Laughter on American television has taken the place of the chorus in Greek tragedy. It is unrelenting; the news, the stock-exchange reports, and the weather forecast are about the only things spared.
The hyperreal is the abolition of the real not by violent destruction, but by its assumption, elevation to the strength of the model. Anticipation, deterrence, preventive transfiguration, etc.: the model acts as a sphere of absorption of the real.
Twins were deified, and sacrificed, in a more savage culture: hypersimilitude was equivalent to the murder of the original, and thus to a pure non-meaning.
True compassion is to suffer in silence for others.
All our societies on the verge of nervous breakdowns, but still they do not collapse. All these bodies subject to the most incredible physical, ideological, media persecutions, yet they resist with an improbable malleability. Far from bemoaning our fragility, we should admire our stamina and that of the social body as a whole.
Power itself must be abolished -and not solely because of a refusal to be dominated, which is at the heart of all traditional struggles- but also, just as violently, in the refusal to dominate. Intelligence cannot, can never be in power because intelligence consists of this double refusal.
We are threatened not just by memory loss, but by the routing of the synapses by the filterable viruses of memory. The strange disappearance of names, faces and places seems like a programmed erasure, like the imperceptible advance of a virus which, after infecting the artificial memories of computers, is now attacking natural memories. Might there not be a conspiracy of software?
This is doubtless the true Oedipal problem for everyone. Not so much to free yourself from the parental triangle as from your virtual double, from that umbilical alter ego who, for each individual, is like a congenital figure of death. It is doubtless with this hidden twin, this virtual twin whom we all carry within us at birth, that we have the greatest difficulty breaking.
What every society looks for in continuing to produce, and to overproduce, is to restore the real that escapes it.
The politics that enter the university are those that come from history, a retro politics, emptied of substance and legalized in their superficial exercise.
To choose the wrong strategy is a serious matter. All the movements that only play on liberation, emancipation, on the resurrection of a subject of history, of the group, of the word based on “consciousness raising,” indeed a “raising of the unconscious” of subjects and of the masses, do not see that they are going in the direction of the system, whose imperative today is precisely the overproduction and regeneration of meaning and of speech.
There is no longer any difference between the economic and the political, because the same language reigns in both, from one end to the other; a society therefore where the political economy, literally speaking, is finally fully realized.
If truth and reality can clearly come only from the subject and his consciousness, then illusion, which is the opposite of these, must necessarily come from elsewhere. From the world of the object, from some other thing than the subject. Illusion, like profusion, comes to us from the world.
Every year, I verify here, alongside the intelligence of the mineral world and the animal kingdom, the proportional stupidity of the human race – the deculturated peasants and acculturated tourists, arrogant adults and children with their pretentious technical gadgetry and senseless chatter. All the other species are more docile and spiritual in their silence than this one.
The universe is mystagogic. It talks without knowing it, and without anything meaningful in its speech. Pedagogues speak in full knowledge of what they are saying, but they treat us like children.
Action or exaction? Voting, petitions, solidarity, information, human rights: all these things are gently extorted from you in the form of personal or promotional blackmail.
When one looks at the emptiness of current art, the only question is how such a machine can continue to function in the absence of any new energy, in an atmosphere of critical disillusionment and commercial frenzy, and with all the players totally indifferent? If it can continue, how long will this illusion last? A hundred years, two hundred? This society is like a vessel whose edges move ever wider apart, and in which the water never comes to a boil.
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.