Ecstasy

And what if reality dissolved before our very eyes? Not into nothingness, but into the more real than real (the triumph of simulacra)? What if the modern universe of communication, of hyper-communication, had plunged us, not into the senseless, but into a tremendous saturation of meaning entirely consumed by its success - without the game, the secret, or distance? If all publicity were the apology, not of a product, but of publicity? If information no longer had anything to do with an event, but were concerned with promoting information itself as the event? If history were only an accumulative,instantaneous memory without a past? If our society were no longer that of the "spectacle" as was said in '68, but, cynically, that of ceremony? If politics were increasingly a dated continent, replaced by the dizziness of terrorism, of a generalized hostage-taking, this very figure of an impossible exchange? If all this mutation did not arise out of a manipulation of subjects and opinions, as some believed, but out of a logic without subject, a logic in which opinion has collapsed into fascination? If pornography signified the end of the sexual as such, from the instant that sex in its obscene form has invaded everything?If seduction followed desire and love, that is, once again the reign of the object and that of the subject? If, as a result, strategy replaced psychology? If it were no longer a question of setting truth against illusion, but of perceiving the prevalent illusion as truer than truth? If no other behavior were possible but to learn, ironically, to disappear? If there were no more fractures, no more vanishing lines, no more lines of rupture, but only a surface that is full and continuous, surface without depth, without interruption? And if all this were neither exciting, nor despairing - but fatal?