · Fate, Ifs, Technology

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“The population, who are, ultimately, indifferent to public affairs and even to their own interests, negotiate this indifference with an equally spectral partner and one that is similarly indifferent to its own will: the government [Ie pouvoir] . This game between zombies may stabilize in the long term. The Year 2000 will not take place in that an era of indifference to time itself - and therefore to the symbolic term of the millennium - will be ushered in by negotiation. Nowadays, you have to go straight from money to money, telegraphically so to speak, by direct transfer (that is the viral side of the matter). A viral revolution, then, more akin to the Glass Bead Game than to the steam engine, and admirably personified in Bernard Tapie's playboy face. For the look of money is reflected in faces. Gone are the hideous old capitalists, the old-style industrial barons wearing the masks of the suffering they have inflicted. Now there are only dashing playboys, sporty and sexual, true knights of industry, wearing the mask of the happiness they spread all around themselves. The world put on a show of despair after 1968. It's been putting on a big show of hope since 1980. No more tears, alright? Reaganite optimism, the pump ing up of the dollar. Fabius's glossy new look. Patriotic conviviality. Reluctance prohibited. The old pessimism was produced by the idea that things were getting worse and worse. The new pessimism is produced by the fact that everything is getting better and better. Supercooled euphoria. Controlled anaesthesia. I should like to see the equivalent of Bernard Tapie in the world of business emerge in the world of concepts. Buying up failing concepts, swallowing them up, dusting them off (firing all the deadbeats who are in the way), putting them back into circulation with a dynamic virginity, sending them shooting up on the Stock Exchange and then abandoning them afterwards like dogs. Some people do this very well. It is perhaps better to save tired concepts by maintaining them in a super cooled state like unemployed labour, or locking them away in interactive data banks kept alive on a respirator.”

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“It used to be the Right that was pessimistic while the Left was unfailingly optimistic. Today on the Right it's 'sunrise' neoliberalism and, on the Left, the Tristes Tropiques. If it is Italian terrorism's ambition to destabilize the state, then it is absurd: the state is already so nonexistent that it would be a joke to try and kill it off any more. Or else it is fuelled by the perverse desire to do too much which might lead to law and order and the state becoming more stable, or at least being perpetually reestablished, fragile as they are. Perhaps that is the terrorists' dream. They long for an immortal enemy. Since if it no longer exists, it is much more difficult to destroy it. Tautologies like these really are the genuine article. But terrorism is tautological. And its ultimate lesson is of the order of the syllogism: if the State really existed, terrorism would make political sense. Since it manifestly does not, that proves the State doesn't exist.”

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“The scandal of the end of the world will not occur, for the very good reason that existence has already been judged and declared unjustifiable. This world must thus be considered the only one there'll ever be, the verdict immanent, injustice irremediable. This has nothing to do with the natural tendency of things but rather with the bestial ethic smouldering in the labyrinthine entrails of human beings, which requires that the just be separated from the unjust, the good from the bad, so that the truest, stupidest and most sentimental order may triumph. In fact there is no need to wait. Let the stupidest things triumph, that is the Last Judgement. When you have lumbago, you have to move like a reptile. You have to get through your movement before the muscle has had time to feel pain. It is the same with ideas and language. You have to have got to the end of the sentence, before language has had time to feel pain.”

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“With certain women, we do not love them as we would wish or as they would wish. We prefer to violate them and lose them. The surprises of thought are like those of love: they wear out. But here too you can carry on for a long time doing your conjugal duty. Rome, Berlin, Sydney, New York, Rio. My secretarial staff is expanding. My rainbow too. The night which would fall simultaneously on all the cities of the world has not yet occurred. The sun which would illuminate all the cities of the world at once has not yet risen. Every woman is like a timezone. She is a nocturnal fragment of your journey. She brings you unflaggingly closer to the next night. Some women have disguised themselves as Congolese dugouts or Aleutian pearls. Why shouldn't they disguise themselves as a timezone, or even as the ecstasy of the journey? Everywhere there is pleasure you will find a woman in disguise, her features lost or metamorphosed into the ecstacy of things. Everywhere there is a woman dying.”

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“Idle, archaic, indifferent mentality. I am beginning to feel I might give all this up, as if the challenge were not worth the trouble, might give up all judgement. This state of mind has been with me from childhood, from adolescence - a lack lustre, slipshod, idle, irresponsible, uncultivated, undesiring state. These books, did they ever interest me? These women, did I ever feel any emotion for them? All these different countries, did I want to discover them? Only the inhumanity of things has affected me, and I have in fact been unable to bring this into my own life. I read this verdict in the graph of the tonality of events, of the melancholy of faces, of the vanity and futility of our undertakings. I am still astonished by the mirror we can offer to others, by the loving or ironic image which we still are sometimes in each others' mirrors. Increasingly, it is machines, not people, who get nervous. People only become nervous if they force themselves to look like machines. All situations where you have to make a choice come down to this: do you prefer a woman with a very ordinary body but an attractive face, or one whose body is attractive, but whose face is nothing special? The problem is a false one. It is always preferable to be in a situation where there is no choice to be made either because the woman is perfect, or because she is the only one available.”

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“One is never simply the child of a father and a mother. I was born in 1929 just after Black Thursday, under the sign of Leo and the Crisis. These mythical powers never leave you. They manifest themselves in a certain mode of thought, a mode which smacks of the desert but is nonetheless vital, analytical and solitary - Solar Criticism. Born at the time of the first great crisis of modernity, I hope to live long enough to witness its catastrophic turn at the end of the century (if there is a logic of birth and death, as I believe). I have a friend born of the flight from Paris in 1939. That exodus had rekindled his father's extinguished passions. He is thus the product of an unexpected copulation with History. The glorious anticipation of summer by springtime gives you the urge to anticipate everything in thought. But it is the anticipation which is the thought itself. It can thus come to us from natural phenomena, from sun and shade.”

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“The unconscious is very serious today - even a little bit sad - because we repress serious things into it: sex, death, libido, desire. But if it were irony and offhandedness which were repressed, what form would the new unconscious take then? It would become ironic; we would have ironic, breezy drives and fantasies, which would surface in our dreams and our slips, in our neuroses and madness. But isn't it already that way, in a sense? Television will perhaps only have been invented in order, by a delectable detour, to give back its force to the silence of the image. We certainly have to accept an authority, but one more stupid than ourselves. That is the great law of the political world. This is wonderfully apparent in the USSR (Zinoviev tells of the pharaonic stupidity of the Soviet leaders, equalled only by the pharaonic servitude of the Soviets themselves), but you can see it in France just as clearly. Why prefer Marchais, Le Pen, Chirac and other such hollow figures to more sophisticated people? Why have they not long ago sunk beneath their own idiocy? The fact is that these figures are the surest remedy against the anxiety we all feel at the reign and the primacy of intelligence. They reassure us about our own stupidity, and this is their vital function as it was that of the shaman. And how can you ward off stupidity, if not by a greater stupidity? I notice that on windows which have been left untouched, which have not, in other words, seen the faintest shadow of a duster for ten years, there is not more than a fraction of a millimetre of dirt and dust. No more, in the end, than the wind and rain scratch from the surface of a rock in the same period. There is a dreamlike slowness to both erosion and sedimentation.”

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“The girls, their feet in the cold water, utter cries like a seagull's. Moreover, they are immediately transformed into seagulls, and these in turn into the obscure object of desire, swaying and waddling like the ostrich at the end of Buñuel's film. The summer has arrived. I was very anxious she might be disappointed and I could never have forgiven her for that. I shall never forgive anyone who passes a condescending or contemptuous judgement on America. They are at the centre of the world and they don't know it. What they prefer is to be at the centre of books and the earth. Only sequoias have the heroic, fabulous, antediluvian stature of the first days of the world, being contemporary with the great prehistoric animals. And indeed their scaley bark resembles a carapace. They are the only trees on a par with the geological and mineral scenario of the deserts. After them it is the little species that have triumphed.”

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“I arrive, by a snow-covered path, at a kind of chateau. The room I enter by is covered all over with several inches of snow - even on the furniture and the ceiling. Shining in through the window are fierce, fluorescent advertisements in blue and red. I walk through the huge rooms secretively. I once lived here. Voices come near. I feel worried, since these are important men and I have no right to be here. But their voices change, their eyes change too, and suddenly they become mental defectives. The mansion is an asylum and indeed a nurse is stretched out on a long table in the peristyle. I wake up, retaining an exact impression of having once been mad myself in this very place, in a previous life.”

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“Melrose Avenue, Santa Monica - Dialogue on a terrace. SHE: You are jealous ? Are you jealous ? You are fucking jealous! . . . Let me say . . . You 're twenty and I am forty-two, and I'll give my fucking ass to fucking anybody . . . Do you know that? * He gets up, crosses Melrose for no reason, comes back, kneels down in front of her (younger, but as theatrical). HE: Do you love me? Do you love me? SHE: Yes . . . Yes, I love you . . . The Italian kneads his meatballs. An Indian is playing a video game and its shrill soundtrack provides a backing to the conversation. The woman herself speaks in a shrill, hysterical voice. It is pleasant in Los Angeles in November, on the Melrose terrace, around the middle of the night. Everyone is smiling somewhere. No passion. A scene American-style. The waiter takes the car keys and drags off the woman, who shows off her black-stockinged legs and pretends to be mad. A black man gets up and, as he passes, says to me: ' Too much love! ' Gliding along the road that runs beside the coast in a black Porsche is like penetrating slowly into the inside of your own body.”

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“Cancer: the code breaks down, becomes disorganized, lets cells proliferate indiscriminately. A disease of information. AIDS: the immune system (the secret defences of the body) is suppressed. Obsessive fear of contiguity, of flows (sperm, blood, saliva), of contact. A disease of communication. What if all this reflected a brute, instinctive refusal of the flows of communic ation, of sperm, of sex, of words? If there were in all this an 'instinctive', vital resistance to the extension of flows and circuits - at the cost of a new mortal pathology, AIDS and cancer, which would ultimately be protecting us from something even more serious, or would at least be serving as an alarm signal? After all, neurosis is what man invents to protect him from madness.”

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“There is certainly some interplay between body and mind. The weaker the body, the more apparent the organic wretchedness or obsolescence of that machine, the freer and the more adventurous one's thinking becomes. It too partakes of that sort of timeless youth which has nothing whatever to do with being in the prime of life. Thinking lives on neither health nor vitality, but on lucidity and pride, and the decaying of the body stimulates that lucidity and that pride. There is nothing worse than this obligation to research, to seek out references and documentation that has taken up residence in the realm of thought and which is the mental and obsessional equivalent of hygiene. In the 'intellectual field', as it is so aptly called, one has to plough the furrow of the concept. It is true that we no longer have a culture of leisure, in which thought and writing were violent and pleasurable. And our leisure now is no more than the charnel-house where dead time is born.”

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“Seducing for a woman consists in sliding into an empty place, where her ideal form is already traced out by all those of her sex who have preceded her. For a woman, seducing is the act of an animal species, and all women are accomplices in the tiniest such venture undertaken by one of their number. There is a chain of feminine seduction. For his part, a man is faced with a mammoth task: braving, with each woman, the image and the collusive judgement of all the others. The game is an unequal one, and it is easy to see why he is less and less willing to risk it. In any case, woman has always kept the captivating part of seduction for herself (the temptress), whereas he has always ended up with the faintly ridiculous part (the seducer). Now it is difficult for a man to join in a game of being a sex object, and in a way simulate femininity. For there is no chain of masculine seduction. It is impossible for him to collude with other men in being a desirable object, as women do among themselves. There is no secret pact to protect a man in such an undertaking.”

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“Seduction is the direct and murderous irradiation of the object, the end of metaphor, the strategy of an enchanted world, the triumphant resurrection of an illusion which puts an end to the dialectical swoonings of sense and the all too naïve ruses of history. If you wish to speak of fiction, the text must obliterate all reference. If you are speaking of simulation, the text must scoff at meaning, while at the same time being completely true. If you are speaking of seduction, language has to pervert something or other in elliptical ways. Otherwise, what would language be there for? Language is a woman: it seduces you by metamorphosing into what it says. It is a woman also in that it will never stop taking its revenge if it does not succeed in seducing you. It will avenge itself by saying only what you make it say, like a woman who only satisfies what you ask of her.”

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“She can jettison her existence, her plans and her passions at a single stroke. She is only committed to reality through a secret electoral pact, by which she will stand down if she is losing. She never assumes responsibility for her existence, which allows her to wipe out at a stroke and to slide, like a good hysteric, towards another life. A strange life, spun out entirely towards a goal of transaction. Let a man ask her to give it up, to sacrifice the whole of it, and it all ceases to exist. The Epeda Multispire mattress. Everyone can have their own night, their own sleep thanks to the 3,600 spiral springs which guarantee everyone complete autonomy. The ideal mattress. You can make love to someone on it without them even noticing. As the automaton of his own pleasure, each person’s experience of their sexuality is like their experience of a night on a Multispire mattress. It isn’t even loneliness, since there is someone else there. It’s more something of the order of the independent lunar module. Tristan and Isode each dreaming to themselves, on either side of their sexual console. That seduction is the seduction of the uterine Mother and that all attraction merely masks the attraction of the primal abyss are platonic ideas. The cavity of the womb has taken over from the Cave in the Realm of Ideas. Once again, the real woman, her anatomy, serves as a sacred referent for a platonic ideology. The vertigo of seduction is here vulgarly phantasized into the hollow of a woman’s womb. This is to move from the most subtle game to the most profound—and hence the most stupid—phantasm.”

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“Burgling your way out of yourself, quietly, subtly, slipping away from yourself as light slips away from a room when night falls (though night does not fall; objects secrete it at the end of the day when, in their tiredness, they exile themselves in their silence). Grey, still day, like a perpetual dawn. The birds themselves were deceived by it. They went on singing all day, even though daybreak never came. It is Sunday 13 May, 6 p.m. Is this a good or a bad thing? As evening comes on, a cold silent wind gets up. All we need is a heat storm to put the finishing touch to the unreality of the season. And yet the birds are singing and men are thinking, on this Sunday, in secret. They are warding off the absence of sun and the monotony of Sunday. They are dreaming of the marriage of sun and sand. They are dreaming of fogging up the mirrors and each shining forth in his own madness. They are listening to a piece of baroque music: 'Whence comes, whence comes such a loneliness?”

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“Having a child has become a prodigiously artificial thing. It no longer has anything of the passionately accidental event about it; it has become the parthenogenetic fruit of a calculation of biological, dietary and psychosocial data and you wonder to what extent dream, desire or fatality are still involved. But perhaps the race is losing its interest in sexuality, preferring instead a sort of protozoan transplantation. Leaving out of account that what has been conceived by artificial insemination is very likely to continue its life in artificial intelligence and to die of built-in obsolescence. After the mechanical bride, the mechanical widow. Now every human being is the product of a sexual act, a sexual pact or else we should not be the human race. It takes a sexual copulation successfully to produce a human being, just as, among the Hindus, it takes a copulation between the word and silence for a sacrifice to be successfully carried out. In a sense the child is indeed the continuation of the species. But in another, he or she is a biological vestige of it. The further we go with change, genetic innovations and fashion, the more unreal it becomes, with each new generation, to put our trust in the processes of childbirth and organic growth. The simplicity and slowness of those things are entirely outside the range of our contemporary experience. How can we claim to exercise judgement if we have lost a sense of punishment? How can we claim to judge anything at all if we no longer accept being judged? And if we are no longer able either to judge or be judged, then we lose all hope of being absolved or condemned in the past or the future. Now, what can no longer be reflected in the past or the future takes place in a single instant with all its consequences. The Last Judgement becomes an immediate reality. We have right here before us the unchecked proliferation in epidemic proportions of all processes, the multiplication of all cancers on an epidemic scale.”

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“One may justify the existence of men in power in many different ways. Yet power remains a pernicious thing for what justifies it is inexpiable. Fragility, which belongs to the realm of appearances, is to be preferred to the fractal which is merely the quality of a mathematical object. It is exciting to hear one of your fondest ideas formulated in one fell swoop, better than you could have done it yourself. You feel no intellectual jealousy at seeing yourself outstripped in this way. You only feel jealous when you are overtaken by your shadow.”

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“This heat in the belly which remains after the evisceration and freezing of bodies can be nothing other than the jealousy of the living for the dead. Our jealousy for the object is that of miserable subjects for what has passed living into a perfection which is beyond us. Man's jealousy of woman, that more than sexual heat, that heat of passion, is born of a desire for what has been torn from him and reincarnated elsewhere in the other sex - and is it not indeed diabolical? - and which sneers at him from there like the hypostasis of the best of himself. Consoling signs. After the fear of victory, which causes the sportsman to fail at the last gasp, after the fear of power - the fear of wielding power - which even the political class shows many signs of, falling in this way into the loneliness of the long-distance runner, we now see science beset by weakness. Reaching the end of the course, this flat-footed idol is also frightened of its shadow.”

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“We are always distant in some way, in some particular, from our sorrow. Only hysteria can create total sorrow, but even this, once it is articulated, is no longer so bad as it was before. For the same reason, absolute happiness is impossible and those who speak of it must be regarded as hypocrites. In the wretchedness of his New Delhi room, weeping hot tears (no doubt more for the personal offence he had suffered than for the lost object), S . still finds the strength to photograph his telephone. Since it is the main virtue of the sexual act to raise the body to that exceptional state which is nudity, it is superfluous if that nudity has now become something obvious. That is why love is only beautiful with a shy body, a sex which makes a play of its shyness. That is why it is only really beautiful the first time. A negative judgement gives you more satisfaction than praise, provided it smacks of jealousy.”

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“The silence of metaphor accompanies the act of cruelty, as for example with the cannibalistic Japanese who moved directly from the metaphor of love to devouring that marvellous Dutch girl. Or the woman who made a present of her eye to the man who said he was so in love with her gaze. The effacement of metaphor is characteristic of the object and its cruelty. Words are left with only a literal, material tenor. They are no longer signs in a language. This is the silence of pure objectality.”

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“If there is a species which is more maltreated than children, then it must be their toys, which they handle in an incredibly off-hand manner (how long will it be before someone starts a society for the protection of battered and maltreated objects?). Toys are thus the end point in that long chain in which all the conditions of despotic high-handedness are in play which enchain beings one to another, from one species to another - from cruel divinities to their sacrificial victims, from masters to slaves, from adults to children, and from children to their objects. This is actually the only strong symbolic chain, the one through which a victim of the whim of a superior power passes it on to an inferior species, the whole process ending with someone taking it out on a powerless simulacrum, like a toy - and beginning no doubt with an all-powerful simulacrum, like the masked divinities which men themselves invent to justify this wretched chain.”

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“The automatic carriage-return on the typewriter, electronic central locking of cars: these are the things that count. The rest is just theory and literature. Space is what prevents everything from being in the same place. Language is what prevents everything from meaning the same thing. My hand, separated from me, dreams it is holding a breast. Nothing fills a hand better than a breast. Stereotype of a sadistic tenderness. This journal develops, as its title indicates, over the course of time. However it is haunted by something which preceded it, the secret underlying event.”

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“A society like the Italian, the very disorder of which renders the action of the State useless and ridiculous, is not without its charm and helps us to grasp this political truth: the principal task of the State today is to justify its own existence. To do so, it has to annihilate society's capacity to survive by itself. Surreptitiously undermining all forms of spontaneous regulation, deregulating, desocializing, breaking down the traditional mechanisms of bodies and antibodies, in order to substitute its artificial mechanisms - such is the strategy of a State locked in a subtle struggle with society - exactly like medicine, which lives off the destruction of natural defences and their replacement by artificial ones. In Rome, Niccolini manages to counter the obsessive fear of terrorism with a cultural revival. To the Romans who no longer dare go out in the evenings he offers festivals, performances, poetry galas. He brings culture down into the street. He combats the terrorist festival with the cultural, advertising festival. He will be criticized for wasteful expenditure, but the only way to fight terrorism is not to create 'solid' institutions, but to put upon the stage a culture that is as sacrificial, eccentric, and ephemeral as the terrorist acts themselves. One festival against the other. If terrorism is a sort of murderous advertising campaign which keeps our imagination on tenterhooks, it can be countered only by a piece of even more effective advertising.”

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“When the night is as long as the day, then the storms of the equinox begin to get up, when artificial light is as strong as the violence of the sun, then the passion for gambling is unleashed, when two women equal each other in your mind, then the equinox of pleasure begins. For some, life is interminable, and what is interminable no longer makes sense. How are they to find time to live? For others, life is over right from the outset. It has ended before it has begun. It unfolds on a sort of abstract strip, without any temporal dimension. In this way, some lives sacrifice their own ends uselessly, and lose even the memory of their origins. If there were a secret, no one, not even the person who knew it, would be able to divulge it. We must keep watching, from the depths of a definitive silence, for the definitive event.”

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“There is no point in building. There is no more real estate, no more life annuities. There are no more concessions in perpetuity in any cultural cemeteries. Isn’t it better that way? When a meteorite breaks up in space, it is the dazzling trace of its end which stands out. With a celestial body in orbit, it is the ellipse that is the most precious. No ancestors, no heritage, no heirs, no capital. For centuries we have had to accumulate. It is equally obvious that we have to squander everything in a single generation. The future belongs to those who have accumulated everything, then unburdened themselves of it in a single lifetime. You have to move quickly. Ten years to soak up a culture, twenty years to expel it, spew it out ( this part always takes longer). Nothing is interesting unless it passes through the entire cycle of the symbolic murder of culture.”

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“The price we pay for the complexity of life is too high. When you think of all the effort you have to put in - telephonic, telepathic, technological and relational to alter even the slightest bit of behaviour in this strange world we call social life, you are left pining for the straightforwardedness of primitive peoples and their physical work. This is particularly true of unnecessary mental complexities. One should always prefer pure physical effort and, for preference, keep mental energy for sensual pleasures alone. The sad thing about artificial intelligence is that it lacks artifice and therefore intelligence.”

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“No one recognizes their faults or their virtues when these are stated by another, any more than they recognize their own voices on a tape recorder. The world transmits back to us only the asymmetric form of our vices, as a mirror reflects back the asymmetric form of our faces. There is a pact of pride in a couple's love, a pact of glory, which is at least as fundamental as sexual feelings. These latter peter out silently in the two bodies, but the pact can only be broken by the spoken word. If you say, I love you, then you have already fallen in love with language, which is already a form of breakup and infidelity.”

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“One must be simultaneously bursting with life and totally unreal. Every acceleration produces an equivalent or even greater mass. Every mobilization gives rise to an equal or greater immobility. Every differentiation gives rise to an equal or greater indifference. All speed produces an equal or greater inertia. There is no need to brake. No need for a braking machine. Besides, such a machine has never existed. Only accelerating machines exist. Or ones for decelerating, which amounts to the same thing. But not for slowing down, because no machinery can produce that. Only language, music and the body can do that.”

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“If the festivities at Christmas and the New Year take the form of an in creasingly conventional hullabaloo - since we no longer have the winter solstice as our excuse in the electronic age, nor, in the age of Jesus Christ Superstar, that of the Nativity, nor even that of the snow and ice isolating each person in their own inner space and numbing the blood in the veins - if the end-of-year revels make people so anxious, it is because they are taking the measure of the twelve months that are to come, which they will slowly have to plough through one by one. It is the same with time today as it is with having a child: it is too long in the carrying, too long agrowing. We would like to have the chance to enjoy it right away, to have the fast-forwarded projection of the next century. Think how impatient we are for the year 2000, this whole millennium to get through, while we are already madly curious about the year 2020 and, no doubt, perfectly disenchanted as to what awaits us in '86. The celebrations of the millennium really are going to have to be brilliant to overcome the boredom we feel when we think of the next century. If only we could at least know that there were merely one or two hundred years to go, that would make things more interesting. There is nothing like a catastrophe to usher in a millennium. They regenerate time in the same way as a cloudburst regenerates low water reserves. Yet it is time, real time, we are going to be short of. If the year 2000 does not happen, it will be because time will simply have disappeared, as winter has in some latitudes. But this is a dream. I fear that we won't have sufficient reserves to get to this point, and that the year 2000 will disappoint us as the year 1000 did by not bringing with it the end of the world.”

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“One way of dying is to make your death alter the state of things in such a way that you no longer have any reason to be a part of it. Thus death can have the effect of a prophetic disappearance. Such were the deaths of Barthes and Lacan, I believe: the world has taken another direction since, in which these subtle figures would no longer have had any meaning. The death of Sartre, by contrast, left the world unchanged and seems an ineluctable, but insignifi cant event. Before dying, he was already to live in a world that was no longer his own. So far as existence is concerned, as Ajar [Romain Gary] would say, it needs to be taken in charge by someone. No one can be expected to bear the responsibility for their own life. This Christian and modern idea is a vain and arrogant proposition. Moreover, it is a groundless utopian notion. The individual would have to be able to transform himself into the vestal, or the slave, of his identity, control all his circuits and all the circuits of the world which meet in his genes, nerves and thoughts. An unprecedented state of servitude. Who would wish to have salvation at such a price? It is so much more human to put one's fate, one's desire, one's will into the hands of another. Circulation of responsibilities, declension of wills, perpetual transfer of forms . Apart from this subtle path, which is attested to by a great many cultures, there is only the totalitarian path of a collective assumption.”

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“Whilst they are hardly to be seen in real life these days, the most intense passions continue to figure in our dreams. Are these then a reserve of fresh and timeless energy, running beneath the stages of life (and perhaps reaching beyond the mishap that is death)? Or is this freshness not merely the hallucination of a jaded desire? In other words: are there two lines to our lives, the one of a non biological, immemorial youth, which we experience in dreams, and the other an organic line of life and death, of duration and of remembrance, with which we identify our pale and mortal existence? Could there be two fundamental sequences and no relation between them? Or is the first simply the projection of the second, its hallucinatory discourse, as, deep down, psychoanalysis argues? I am for the first hypothesis: we have two existences, each of which is wholly original and independent of the other (it is not a case of a psychological splitting). Neither existence can be used to interpret the other - which is why psychoanalysis is futile.”

PsychoanalysisBifurcation
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“They say other species have stopped short, and that only the human species, the humanoid branch, has made its definitive breakthrough. In fact while all the others persevered in their specific forms and ended up disappearing genetically, thus leaving evolution to run its course, only the human species succeeded in surpassing itself in the simulacrum of itself - in disappearing genetically to resuscitate artificially. By perpetuating itself in a world of clones and electronic prostheses (perfect in so far as they will have eliminated every potential species, including humanity), man will thus, in a definitive act, have wiped out the natural genesis of things. Contact with the men who wield power and authority still leaves an intang ible sense of repulsion. It's very like being in close proximity to faecal matter, the faecal embodiment of something unmentionable and you wonder what it is made of and where it acquired its historically sacred character. Why this feeling of loathing for the politician? Is it the impression of being artificially subjected to a will that is even more stupid than your own and which, by its very function, has to be crude? How can the decision-making function be performed without simplifying the mechanisms of thought? Political charisma is precisely not that gracious charisma which emanates from the irresistible power of a pure object, such as the power of a woman, but an ungracious will which derives its power and its glory from voluntary servitude. This is true of all institutions, the military, the clerical, the medical, and more recently the psychoanalytic, but it is particularly so in politics which remains the most striking hallucination of all the weaknesses of the will.”

PowerEvolutionAnti PsychiatryMachina Animata
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“Challenger and Chernobyl: the only felicitous accidents, like a freeze-frame of the system. In the same way as a photo arrests movement and restores the unforgettable character that it had lost, the Challenger explosion has revived our imagination where space is concerned. The photos of Challenger were only so beautiful because they fixed in our minds the secret destination of the adventure of space travel, whereas its speed only gives us the apparent movement.”

ChernobylChallengerInsustainabilitySpace Program Decay
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“The tendency of the whole of contemporary culture to become healthy and virtuous again, to recover its intellectual morality, to revive a pedagogic approach to science, history and democracy. The breach opened up by the years 1960-80 is closing; everyone is gearing up for a high-efficiency perspective which is merely an abreactive defence against the imminence of the year 2000. The long period of blackmail by threat of crisis has begun - intellectually too. Back, back to the middle ground, an end to centrifugal passions. What we had dismantled and destroyed in joy, we are rebuilding in sorrow.”

CultureCrisis1968
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“We are merely epigones. The events, the discoveries, the visions are those from the period between 1910 and 1940. We live on like weary commentators on that frenzied period in which the whole invention of modernity (and the lucid presentiment of its end) occurred in a language which still bore the brilliance of style. The highest level of intensity lies behind us. The lowest level of passion and intellectual illumination lies ahead of us. There is something like a general entropic movement in the century, the initial energy dissipating slowly in the sophisticated ramifications of the structural, pictural, ideological, linguistic and psychoanalytic revolutions - the final configuration, that of 'postmodernity' marking the most degraded, most factitious and most eclectic phase, the shattered fetishism of all the idols and the purer signs that have preceded it. Even the great burst of light in the years 1960-80, seen with some critical distance, will merely have been an episode in the involutive course of the century, in terms of powerful new ideas. But a portent all the same. Might a new event produce some surprise? We can say nothing of this, since archives and analysis are twilight tools.”

Modernism1968
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“Water, which in itself is silent, is just waiting to make a noise. In itself completely motionless, it is just waiting to move. Perfectly cold and harsh in itself, it nonetheless has the tepidness of salt and the mineral softness of fabric. Total abhorrence of dominant ideologies. And anti-gulagism is the dominant ideology today. The anti-gulag priests are every bit as bad as the gulag torturers. The sheep have taken over from the beasts of the Apocalypse.”

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“Before me a scholarly man, of European culture, head of a literary department in one of the great universities of the West. He speaks of it with bitterness, as do almost all his colleagues. Culture is not what it was and he has not the slightest regard for mass culture. He comes from New York and, deep down, he despises California, his colleagues and the decline of standards. He gets 60-80,000 dollars a year and does not have many students or friends. He has lots of ideas, is sincere, proud and awkward. His secret is his python. I see him plunge his gloved hand into its glass case and stroke the reptile's head, which shoots out a voracious tongue and uncoils itself, still famished though it has just devoured a rat. We discuss the diet of snakes. A tortoise slumbers by the fireside in the glow of an artificial wood fire. It is Sunday in Santa Monica. Towards four, the sun drives away the mists of the Pacific. But the snake knows neither night nor day; he is immortal and poisonous and, in the words of the poet, he dreams on the hills of the sky. Which is something his master does not do, he whose reptilian brain identifies with the snake's, and who stares long and hard into his face, even though ordinarily he is incapable of looking people straight in the eye. A perverse couple, the somnambulism of the intellectual mingling with the inner night of the reptile.”

SnakesOld WorldDavid Foster WallaceAcademic Decadence
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“The Cynecure. Looking for the Cynecure (in the palinody of my cenesthesias, as Segalen would say). The Sabbatical form. What was the Stoic dream of our adolescence - detachment - suddenly materializes in maturity. I now find myself out on my own, within a rainbow-hued research structure. Towns are never left alone; there are always works going on - digging, demolition, construction. Knocking down, building up again. Perhaps only certain places in California, completely anaesthetized by domestic luxury and suburban comfort, seem to have come to rest in a fixed and lasting ambience, beyond this perpetual deconstruction. Works are always going on in our bodies too. They are constantly being disturbed, tortured, renovated. Never at rest, never serene. Peace of mind - impossible to keep it more than a few hours. Impatience always gets the upper hand. Everyone aspires to peace and quiet, but they do so today in a thoroughly derisory manner, wherein we see the last moments of the contemplative soul. In the countryside there is always a dog howling. And sterility is hereditary.”

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“Entirely in agreement with Salieri when he rails against God for having given humanity the gift of Mozart's divine music, for the sole purpose of making us look ridiculous and plunging us into despair. Salieri sets himself up as Man's champion against divine injustice. It is the same problem as that of the Grand Inquisitor in the Brothers Karamazov. When Christ returns to earth he says to him: 'We manage humanity for its greatest happiness. It has paid for this with its mediocrity. Don't come disturbing this fragile balance with insane promises. ' And he condemns Christ to death once again. Salieri is not mean-spirited: it took pride, not to become jealous of Mozart, but to challenge God and ask: 'Tell it to me plainly, why am I not Mozart?' For God mocked us by throwing Mozart among us in the guise of a vulgar being, who did not even bear the exceptional marks of grace. God is toying with us, and that is unbearable. Mozart must be destroyed. All that challenges God is noble in spirit and superior to gaping, unconditional admiration of His works. We will not have the same problem with Changeux's Neuronal Man, emerging on the horizon like Nietzsche's Last Man, with his cortical and synaptic flatness. Farewell Mozart, farewell Salieri, no more grace, but no more challenges either, such is the solution offered by modern science to the insoluble despair of the difference between men. Signs, signs? Is that all you have to say? People act and people dream, they speak or they don't - none of that is unreal. Shut up and watch. See the philosophical beauty of these closing years of the century, the stars in the sky falling lower as the fateful date approaches, and the interactive horizon of couples in love - all this is beyond doubt, and it moves me to tears . . . The age, the coming age is like a metropolis deserted by its population, cut off from its sources of energy. Are you going to say that, are you going to go on with these twilight rantings? Every century throws the reality principle into question as it closes, but it's over today, finished, done. Everybody works these days. Narrative and moral passions, the philosophical animal spirits, are literally blocking the electronic animal spirits, a thousand times more lively and insignificant. Videos and advertisements, credits, news reports and sports flashes, Dallas, that's television, all that transfers easily, with the minimum of energy, on ephemeral film. But pure television, like pure painting or pure speed, is hard to bear.”

MozartSalieriInsustainabilityGod And HumanityMan And TechnologyPure Postmodernity
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“I no longer even need a window to follow the journey. I can narrate it to myself hour by hour, live it from memory, all of it - canyons, towns, the reflection of the clouds in the rivers. Memory has taken on wings and speed has become an inner quality. A pity. No doubt it was better that this purely fornicatory and imaginary relationship, with her sexual voracity and her ankle bracelets, which we carried on all over the place - in the Badlands, in the Chelsea Hotel, in motels, in the sand, between the sheets - and which always meant immediate lovemaking in the minutes that followed, never satisfied, but just as sweet, and flexible and blonde, her eyes raised like a slavegirl's and her hand outstretched towards her sex, she free and servile, feminine and muscled, laughing and admiring, animal blood and metallic eyes - it was natural that this relationship should finish with a pathetic fellatio on a motel balcony, in the morning mist and a hypothetical child which no doubt was not mine and which I shall never see. I have even forgotten her name, but I have not forgotten the straw scent of her sex, nor the twenty-dollar bet on salt or snow, nor the sudden menstrual nosebleed I had one morning when I saw her arriving at my place in all her Californian splendour.”

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“Soiree in Rome. The women are more attractive than the men - they always are. My first impression is that all the men are ugly (they are producers and film directors) and that all the women are beautiful (they are actresses). On a second view: the men are ugly, but they have character; all the women have something erotic about them, but nothing remarkable - a purely macho society, the world of showbiz. The big scene with the male lead is played out in all its grandeur, from one palazzo to the next in the Roman night. The most beautiful actress I know is marrying a rich director, author of 97 screenplays. This is the rule among the showbiz crowd. As usual I feel alienation from all the men there and solidarity with all the women, whom the men pretend to scorn in order to please them, but to whom they are basically indifferent. It must be nice to live in bodies so beautiful, so ingenuous, and allow the men to dominate you with all their ugliness, wealth and pretensions. It must be marvellous to be a woman. Ultimately, it is this which is fascinating: woman is unimaginable. The more beautiful she is, the more unimaginable.”

ActingBeautyHorrorProducersAlienationMass ProductionPop Culture ReferencesCinematographic Industry
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