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Quote by Zachariah Renfro

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Zachariah Renfro

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“It was never said of history, for instance, that it shouldn’t be talked about; on the contrary, in terms of history silence was forgetting, and it was the thing people feared most of all when it was their own history that was at risk of being forgotten. And history, really, was invisible, though its monuments still stood. The making of the monuments was half of it, but the rest was interpretation. Yet there was something worse than forgetting, which was misrepresentation, bias, the selective presentation of events. The truth had to be represented: it couldn’t just be left to represent itself, as for instance she had left it to the police after the incident, and found herself more or less sidelined.”

“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.”