Cruelty as it occurs in life does not reach its victims in their sovereignty. Pity, on the other hand, or fellowship, touches them precisely there, in what is most precious to them, most inhuman, in what is both cruel and loving vis-à-vis themselves: in their pride.

Cruelty goads man to what he is capable of being, pity goads man into being guilty about what he is.

If solidarity isn’t sharing sovereignty, if solidarity is, as it so often is these days, merely sharing in a collective misery or fate, solidarity is itself even less than a form of abjection.

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Police in civilian clothes––young––leather jackets––hanging out with uninformed colleagues, at a demonstration. We support the concept of road signs when it comes to sexual distinctions, or to fashion, or to the corruption and disarray of our values, but we don’t support it when it comes to the realm of order. A cop disguised as a civilian is truly obscene, corrupt; the disguise itself humiliates you.

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Black is the embarrassment of White. The obscenity of blackness gambles and wins against the obscenity of whiteness.

Marvelous Idi Amin Dada, who has himself carried triumphant by four English diplomats, whose ambassador is received by the Pope. Marvelous Emperor Jean-Bédel Bokassa, eating up little black babies, lavishing diamonds upon the Western dignitary! Nowhere else as in Africa does the concept of power undergo parody in as Ubu-esque a fashion. The West will be hard pressed to rid itself of this generation of simian and prosaic despots, born of the monstrous crossing of the jungle with the shining values of ideology.

Let us remember the rulers, let us remember the lumpen-bureaucrats of the bush who go home at night to the forest to mime their leader, in epileptic and frothing trances, the white employee, the white chief of Abidjan, let us remember the locomotive! All of them Bokassas, all of them Amin Dadas. Incredible, no hope for that continent. All the Peace Corps and other charitable institutions will go under there. The power of scorn, Africa’s contempt for its own authenticity.

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Politicians––power itself becomes degraded because politicians are the incarnation of the deepest contempts that people have for their own lives. Their degradation is in the image of those dominated, and therein they find some way to rid themselves of that image. One has to have a politician’s frame of mind to assume the degradation of power and to rid others of it. This very thing kills politicians, but they get their revenge by passing on to others the corpse of power. This ancient hereditary function has never failed to be true to itself.

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They say that stupidity is obscene. No. Because stupidity is never certain, and obscenity is perhaps the triumph of intelligence. Thus, a silly game where one is supposed to bring the dumbest person one knows: the person who brings the dumbest guest wins.

Of course assumptions about intelligence reverse themselves. It is hardly likely that an intelligent person won’t say a stupid thing in the course of an evening; it is also hardly likely that a stupid person won’t say something that makes sense, or at least simply keep quiet. All it takes is one such instance for the “intelligent” one to appear foolish, and to be thought of as the dumb “guest” rather than the host. Summoned, exorcized by intelligence which serves as mirror, stupidity is once again seductive, and intelligence is odious.

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How great it feels to disappear in the bosom of the masses! Even better than flipping into transcendence (God) is to bask in immanence. The masses. They are the ideal situation for an individual to disappear (even if lamenting alienation and lost identity). Weren’t the masses invented for this very purpose?

In any case, this strategy, this irony of the masses is mine and nothing more. It is my fantasy to disappear into television’s cold blue light, to disappear behind that screen, forever protected from it, because buried at the heart of this obscenity, blue also, sometimes black and white, I can lie in wait from the bottom of this silence for the blinding signal of a definitive event.