Admittedly, the irony of community is missing here, as is the playfulness of social life. The charm to be found in social graces and in the theatre of social relations is all transferred outwards into the advertising of life and lifestyles. This is a society that is endlessly concerned to vindicate itself, perpetually seeking…
Americans believe in facts,but not in facticity.They do not know that factsare factitious*, as their name suggests.It is this belief in facts,in the total credibility of what is done or seen,in this pragmatic evidence of things and an accompanying contempt for what may be called appearancesor the play of appearances –— a face does…
It is by an act of force,or coup de théâtre*geographical exile of the Founding Fathers of the seventeenth centuryadding itself to the voluntary exile of man within his own consciousness –that what in Europe had remained a critical and religious esotericismbecame transformed on the New Continent into a pragmatic exotercism.The whole foundation of America…
Yesterday I found time to take a short bike ride along the river path to the North Aurora dam. The river is less swollen within its banks than my last visit some weeks ago to this spot. Just below the dam on the bank under a bit of shade I read more from America…
Money is fluid. Like grace, it is never yours. Coming to claim it is an offense against the divinity. Have you deserved this favor? Who are you and what are you going to do with it? You are suspected of wanting to put it to some use, an evil one no doubt, whereas money…
This morning I do not want to write more about the coronavirus. I prefer a session with a philosophy book, America by Jean Baudrillard. The pandemic leaves one emotionally drained, by the disruption in daily life, — more so after hearing recent developments in the South and West. What to write is not entirely…
And that smile everyone gives you as they pass, that friendly contraction of the jaws triggered by human warmth. It is the eternal smile of communication, the smile through which the child becomes aware of the presence of the others. It is the equivalent of the primal scream of man alone in the world….
NEW YORK The beauty of the Black and Puerto Rican women of New York. Apart from the sexual stimulation produced by the crowding together of so many races, it must be said that black, the pigmentation of the dark races, is like a natural make-up that is set off by the artificial kind to…
And we are all melancholic. Melancholia is the brutal disaffection that characterizes our saturated systems. Once the hope of balancing good and evil, true and false, indeed of confronting some values of the same order, once the more general hope of a relation of forces and a stake has vanished. Everywhere, always, the system…
All around us are nothingbut dummies of power,but the mechanical illusion of powerstill rules the social order,behind which grows the absent, illegible, terror of control, of which we are the minuscule terminals. The whole logical universe of the politicalis dissolved at the same time,ceding its place to a transfinite universe of simulationwhere from the…
