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Vélizy. The shepherds of the Pyrenees who have recently been intruded upon by optical wires, hertz signals, cable TV. These people, did they really think they were living in society, with their neighbors, their beasts, their histories? Scandalous condition of underdeveloped communication, monstrous deprivation of all that good informational substance, barbarous solitude wherein they were not able to express themselves and interface . . . .

Before all of this, they were let alone. When they were pursued, it was to go to town, to factories, or to war. Why do we need them if they need nothing? To what do they have to bear witness? They will be forced to, if necessary, in televised reports and video documentation of their lifestyles: the new terror, not Orwell’s 1984, but that of the 21st Century, is right here––the new negritude is here, the new involuntary service.

There is already a martyrology of information. The Bretons who were all of a sudden given television after Vélizy stations were dynamited. You’ve got cables, you’ve got targets. The new guinea pigs, the new hostages. Crucified on the altar of information, on the pillory of their consoles. Informacuted live. All of this to make them acknowledge all the good being heaped upon them, to extort their vows of sociability, of their at long last being “normalized,” assimilated humanoids.

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We’ve discovered the anxiety molecule! Hooray! François Jacob: “The cerebral locus of pleasure is situated right next to the locus of discontent.” Wonderful biological verification of the ambivalence principle! “This would have made Freud happy,” he says. (Between us, and to follow his delirious logic, if the ambivalence of things like love and hate, pain and pleasure, exists, then everything should be situated in one and the same center––for that is the secret of ambivalence––not merely stupid juxtapositions.) But the compulsion to localize, the compulsion to pin down all functions of biology and to isolate them does not encompass ambiguity, ambivalence, or the reversibility of things that aren’t and can never be categorized. Psychophysiology of the brain is obscene in its functional oversimplification, the genetic code is obscene is cybernetic oversimplification.

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Obscenity is a desperate attempt at seduction. Its only mistake is to try to seduce with crude evidence of verity, and not with subtle use of available signs. Obscenity has it that showing alone suffices, that forcing one to look suffices. Obscenity is a vulgar offering, it is fundamentally naive and sentimental in terms of what it considers to be the material truth of things, without taking into account their complexity and the subtlety of appearances. Obscenity is simultaneously an effusion and a provocation.

Provocation is obscene in what it calls seduction. It says: I know that you want to be seduced, and I’m going to seduce you. There is nothing worse than betraying this secret rule.

There is nothing less seductive than a provocative smile or gesture since such things presume that one would not know how to be seduced quite naturally and that blackmail or statements of purpose are somehow necessary: “Let yourself be seduced . . . .”

Any form of forced solicitation, but also any kind of forced solicitude, is obscene. Thus solidarity is obscene and provocative, for it too says: I know that you need me and I’m going to help you.

All gestures of solidarity are stained with this indiscretion, with this indelicacy toward the misery of others. One knows about the contempt that hides behind charity, one holds in low regard those who hide behind fellowship.

The social bond is without doubt also covered by the rule of the secret game, and thus it becomes the same contradiction and the same obscenity when it pretends to disclose, reveal, tell, and promote that which is social as when it tries to institutionalize seduction (or for that matter truth). Only lumpen effects of socialization can emerge from this.

Thus madness is rendered obscene through therapy, the cripple becomes obscene because of the care given him (crippled is beautiful). Obscenity is never the cruelty of evil, but the sentimentality of concern. Obscenity is quintessentially pity, immodest condescension. Indifference to violence is cruel, but there is an equal violence in weeping over the victims, because commiseration is obscene.