The Desert Is No Longer A Landscape,

We Are All Hostages, And We Are All Terrorists. This Circuit Has Replaced That Other One Of Masters And Slaves, The Dominating And The Dominated, The Exploiters And The Exploited. It Is Worse Than The One It Replaces, But At Least It Liberates Us From Liberal Nostalgia And The Ruses Of History.

Today, Every Principle Of Identity Is Affected By Fashion, Precisely Because Of Its Potential To Revert All Forms To Non-origin And Recurrence. Fashion Is Always Retro, But Always On The Basis Of The Abolition Of The Passé (the Past): The Spectral Death And Resurrection Of Forms. Its Proper Actuality (its 'up-to-dateness', Its 'relevance') Is Not A Reference To The Present, But An Immediate And Total Recycling.

Prophesying Catastrophe Is Incredibly Banal. The More Original Move Is To Assume That It Has Already Happened.

The Us ... Cultivates No Origin Or Mythical Authenticity; It Has No Past And No Founding Truth ... It Lives In A Perpetual Present. In The Us Everything Human Is Artificial. The Country Is Without Hope. What Is Arresting Here Is ... Both The Absence Of Architecture In The Cities And The Dizzying Absence Of Emotion And Character In The Faces And Bodies.

Smile And Others Will Smile Back.