I

WANT

TO

CHAT

ROULETTE

UNTIL

I

DIE

a brief survival guide for tired. anxious timesthe desire and the public realm issue

what’s that buzzing?marshall mcluhan

BUT I DON’T WANT COMFORT. I WANT GOD,

I WANT POETRY,

I WANT REAL DANGER,

I WANT FREEDOM,

I WANT GOODNESS,

I WANT SIN.

BUT I DON’T WANT COMFORT. I WANT GOD,

I WANT POETRY,

I WANT REAL DANGER,

I WANT FREEDOM,

I WANT GOODNESS,

I WANT SIN.

d e s i r e i s c r u e l ,a n d s o a r e a u t o n o m y, b e a u t y a n d t h e i r r e s p o n s a b i l i t y

wood,and yet we hope only for the debacle...Were the r i ver to thaw, i t wou ld be al l up with this binding traf f ic , withthis grotesque circulation of calculating trivia-lity whose oppressive yoke makes us worse than servants. To break free of this dusty bin in which we lie, moldering alongside our tarnished casto-ffs, rusty as the saber of a Reischoffen veteranthe waters of our hearts, of our muscles, and of our skins would have to regain their natural state, thereby rediscovering in all their pri-mitive violence the time of floods, glacial ca-taclysms, and tidal waves. They would have to burst the banks, the age-old dams, and spread through every land, whether fallow field, town, or hamlet, drowning in their path all that is not human and, finally, evaporating so that this resurrection may be instantly transformed into a defeat. And having first smashed all that was hostile and stranger to it, it must finallyself-destruct, evaporating into a chimerical haze annihilating a b s o l u t e l y e v e r y t h i n g .

O F d a n c i n g

D E B A C L E .N a t u r a l p h e n o m e n a f o r m a vast alphabet of symbols upon w h i c h w e d r a w i n f o r g i n g a n u m b e r o f o u r e x p r e s s i o n s . Who is not famil iar with the“bolt out of the blue,” the “tem-pest in a teacup,” the “flood of compliments,” the “brainstorm”?However worn the majority of these images may be, one still moves usthrough its brutal and implaca-ble concision, a word quite exact-ly “thrown to- gether” (bacle)with that haste which characteri-zes disasters-I mean the debacle.It appears as a title in Zola’s work to describe the war of 1870 and hasbeen mainly popularized to desig-nate monetary collapses and fi-nancial crashes. This expression is still a very strong one, all the more so in that, given the current situa-tion, it could pass for prophetic.The fact is that life today is bound and frozen in a thick industrial icemeant to make corpses of us. The ri-vers of truly human relations are im-mobile, dead. The cold gains ground; the air constricts. Just as in that win-ter of 1870- 71 which ghastly veterans like to recall, when the solidified Seine braced its back, its spine of hardened water, to the passing cars, pedestrians, and trucks, our rivers of feeling are turning into arteries full of cold, coagulating blood, chan-nels for sticky animalcules of a state of affairs in which the principle ofjustification is purely economic, where social relations are as mean and dirty as lice and harder on our spinal columns than whole truc-kloads or omnibuses full to bursting with inevitably base-looking men. Prisoners of this cold, like mum- mies in their stiffened wrappings, in the twisted poses of shameful paralytics, we do not budge, we re-main inert, we feel ourselves, in a manner of speaking, more like bitsof

CONCEPTS GIVE SENSE TO THE WORLD, SINGULARIZING IT AND PROJECTING DESIRE IN SUCH A WAY THAT IT MIGHT BECOME THE WORLD. BUT THE WORLD FLOWS AND DISPERSES IT-SELF. THE PAINFUL SPREADING OF CHAOS; A N A B S E N C E O F S E N S E , W H AT R E -M A I N S O F T H E WO R L D W H E N L OV E S A R E L O ST A N D F R I E N D S H I P D I E S OUT.

THE WORLD

E M E R G E S

FROM THE

DESIRING FACTOR

AS A FLOW

OF

SHARED

I L L U S I O N S

THE WORLD

E M E R G E S

FROM THE

DESIRING FACTOR

AS A FLOW

OF

SHARED

I L L U S I O N S

?without a transcendence into a potent ial earthly immortality, no politics, strictly speaking, no common world and no public realm is possible

the reality of the public realm re l i e s o n t h e s i mu l ta n e o u s p r e s e n c e o f i n n u m e r a b l ep e r s p e c t i v e s a n d a s p e c t s in which the common world presenti t s e l fa n d f o r w h i c h n o c o m m o n m e a s u r e m e n t o r denominator can ever be devised.

BE ING SEEN AND BE ING HEARD BY O T H E R S D E R I V E THEIR SIGNIFICANCE FROM THE FACT THAT EVERYBODY SEES AND HEARS FROM A DIFFERENT POSITION

U N D E R C O N D I T I O N O F R A D I C A L I S O L AT I O N , WHERE NOBODY CAN ANY LONGER AGREE WITH A N Y B O D Y E L S E

from this viewpoint, the test of reality does not lie in the public presence of others. but rather in the great-er or lesser urgency of needs to whose existence or non –existence nobody can ever testify except the one who happens to suffer them >>>>yet, even if these need, were shared by others, their very futility would prevent their ever establishing anything so sol-id and durable as a common world >>> to live an entirely private life means above all to be deprived of the reality that comes from being seen and heard by others, to be deprived of an ‘objective relationship’ with them that comes from being related to and sepa-rated from them through the intermediary of a com-mon world of thing, to be deprived of the possibility of A C H I E V I N G S O M E T H I N G M O R E P E R M A N E N T T H A N L I F E I T S E L F .

e n t i r e l y private

L I F E

MEN HAVE BECOME ENT IRELY P R I V A T ETHAT I S , THEY HAVE BEEN DE -PRIVED OF SEEING AND HEARING OTHERS, OF BEING SEE AND BE-ING HEARD BY THEM. THEY ARE ALL IMPRISONED IN THE SUBJECTIVITY OF THEIR OWN SINGULAR EXPERI-ENCE, WHICH DOES NOT CEASE TO BE SINGULAR IF THE SAME EXPERIENCE IS MULTIPLIED INNUMERABLE TIMES.

MEN HAVE BECOME ENT IRELY P R I V A T ETHAT I S , THEY HAVE BEEN DE -PRIVED OF SEEING AND HEARING OTHERS, OF BEING SEE AND BE-ING HEARD BY THEM. THEY ARE ALL IMPRISONED IN THE SUBJECTIVITY OF THEIR OWN SINGULAR EXPERI-ENCE, WHICH DOES NOT CEASE TO BE SINGULAR IF THE SAME EXPERIENCE IS MULTIPLIED INNUMERABLE TIMES.

a life in boundless pursuit of pleasure

a life in boundless pursuit of pleasure