What happens on the other side of the truth, not in what would be false, but in what is more true than the true, more real than the real? Bizarre effects, certainly, and sacrileges, much more destructive of the order of truth than its pure negation. Singular and murderous power of the potentialization of the truth, of the potentialization of the real.
This is free-market fanaticism, the fanaticism of indifference to its own values and, for that very reason, total intolerance towards those who differ by any passion whatsoever. The New World Order implies the extermination of everything different to integrate it into an indifferent world order. Is there still room between these two fanaticisms for a non-believer to exercise his liberty?
We are simplified by technical manipulation.
Our entire reality has become experimental. In the absence of any stable destiny, modern man has reached the point of unlimited experimentation on himself.
In the past, bad literature was made with high-flown sentiment; today, it is made with the unconscious.
We are all transsexuals, just as we are biological mutants in potentia. This is not a biological issue, however: we are all transsexuals symbolically.
In New York, madmen are free. Put out on the streets, they’re not all that different from the punks, junk, junkies, alcoholics, beggars who fill it. It is unclear why a city, just as mad, would suddenly keep its madmen locked up, why should he deprive the movement of these samples of madness, if it, in one form or another, has already captured the entire city.
We are dealing with a genuine Stockholm syndrome on a mass scale – when the hostage becomes the accomplice of the hostage taker – as well as a revolution of the concept of voluntary servitude and master-slave relations. When the entire society becomes an accomplice to those who took it hostage, but just as much when individuals split into, for themselves, hostage and hostage taker.
The image of a country of great dreams and universal prosperity, created by all the forces of a gigantic propaganda machine, has become the greatest deception that has poisoned the minds of millions around the world, but above all the Americans themselves. Their consciousness is still in sweet captivity and this captivity turned out to be stronger than the survival instinct.
The individual, floating, but held on a leash like a dog, like an eye popping out of its socket, hanging on the end of its optic nerve, scanning the horizon through 180 degrees but not sending back any images – a disembodied panoptical terminal, runaway organ of a species of mutants.
Any gloss on authors, their character traits or biographies, hides the fact that only bad writing has an author, good writing does not.
It is in the sphere of the media that we most clearly see the event short-circuited by its immediate image-feedback. Information, news coverage, is always already there. When there are catastrophes, the reporters and photojournalists are there before the emergency services. If they could be, they would be there before the catastrophe, the best thing being to invent or cause the event so as to be first with the news.
These old Australians or Californians who spend all their days staring at the ocean without leaving their limousines, which they have turned into their panoramic childhood sites and their coffins, and who dream there, while awaiting the last wave, the one that will come from the depths of the ocean to engulf them.
The anxiety specific to leisure and the Coast. Too many forms of natural beauty artificially brought together. Too many villas, too many flowers. Villegiatura, nomenklatura: the same struggle. The same artificial privilege, whether it be that of the political bureaucracy or the luxuriance of lifestyle. Nature putrefied by leisure, purged of all barbarity, sickeningly comfortable – one day perhaps this dream climate, this heatwave of luxury will explode into one last forest fire.
In the classical imagination, Evil was still a mythical power. There was still a Mephisto or a Frankenstein to embody the principle of Evil. Our evil is faceless and without imagination. We no longer need the Devil to steal our shadows. There are no powers doing battle above our heads, fighting over our souls. No longer any need for the lubricious agency of capital to extort our labour-power from us. We no longer have any shadows, any souls, and we are stakeholders in our own lives.
Freedom is not as free as is generally thought: it produces antibodies which rebel against it. Truth, too, is threatened from within, like a state battling with its own police force. If values enjoyed total immunity, they would be as lethal as a scientific truth.
The only impossible revolution, says Ceronetti in substance, one that is even inconceivable to reason, would be the revolution against machines- and this impossibility turns all other revolutions into a schizophrenic farce.
They say there is always a photographic moment to be seized where the most banal of beings yield up their secret identity. But what is interesting is their secret alterity, and rather than looking for the identity beneath the appearances, we should look for the mask beneath the identity, the figure which haunts us and diverts us from our identities – the masked divinity which, in effect, haunts each of us for a moment, one day or another.
The heroes of humanitarian action are applauded: a good thing they’re there to rescue our honour! If you denounce this shroud-waving, again there is applause: thank goodness you’re there to say these things! It is often the same people who applaud. Sycophants, catechumens, proselytes, acolytes – to arms, all of you!
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.