Imagine the amazing good fortune of the generation that gets to see the end of the world. This is as marvelous as being there in the beginning.
History that repeats itself turns to farce. Farce that repeats itself turns to history.
Boredom is like a pitiless zooming in on the epidermis of time. Every instant is dilated and magnified like the pores of the face.
The war was won on both sides: by the Vietnamese on the ground, by the Americans in the electronic mental space. And if the one side won an ideological and political victory, the other made Apocalypse Now and that has gone right around the world.
Fiction is not imagination. It is what anticipates imagination by giving it the form of reality.
It is not enough for theory to describe and analyze, it must itself be an event in the universe it describes.
Power floats like money, like language, like theory.
You have to know how to disappear.
The obese is in a total delirium. For he is not only large, of a size opposed to normal morphology: he is larger than large. He no longer makes sense in some distinctive opposition, but in his excess, his redundancy.
The cities of the world are concentric, isomorphic, synchronic. Only one exists and you are always in the same one. It’s the effect of their permanent revolution, their intense circulation, their instantaneous magnetism.
Smile and others will smile back.
A series of accidents creates a positively light-hearted state, out of consideration for this strange power.
Business owners are like joggers. If you stop a jogger, he goes on running on the spot. If you drag an owner away from his business, he goes on running on the spot, pawing the ground, talking business. He never stops hurtling onwards, making decisions and executing them.
At the heart of pornography is sexuality haunted by its own disappearance.
In days gone by, we were afraid of dying in dishonor or a state of sin. Nowadays, we are afraid of dying fools. Now the fact is that there is no Extreme Unction to absolve us of foolishness. We endure it here on earth as subjective eternity.
Simulation is the situation created by any system of signs when it becomes sophisticated enough, autonomous enough, to abolish its own referent and to replace it with itself.
There is nothing more mysterious than a TV set left on in an empty room. It is even stranger than a man talking to himself or a woman standing dreaming at her stove. It is as if another planet is communicating with you.
One has never said better how much “humanism”, “normality”, “quality of life” were nothing but the vicissitudes of profitability.
It is the corpse of the bourgeoisie that separates us. With us, it is that class that is the carrier of the chromosome of banality.
If you say, I love you, then you have already fallen in love with language, which is already a form of break up and infidelity.