Democracy is the menopause of Western society, the Grand Climacteric of the body social. Fascism is its middle-aged lust.
The only benefit of a Campbell’s soup can by Andy Warhol (and it is an immense benefit) is that it releases us from the need to decide between beautiful and ugly, between real and unreal, between transcendence and immanence.
The real joy of writing lies in the opportunity of being able to sacrifice a whole chapter for a single sentence, a complete sentence for a single word…
What is man if the signs that predate him have such power? A human race has to invent sacrifices equal to the natural cataclysmic order that surrounds it.
Take your desires for reality!” can be understood as the ultimate slogan of power.
The only weapon of power, its only strategy against this defection, is to reinject the real and the referential everywhere, to persuade us of the reality of the social, of the gravity of the economy and the finalities of production.
it is dangerous to unmask images, since they dissimulate the fact that there is nothing behind them).
It is useless to dream of revolution through content, useless to dream of a revelation through form, because the medium and the real are now in a single nebula whose truth is indecipherable.
What one exorcises in this [imagery] way at little cost, and for the price of a few tears, will never in effect be reproduced
To dissimulate is to pretend not to have what one has. To simulate is to feign to have what one doesn’t have.
it is with this same imperialism that present-day simulators attempt to make the real, all of the real, coincide with their models of simulation.
Children are simultaneously required to constitute themselves as autonomous subjects, responsible, free and conscious, and to constitute themselves as submissive, inert, obedient, conforming objects.
I vote, I participate, I am present, I am concerned” – mirror of a paradoxical mockery, mirror of the indifference of all public signification.
Each segment of the worm is directly reproduced as a whole worm, just as each cell of the American CEO can produce a new CEO.
There is no more hope for meaning. And without a doubt this is a good thing: meaning is mortal. Appearances, they, are immortal, invulnerable to the nihilism. This is where seduction begins.
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.
All contents of meaning are absorbed in the only dominant form of the medium. Only the medium can make an event.
It is the task of radical thought, since the world is given to us in unintelligibility, to make it more unintelligible, more enigmatic, more fabulous.
Americans may have no identity, but they do have wonderful teeth.
We are fascinated by Ramses as Renaissance Christians were by the American Indians, those (human?) beings who had never known the word of Christ.
If you do not lend your car, your fountain pen or your wife to anyone, that is because these objects, according to the logic of jealously, are narcissistic equivalents of the ego: to lose them, or for them to be damaged, means castration.
Today cinema can place all its talent, all its technology in the service of reanimating what it itself contributed to liquidating. It only resurrects ghosts, and it itself is lost therein.
Television knows no night. It is perpetual day. TV embodies our fear of the dark, of night, of the other side of things.
What do Chile, Biafra, the boat people, Bologna, or Poland matter? All of that comes to be annihilated on the television screen. We are in the era of events without consequences (and of theories without consequences).
Our sentimentality toward animals is a sure sign of the disdain in which we hold them. Sentimentality is nothing but the infinitely degraded form of bestiality, the racist commiseration.
Speed is simply the rite that initiates us intoemptiness: a nostalgic desire for forms to revert to immobility, concealed beneath the very intensification of their mobility. Akin to the nostalgia for living forms that haunts geometry.
Simultaneously, in the most complete ambiguity, they [media] propagate the brutal charm of the terrorist act, they are themselves terrorists, insofar as they themselves march to the tune of seduction.
It is from the death of the social that socialism will emerge, as it is from the death of God that religions emerge.
Like dreams, statistics are a form of wish fulfillment.
The sad thing about artificial intelligence is that it lacks artifice and therefore intelligence.
Cowardice and courage are never without a measure of affectation. Nor is love. Feelings are never true. They play with their mirrors.
A negative judgment gives you more satisfaction than praise, provided it smacks of jealousy.
There is nothing funny about Halloween. This sarcastic festival reflects, rather, an infernal demand for revenge by children on the adult world.
To love someone is to isolate him from the world, wipe out every trace of him, dispossess him of his shadow, drag him into a murderous future. It is to circle around the other like a dead star and absorb him into a black light.