Poets aren't so much in my debt, though they're admittedly members of my party, as they're a free race, as the saying goes, whose sole interest lies in delighting the ears of the foolish with pure nonsense and silly tales. Yet strange to say, they rely on these for the immortality and god-like life they assure themselves, and they make similar promises to others. 'Self-love and flattery' are their special friends, and no other race of men worships me with such wholehearted devotion [...] Of the same kidney are those who court immortal fame by writing books. They all owe a great deal to me, especially any who blot their pages with unadulterated rubbish. But people who use their erudition to write for a learned minority and are anxious to have either Persius or Laelius pass judgment don't seem to me favored by fortune but rather to be pitied for their continuous self-torture. They add, change, remove, lay aside, take up, rephrase, show to their friends, keep for nine years and are never satisfied. And their futile reward, a word of praise from a handful of people, they win at such a cost – so many late nights, such loss of sleep, sweetest of all things, and so much sweat and anguish. Then their health deteriorates, their looks are destroyed, they suffer partial or total lindness, poverty, ill-will, denial of pleasure, premature old age and early death, and whatever remaining disasters there may be. Yet the wise man believes he is compensated for everything if he wins the approval of one or another purblind scholar.

It is well-known that an automaton once existed, which was so constructed that it could counter any move of a chess-player with a counter-move, and thereby assure itself of victory in the match. A puppet in Turkish attire, water-pipe in mouth, sat before the chessboard, which rested on a broad table. Through a system of mirrors, the illusion was created that this table was transparent from all sides. In truth, a hunchbacked dwarf who was a master chess-player sat inside, controlling the hands of the puppet with strings. One can envision a corresponding object to this apparatus in philosophy. The puppet called “historical materialism” is always supposed to win. It can do this with no further ado against any opponent, so long as it employs the services of theology, which as everyone knows is small and ugly and must be kept out of sight.

We once lived in a world where the realm of the imaginary was governed by the mirror, by dividing one into two, by theatre, by otherness and alienation. Today that realm is the realm of the screen, of interfaces and duplication, of contiguity and networks.

That is how we sorcerers operate. Not following a logical order, but following alogical consistencies or compatibilities. The reason is simple. It is because no one, not even God, can say in advance whether a given multiplicity will or will not cross over into another given multiplicity, or even if given heterogeneous elements will enter symbiosis, will form a consistent, or cofunctioning, multiplicity susceptible to transformation.

With instant speed the cause of things began to emerge to awareness again, as they had not done with sequence and in concatenation accordingly. Instead of asking which came first, the chicken or the egg, it suddenly seemed that that a chicken was an egg’s idea for getting more eggs.

‘Even a potato in a dark cellar has a certain low cunning about him which serves him in excellent stead. He knows perfectly well what he wants and he knows how to get it […] If it be urged that the action of the potato is chemical and mechanical only […] the answer would seem to lie in an inquiry whether every sensation is not chemical and mechanical, whether those things which we deem the most spiritual are anything other but disturbances of equilibrium in a finite series of levers, beginning with those that are too small for microscopic detection, and going up to the human arm and the appliances which it makes use of?’

War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses. I believe in adequate defence at the coastline and nothing else. If a nation comes over here to fight, then we'll fight. The trouble with America is that when the dollar only earns 6 percent over here, then it gets restless and goes overseas to get 100 percent. Then the flag follows the dollar and the soldiers follow the flag. I wouldn't go to war again as I have done to protect some lousy investment of the bankers. There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defence of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket. There isn't a trick in the racketeering bag that the military gang is blind to. It has its "finger men" to point out enemies, its "muscle men" to destroy enemies, its "brain men" to plan war reparations, and a "Big Boss" - Super-Nationalistic-Capitalism. It may seem odd for me, a military man to adopt such a comparison. Truthfulness compels me to. I spent thirty- three years and four months in active military service as a member of this country's most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle- man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I suspected I was just part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of it. Like all the members of the military profession, I never had a thought of my own until I left the service. My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of higher-ups. This is typical with everyone in the military service. I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested. During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket. Looking back on it, I feel that I could have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.

If hysteria was the pathology of the exacerbated staging of the subject, a pathology of expression, of the body’s theatrical and operatic conversion; and if paranoia was the pathology of organization, of the structuration of a rigid and jealous world, with communication and information, with the immanent promiscuity of all these networks, with their continual connections, we are now in a new form of schizophrenia.

[C]onsider a blind man with a stick. Where does the blind man’s self begin? At the tip of the stick? At the handle of the stick? Or at some point halfway up the stick? These questions are nonsense, because the stick is a difference along which differences are transmitted under transformation, so that to draw a delimiting line across this pathway is to cut off a part of the systemic circuit which determines the blind man’s locomotion.

The youth Narcissus mistook his own reflection in the water for another person. This extension of himself by the mirror numbed his perceptions until he became the servomechanism of his own extended or repeated image. [...] Now the point of this myth is the fact that men at once become fascinated by any extensions of themselves in any material other than themselves [...] [T]he wisdom of the Narcissus myth does not convey any idea that Narcissus fell in love with anything he regards as himself. Obviously he would have had very different feelings about the image had he known it was an extension or repetition of himself.

The great bulk of fiction still being written is retrospective in character; it’s concerned with the origins of experience, behaviour, development of character over a great span of years; it interprets the present in terms of the past, and it uses a narrative technique, by and large the linear narrative, in which events are shown in more-or-less chronological sequence, which is suited to it. But when you turn to the present [...] I feel that what one needs is a non-linear technique, simply because our lives today are not conducted in linear terms. They are much more quantified; a whole stream of random events is taking place.

Consciousness, like memory and habit, is always a reflection on - which is to say, after - the unconscious processes which produce it. The attempt by a subject to grasp the moment will only ever produce a Mis-en abyme of auto-monitoring neurosis (always too late): the postmodern bad infinity of self-consciousness, crippling activity whilst not achieving transparency.

In Spinoza, it is only when the idea of the affection is doubled by an idea of the idea of the affection that it attains the level of conscious reflection. Conscious reflection is a doubling over of the idea on itself, a self-recursion of the idea that enwraps the affection or impingement, at two removes.

It sometimes happens that a man undergoes such changes that I would not be prepared to say that he is the same person. I have heard tell of a certain Spanish poet who was seized with sickness, and although he recovered, he remained so unconscious of his past life that he did not believe that the stories and tragedies he had written were his own.

Private persons are [...] simulacra.

Mind is an idea of the body

For Gothic Materialism, body horror is not something with which the body is afflicted merely contingently - it is not, for instance, a question of the penetration of a biotically-sealed interiority by invaders that may or may not strike - but something inherent to the body at all times and in all its operations. Body horror= cybernetic realism. Cronenberg: “One of our touchstones for reality is our bodies. And yet they[...] are by definition ephemeral.”[60] Wiener: “Our tissues changes as we live: the food we eat and the air we breathe become flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone, and the momentary elements of our flesh and bone pass out of our body every day through excreta[...] We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that repeat themselves.” (HUHB 96) From the point of view of a “residual” subject, then, body horror is a horror of the body’s terrifying mutability, its sheer meat materiality . As Deleuze observes when writing on Bacon, the body is always that which is escaping the subject: “It is not me who tries to escape my body, it is the body which tries to escape through itself.”[61] But it is also a horror the body registers itself , when “[b]eneath its organs it senses there are larvae and loathsome worms, and a God at work messing it all up or strangling it by organizing it.” (AO 9)

a post-mortem despotism, the despot become anus and vampire: ‘Capital is dead labour, that vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks’

As the authors of horror stories have understood so well, it is not death that serves as the model for catatonia, it is catatonic schizophrenia that gives its model to death. Zero intensity.

Most cinema today is an illustration of 19th century novels. A lot of it is disastrous, formulaic and predictable. The sense of pluralism has been curtailed.

Actionists, beatniks, hippies, and serial killers were all pure libertarians who advanced the rights of the individual against social norms and against what they believed to be the hypocrisy of morality, sentiment, justice, and pity. Having exhausted the possibilities of sexual pleasure, it was reasonable that individuals should turn their attention to the wider pleasure of cruelty.

As capitalism exemplifies and outstrips Marx’s most horrified descriptions of it, the Gothic escapes codification as a generic, psychological or fantastic mode to become the most persuasive materialist account of the contemporary socioeconomic scene. For cyberpunk, Marx’s most Gothic language has become his most realistic, whereas his organicist protestations against capital look like antique sentimentalities. “What Marx only thought [...] as ‘fantasy’ recodes and reassembles reality: as capital becomes the DNA of determinant technology, living labour is retrofitted as mere ‘conscious linkages’, reacting to digital stimuli, in ‘an automated system of machinery ... set in motion by an automaton, a moving power that moves itself.’”

As Deleuze-Guattari establish, it is catatonia - simulated or artificial death - rather than death itself that is Poe's obsession: “Horror-story writers have understood, after Edgar Allan Poe, that death wasn't the model for schizophrenic catatonia, but that the contrary was true, and that the catatonic was one who made of his body a body-without-organs, a decoded body, and that on such a body there is a kind of nullification of the organs.” (Deleuze, http) 'Mesmeric Revelation' is presented in the form of a simulated dialogue between 'Poe' and Vankirk, the victim of a terminal disease, who has, like Waldemar, allowed himself to be hypnotised. The 'mesmeric revelation' that the trans alive-dead Vankirk furnishes Poe with turns out to be a Spinozist disquisition on the nature of God and matter.

'Death', Vankirk tells 'Poe' in 'Mesmeric Revelation', is far from being the end, since 'There are two bodies - the rudimental and the complete ... what we call 'death' is but the painful metamorphosis.' ('Life is a lower form of matter.' [Artaud, 1965, 216]) The passage from 'life' to 'death' is not a journey from Being to (phenomenologically-construed) Nothingness, but a movement from the organism to the desolated but populous body [without organs] of zero. In Vankirk-Poe's hypermaterialist metaphysics, the 'ultimate life' is 'unorganized' since 'organs are contrivances by which the individual is brought into sensible relations with particular classes and forms of matter, to the exclusion of other classes and forms.' (Poe, 1982, 93) Either everything is alive, or nothing is. Either way, the distinction between living and nonliving, vital and mechanical is illegitimate and unworkable. 'To rudimental beings, organs are the cages necessary to confine them until fledged.' (Poe, 1982, 93)

And what is the Horror?

'me unconscious = me outside = Me noumenon.' (Grant, ibid.)

'Strip-out everything human, significant, subjective, or organic, and you approach raw K- Matrix, the limit-plane of continuous cessation or Unlife, where cosmic reality constructs itself without presupposition, in advance of any natural order, and exterior to established structures of time. On this plane you are impossible, and because it has no end you will find - will have ultimately always found - that you cannot be, except as a figment of terminal passage, an illusion of waiting to be changed for cthulhoid-continuum of destratified hypermatter at zero-intensity.' (Carver, 1999, html)

Even though we know that - at some level - we are becoming It, we confront the Horror of 'cthuloid continuum' only through the 'black mirror.' It's like death, since wherever It is, we cannot be. We sense that It includes us, but we [know we] cannot know It, since to admit It is to become It and to become It is to cease to be who we are

It's of course no accident that the current power elite (Spielberg, Lucas, Gates, Blair) belonged to the so-called counterculture of the 1960s. Capital, needless to say, is indifferent to individual human motivation, but happy slaves are better slaves, and the reprogramming of the way the master class thinks (about itself, about workers, about capital) has been crucial to the presentation of the multi-nationalised capital's current dominion as immutable fact. And George Lucas' 'transubstantiation' of Apocalypse Now into Star Wars is emblematic of the shifts in late capitalism since the 60s. The smooth transition from hippy to hyper-capitalist, from slacker hedonism to authoritarianism, from engagement to entertainment, retrospectively reveals what the punks knew so we when they cackled 'never trust a hippie'. Far from posing any threat to capitalism, the dope-smoking, soap-dodging rockers of the 60s were acting as capitalism's reserve army of exploiters, whose time spent at festivals and on the experimental avant-garde fringe did little or nothing to engineer lines of collective escape, but yielded instead resources for the new forms of enslavement that loom everywhere around us now. Exactly those likely to have 'approved' of Kubrick's critique of corporate-controlled environments in 1968 are now administering their own 'total control' systems, all the more sinister for their shirtsleeves 'informality', all the more enveloping because the bosses wire themselves into the circuit, flaunting their own self-exploitation as both inevitable and exemplary. As Deleuze and Guattari had it in Anti-Oedipus, "The bourgeois sets the example, he absorbs surplus value for ends that ... have nothing to do with his own enjoyment: more utterly enslaved than the lowest of slaves, he is the first servant of the ravenous machine, the beast of the reproduction of capital. 'I too am a slave'- these are the new words spoken by the master."

In the world of Oedipal sexuality there is no more wandering around freely and uniting amongst the organs, no interrelation of immediate pleasure. Now there is only one organ, one single sexual organ which stands in the center of the triangular Oedipal relationship as the One which assigns the three elements of the triangle their place. It is this One which accounts for the lack, which determines the despotic signifier (signifiant despotique, Deleuze and Guattari), through which various situations of the overall person develop. It is that complete and isolated object which plays the same role in the sexuality of our society as money plays in a capitalist economy: that of the fetish and the truly universal point of reference of all trade, in the one case economic and in the other of desire (...). "Sex" is, above all, a word for describing the phallus.

Philosophers are familiar with reason but are only beginning to discover intelligence. Impersonal, anonymous, and disinterested, intelligence may have found a temporary support in the terrestrial biosphere, but certainly not a home. It cares nothing for the norms of pure reason, the bounds of sense, or the interests of life. While transcendental orthodoxy wastes time staving off the imminent liquidation of reason, sense, and life, transcendental materialism celebrates the deterritorialization of intelligence.

Tedium is not the disease of being bored because there's nothing to do, but the more serious disease of feeling that there's nothing worth doing. This means that the more there is to do, the more tedium one will feel.

I've never seen suicide as a solution, because my hatred of life is due to my love of life. It took me a long time to be convinced of this unfortunate mistake in how I live with myself. Convinced of it, I felt frustrated, which is what I always feel when I convince myself of something, since for me each new conviction means another lost illusion.

It takes a certain intellectual courage for a man to frankly recognize that he's nothing more than a human tatter, an abortion that survived, a madman not mad enough to be committed; and once he recognizes this, it takes even more moral courage to devise a way of adapting to his destiny, to accept without protest and without resignation, without any gesture or hint of a gesture, the organic curse imposed on him by Nature. To want not to suffer from this is to want too much, for it's beyond human capacity to accept what's obviously bad as if it were something good; and if we accept it as the bad thing it is, then we can't help but suffer.

[My empiricism] is derived from the two characteristics by which Whitehead defined empiricism: the abstract does not explain, but must itself be explained; and the aim is not to rediscover the eternal or the universal, but to find the conditions under which something new is produced (creativeness).

[Karl] Polanyi [writing in the 1940s] detected the link yoking liberalism to fascism, inasmuch as fascism saw its task as preventing interference in the price system and diminishing the sum total of goods produced, as promoted by both communism and democracy. 'Fascism', hence, 'is condoned as the safeguard of liberal economics through the elimination of a democratic political sphere and the subsequent reorganization of economic life - market capitalism - on the template of different branches of industry to become the whole of society.' As a result, fascism everywhere appeared under the banner of solving the crisis of capitalism by calling into question the utility of all forms of political representation.

Although his theme is depression rather than abjection, Michael Ignatieff brilliantly summarizes the essential link between the depths of our personal agony and our conviction that it is precisely in those depths that we can locate an otherwise inaccessible truth:

"Of all the painful features of a depression, the worst may be its truth. As long as some portion of our mind believes that our reactions and emotions are exaggerated, we can shield ourselves from the full force of melancholia. But if we convince ourselves that depression lays bare the reality of our existence, we experience our own despair as the scourge of truth....Our despair seems to cast the sinister light of truth on all our former experience. In this phase, depression appears as the bearer of bad but indisputable tidings."*

Because we sense that our unhappiness has brought us in touch with a core of meaning more authentic than the assumptions on which quotidian existence bases its habitual justifications, we are at once indebted to anyone who agrees with our estimation of its meaning and outraged at anyone who would question its revelatory authority. As Ignatieff notes, "Nothing is more likely to arouse rage than the tinny eudaemonism of the variety 'Look on the bright side,' 'Don't let things get out of proportion.' The insult here is an insult to the truth of lived experience.

[supercomputer to man] …talking to you is like giving birth to a leviathan through the eye of a needle -- which turns out to be possible, if the leviathan is sufficiently reduced. But then the leviathan looks like a flea. Such are my problems when I try to adapt myself to your language. As you see, the difficulty is not only that you cannot reach my heights, but also that I cannot wholly descend to you, for in descending I lose along the way what I wanted to convey.

In Gaza, children,
you learn that the sky kills
and that houses hurt.
You learn that your blanket is smoke
and breakfast is dirt.

You learn that cars do somersaults
clothes turn red,
friends become statues,
bakers don’t sell bread.

You learn that the night is a gun,
that toys burn
breath can stop,
it could be your turn.

You learn:
if they send you fire
they couldn’t guess:
not just the soldier dies -
it’s you and the rest.

Nowhere to run,
nowhere to go,
nowhere to hide
in the home you know.

You learn
that death isn’t life,
that air isn’t bread,
the land is for all.
You have the right to be
Not Dead.
You have the right to be
Not Dead.
You have the right to be
Not Dead.

The Stranger

Tell me, enigmatical man, whom do you love best, your father, your mother, your sister, or your brother?
I have neither faither, not mother, nor sister nor brother.
Your friends?
Now you use a word whose meaning I have never known.
Your country?
I do not know in what latitude it lies.
Beauty?
I could indeed love her, Goddess and Immortal.
Gold?
I hate it as you hate God.
Then, what do you love, extraordinary stranger?
I love the clouds ... the clouds that pass ... up there ... up there ... the wonderful clouds!

Desire is not putting something up on a pedestal and saying, hey, I desire this. We don't desire liberty and so forth, for example; that doesn't mean anything. We find ourselves in situations.

When a social mutation appears, it is not enough to draw the consequences or effects according to lines of economic or political causality. Society must be capable of forming collective agencies of enunciation that match the new subjectivity, in such a way that it desires its own mutation. It's a veritable redeployment. The American New Deal and the Japanese boom correspond to two very different examples of subjective redeployment, into all sorts of ambiguities and even reactionary structures. But they produced enough initiative and creativity to conceive new social states capable of responding to the demands of the event. Following 68 in France, on the contrary, the authorities never stopped living with the idea that "things will settle down". And indeed, things did settle down, but under catastrophic conditions. May 68 was neither the result of, nor a reaction to a crisis. It is rather the opposite. It is the current crisis in France, the impasse that stems directly from the inability of the French society to assimilate May 68. French society has shown a radical incapacity to create a subjective redeployment on the collective level, which is what 68 demands. In this light, how could it now trigger an economic redeployment that would ever satisfy the expectations of the "left"? French society never came up with anything for the people: nothing at school, nothing at work. Everything that was new was marginalized or reduces into caricature. Today we see the population of Longwy cling to their steel, the dairy farmers to their cows, etc. What else can they do? Every collective enunciation by a new existence, by a new collective subjectivity, was crushed in advance by the reaction against 68, on the left almost as much as on the right. Even by the "free radio stations". Each time it appeared, the possible was closed off.

The children of May 68, you can run into them all over the place, even if they are not aware of who they are. Each country produces them in its own way. Their situation isn't so great. These are not young executives. These are strangely indifferent, and for this very reason are in the right frame of mind. They have stopped being demanding and narcissistic, but they know perfectly well that nothing today corresponds to their subjectivity, to their potential of energy. They even know that all current reforms are rather directed against them. They are determined to mind their own business as much as they can. They hold it open, hang on to something possible. It is Coppola who created their poetized portrait in Rusty James. The actor Mickey Rourke explained: "The character is at the end of his rope, on the edge. He's not the Hell's Angel type. He's got brains and he's got good sense. But he hasn't got any university degree. And it is this combination that makes him go crazy. He knows that there's no job for him because he is smarter than any guy willing to hire him" (Libération, February 15, 1984).

This is true of the entire world. What we institutionalize for the unemployed, the retired, or in school, are controlled "situations of abandonment". For these, the handicapped are the model. The only subjective redeployments actually occurring collectively are those of an unbridled American-style capitalism, of a Muslim fundamentalism like in Iran, or of Afro-American religion like in Brazil: the reversed figures of a new orthodoxy (one should add European neo-Papism to the list). Europe has nothing to suggest, and France seems no longer to have any other ambition than to assume the leadership of an Americanized and over-armed Europe that would impose the necessary economic redeployment from above. But the field of the possible lives elsewhere. Along the East-West axis, in pacifism, insofar as it intends to break up not only relations of conflict and over-armament, but also of complicity and distribution between the United States and the Soviet Union. Along the North-South axis, in a new internationalism that no longer relies solely of an alliance with the third-world, but on the phenomena of third-worldification in the rich countries themselves (the evolution of metropolises, the decline of the inner-cities, the rise of a European third-world, as Paul Virilio has theorized them). There can only be creative solutions. These are the creative redeployments that can contribute to a resolution of the current crisis and that can take over where a generalized May 68, amplified bifurcation or fluctuation, left off.

...Human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but...life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.

Every day we slaughter our finest impulses. That is why we get a heartache when we read those lines written by the hand of a master and recognize them as our own, as the tender shoots which we stifled because we lacked the faith to believe in our own powers, our own criterion of truth and beauty. Every man, when he gets quiet, when he becomes desperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths. We all derive from the same source. there is no mystery about the origin of things. We are all part of creation, all kings, all poets, all musicians; we have only to open up, only to discover what is already there.

History progresses not by negation and the negation of negation, but by deciding problems and affirming differences. It is no less bloody and cruel as a result. Only the shadows of history live by negation...

[Spinoza] denounces all the falsifications of life, all the values in the name of which we disparage life. We do not live, we only lead a semblance of life; we can only think of how to keep from dying, and our whole life is a death worship.

We have pushed a process into a goal. The aim of any process is not the perpetuation of that process, but the completion thereof....

Laughter has the remarkable power of making an object come up close, of drawing it into a zone of crude contact with the reality where one can finger it familiarly on all sides, turn it upside down, inside out, peer at it from above and bellow, break open its external shell, look into its center, doubt it, take it apart, dismember it, lay it bare and expose it, examine it freely and experiment with it. Laughter demolishes fear and piety, before an object, before a world, making of it an object of familiar contact and thus clearing the ground for an absolutely free investigation of it. . . . Familiarization of the world through laughter and popular speech is an extremely important and indispensable step in making free, scientifically knowable and artistically realistic creativity in European civilization.

To be pressured by meaning signifies that one must appear as if carried away by what one is meant to carry.

This perfect democracy fabricates its own inconceivable enemy, terrorism. It wants, actually, to be judged by its enemies rather than by its results. The history of terrorism is written by the State and it is thus instructive. The spectating populations must certainly never know everything about terrorism, but they must always know enough to convince them that, compared with terrorism, everything else seems rather acceptable, in any case more rational and democratic.

Once it attains the stage of the integrated spectacular, self-proclaimed democratic society seems to be generally accepted as the realization of a fragile perfection. So that it must no longer be exposed to attacks, being fragile; and indeed is no longer attackable, being perfect, which no other society has been. It is a fragile society because it has great difficulty managing its dangerous technological expansion. But it is a perfect society to be governed; and the proof is that all those who aspire to govern want to govern this one, in the same way, maintaining it almost exactly as it is. For the first time in contemporary Europe, no party or fraction of a party even tries to pretend that they wish to change something important. The commodity can no longer be criticized by anyone: as a general system or even as the particular forms of junk which heads of industry choose to put on the market at any given time.

Wherever the spectacle rules, the only organized forces are those that want the spectacle. No one can any longer be the enemy of what exists, nor transgress the omerta that concerns everything. We have finished with that disturbing conception, which was dominant for over two hundred years, according to which society was criticizable or transformable, reformed or revolutionized. And this has not been obtained by the appearance of new arguments, but quite simply because all argument has become useless. From this result we can measure not universal happiness, but the redoubtable strength of the networks of tyranny.

Never has censorship been more perfect. Never has the opinion of those who are still led to believe, in several countries, that they remain free citizens, been less authorized to make themselves known, whenever it is a matter of choices affecting their real lives. Never has it been possible to lie to them with a perfect absence of consequences. The spectator is simply supposed to know nothing, and deserve nothing. Those who are always watching to see what happens next will never act: such must be the spectator's condition. People often cite the United States as an exception because there Nixon came to an end due to a series of denials whose clumsiness was too cynical: but this entirely local exception, for which there were some old historical causes, clearly no longer holds true, since Reagan has recently been able to do the same thing with impunity. All that is never sanctioned is veritably permitted. Talk of scandal is thus archaic. The most profound summing up of the period that the whole world entered shortly after Italy and the United States can be found in the words of a senior Italian statesman, a member, simultaneously, of both the official government and the parallel government called P2, Potere Due: "Once there were scandals, but not any more."

When the spectacle stops talking about something for three days, it is as if it did not exist. For it has then gone on to talk about something else, and it is that which henceforth, in short, exists. The practical consequences, as we see, are enormous.

Sengcan: I am riddled with sickness. Please absolve me of my sin.
Huike: Bring your sin here and I will absolve you.
Sengcan (after a long pause): When I look for my sin, I cannot find it.
Huike: I have absolved you. You should live by the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha.

What to say of today’s world? A solitary power whose army is terrorizing the entire planet dictates its law of the circulation of capital and images and proclaims everywhere, with the most extreme violence, the Duties and Rights of everyone. Behind it run valets and rivals, Europeans, Russians, Chinese… Often disagreeing on means, they never cease testifying to their basic agreement. Because they have no other idea of how to give value to the world.

Under the imposed name of “terrorism,” those most violently opposed to this hegemony of the brutal West, for which “democracy” is spiritual ornament, are in reality part of it. Some nihilist criminals killed at random thousands of inhabitants of New York. This mass crime is evidently an avatar of a contemporary pathology. It is a cold mise en scène of a hackneyed motif: the fury of inspired barbarism against sated imperialism. The American army and the “terrorists” replay the old and bloody historical scene of civilization encircled by brutes. It’s enough to remind us of Rome: a solitary power, which in its own eyes incarnates civilization, disposes art in two directions. On the one hand, a sort of flashy celebration of its own power, a morbid and repetitive drunkenness, proposed to the people as an opiate for its passivity. These are circus games, of which today professional sports and the culture industry, be it musical or filmic, give us the exact equivalent. This kind of entertainment works on a grand scale. To the names of victim and gladiator correspond today the commerce of colossal media budgets and doping in sports. This art is the art of pomp which makes of the funereal power of the Empire the material of games and fictions increasingly more allegorical and bombastic. The natural hero of this art is the Killer, the torturing serial killer. In short, the perverse gladiator.

In the other direction, a meager sophistication, itself finely wrought through a kind of formalist excess, tries to oppose to pompous massiveness the unctuous discernment and subtle perversity of people who can, without suffering too much from it, pretend to retire from general circulation. This art is Romantically morose: it expresses impotence and portrays it as nihilistic delectation. It freely reclaims great forests, eternal snowfalls, softened bodies through a native or oriental wisdom. But this art is all the while bound up with the twilight of pompous art, like the pairing of circus horns with Martial’s deliciously obscene epigrams. Or the flamboyant rhetoric of the generals with the ascetic sermon of the Christians in catacombs.

Can one, however, deny that in the abstract a new phase of capitalism to follow imperialism, namely, a phase of ultra-imperialism, is "thinkable"? No. In the abstract one can think of such a phase. In practice, however, he who denies the sharp tasks of to-day in the name of dreams about soft tasks of the future becomes an opportunist. Theoretically it means to fail to base oneself on the developments now going on in real life, to detach oneself from them in the name of dreams. There is no doubt that the development is going in the direction of a single world trust that will swallow up all enterprises and all states without exception. But the development in this direction is proceeding under such stress, with such a tempo, with such contradictions, conflicts, and convulsions-not only economical, but also political, national, etc., etc.-that before a single world trust will be reached, before the respective national finance capitals will have formed a world union of "ultra-imperialism," imperialism will inevitably explode, capitalism will turn into its opposite.

December, 1915.

Since Robinson Crusoe’s experiences are a favourite theme with political economists, let us take a look at him on his island. Moderate though he be, yet some few wants he has to satisfy, and must therefore do a little useful work of various sorts, such as making tools and furniture, taming goats, fishing and hunting. Of his prayers and the like we take no account, since they are a source of pleasure to him, and he looks upon them as so much recreation. In spite of the variety of his work, he knows that his labour, whatever its form, is but the activity of one and the same Robinson, and consequently, that it consists of nothing but different modes of human labour. Necessity itself compels him to apportion his time accurately between his different kinds of work. Whether one kind occupies a greater space in his general activity than another, depends on the difficulties, greater or less as the case may be, to be overcome in attaining the useful effect aimed at. This our friend Robinson soon learns by experience, and having rescued a watch, ledger, and pen and ink from the wreck, commences, like a true-born Briton, to keep a set of books. His stock-book contains a list of the objects of utility that belong to him, of the operations necessary for their production; and lastly, of the labour time that definite quantities of those objects have, on an average, cost him. All the relations between Robinson and the objects that form this wealth of his own creation, are here so simple and clear as to be intelligible without exertion, even to Mr. Sedley Taylor. And yet those relations contain all that is essential to the determination of value.

Today, after so many capitalist victories, after socialist hopes have withered in disillusionment, and after capitalist violence against labor has been solidified under the name of ultra-liberalism, why is it that instances of militancy still arise, why have resistances deepened, and why does struggle continually reemerge with new vigor? We should say right away that this new militancy does not simply repeat the organizational formulas of the old revolutionary working class. Today the militant cannot even pretend to be a representative, even of the fundamental human needs of the exploited. Revolutionary political militancy today, on the contrary, must rediscover what has always been its proper form: not representational but constituent activity. Militancy today is a positive, constructive, and innovative activity. This is the form in which we and all those who revolt against the rule of capital recognize ourselves as militants today. Militants resist imperial command in a creative way. In other words, resistance is linked immediately with a constitutive investment in the biopolitical realm and to the formation of cooperative apparatuses of production and community. Here is the strong novelty of militancy today: it repeats the virtues of insurrectional action of two hundred years of subversive experience, but at the same time it is linked to a new world, a world that knows no outside. It knows only an inside, a vital and ineluctable participation in the set of social structures, with no possibility of transcending them. This inside is the productive cooperation of mass intellectuality and affective networks, the productivity of postmodern biopolitics. This militancy makes resistance into counterpower and makes rebellion into a project of love.

There is an ancient legend that might serve to illuminate the future life of communist militancy: that of Saint Francis of Assisi. Consider his work. To denounce the poverty of the multitude he adopted that common condition and discovered there the ontological power of a new society. The communist militant does the same, identifying in the common condition of the multitude its enormous wealth. Francis in opposition to nascent capitalism refused every instrumental discipline, and in opposition to the mortification of the flesh (in poverty and in the constituted order) he posed a joyous life, including all of being and nature, the animals, sister moon, brother sun, the birds of the field, the poor and exploited humans, together against the will of power and corruption. Once again in postmodernity we find ourselves in Francis’s situation, posing against the misery of power the joy of being. This is a revolution that no power will control—because biopower and communism, cooperation and revolution remain together, in love, simplicity, and also innocence. This is the irrepressible lightness and joy of being communist.

The charges against Communism made from a religious, a philosophical and, generally, from an ideological standpoint, are not deserving of serious examination.

What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers.

If it is true that the state as we know it is the instrument of a class, we may assume that it “will wither away” with the disappearance of classes. But Lenin carefully points out “it has never entered the head of any socialist to ‘promise’ that the higher phase of development of Communism will arrive.” This means that Marxism, rather than an affirmation of a future that is necessary, is much more a judgment of the present as contradictory and intolerable. It operates in the tangle of the present and with the means of action offered by the present…

Marxism has nothing in common with the joyful cynicism of “at all costs.” First of all, it should be observed that the categories of “ends” and “means” are entirely alien to Marxism. An end is a result to come which one proposes for oneself and seeks to realize. It ought to be superfluous to recall that Marxism very consciously distinguishes itself from utopianism by defining revolutionary action not as the adoption of a certain number of ends through reasoning and will, but as the simple extrapolation of a praxis already at work in history, of a reality that is already committed, namely, the proletariat. It is not a question of representing a “society of the future.” Rather than the awareness of a goal, there is the espousal of an impossibility, in which the present world is grasped in contradiction and decomposition; rather than a fantastic conception of paradise on earth, there is the patient analysis of past and present history as a class strugle; and finally there is the creative decision to pass beyond this chaos through the universal class which will relay the foundations of human history. Revolutionary action can acquire a perspective by drawing out the lines of proletarian development into the future. But Marxists patently refuse to assume “ends”; none of them, says Lenin, can “promise” the last phase of communism - because one can only validly think what one has in some way lived, the rest being nothing but imagination.

There isn't the slightest operation, the slightest industrial or financial mechanism that does not reveal the dementia of the capitalist machine and the pathological character of its rationality

The more detached one is from a role, the easier it becomes to turn it against the enemy. The more effectively one avoids the weight of things, the easier it is to achieve lightness of movement. Comrades care little for forms. They argue openly, confident in the knowledge that they cannot inflict wounds on each other. Where communication is genuinely sought, misunderstandings are no crime. But if you accost me armed to the teeth, understanding agreement only in terms of a victory for you, then you will get nothing out of me but an evasive pose, and a formal silence intended to indicate that the discussion is closed. For interchange on the basis of contending roles is useless a priori. Only the enemy wants to fight on the terrain of roles, according to the rules of the spectacle.

We have an expression, millet plus rifles. In the case of the United States, it is planes plus the A-bomb. However, if the United States with its planes plus the A-bomb is to launch a war of aggression against China, then China with its millet plus rifles is sure to emerge the victor. The people of the whole world will support us. As a result of World War I, the tsar, the landlords and the capitalists in Russia were wiped out; as a result of World War II, Chiang Kai-shek and the landlords were overthrown in China and the East European countries and a number of countries in Asia were liberated. Should the United States launch a third world war and supposing it lasted eight or ten years, the result would be the elimination of the ruling classes in the United States, Britain and the other accomplice countries and the transformation of most of the world into countries led by Communist Parties. World wars end not in favour of the warmongers but in favour of the Communist Parties and the revolutionary people in all lands. If the warmongers are to make war, then they mustn't blame us for making revolution or engaging in "subversive activities", as they keep saying all the time. If they desist from war, they can survive a little longer on this earth. But the sooner they make war, the sooner they will be wiped from the face of the earth.

Contrary to metaphysics, dialectics holds that internal contradictions are inherent in all things and phenomena of nature, for they all have their negative and positive sides, a past and a future, something dying away and something developing; and that the struggle between these opposites, the struggle between the old and the new, between that which is dying away and that which is being born, between that which is disappearing and that which is developing, constitutes the internal content of the process of development, the internal content of the transformation of quantitative changes into qualitative changes.

There is infinite hope but not for us.