Freud already knew about the link between narcissism and immersion in a a crowed, best rendered precisely by the Californian phrase 'to share an experience.' This coincidence of opposed features is grounded in the exclusion that they share: one not only can be, one is alone in a crowd. Both an individual's isolation and his immersion in a crowd exclude intersubjectivity proper, the encounter with an Other. This is why, as the French philosopher Alain Badiou set out in a perspicuous way, today more than ever one should insist on a focus on love, not mere enjoyment: it is love, the encounter of the Two, which 'transubstantiates' idiotic masturbatory enjoyment into an event proper.

The joke goes: Marx, Engels, and Lenin are asked whether they would prefer to have a wife or a mistress. As expected, Marx, rather conservative in private matters, answers, "A wife!" while Engels, more of a bon vivant, ops for a mistress. To everyone's surprise, Lenin says, "I'd like to have both!" Why? Is there a hidden stripe of a decadent jouisseur behind his austere revolutionary image? No--he explains: "So that I can tell my wife that I am going to my mistress, and my mistress that I have to be with my wife..." "And then, what do you do?" "I go to a solitary place to learn, learn, and learn!"

I think the origin of all this clamour for tonality is not so much the need to sense a relationship to the tonic, as a need for familiar chords: let us be frank and say "for the triad"; and I believe I have good reason to say that just so long as a certain kind of music contains enough such triads, it causes no offence, even if in other ways it most violently clashes with the sacred laws of tonality.

I have never seen faces, but because I have looked people in the eye, only their gazes.