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.