Political obscenity.

The Moscow airport. Six hours of waiting. Bureaucratic stupidity loses all limits from the moment institutional regulations or objective control systems estheticize it as part of the landscape, and it becomes elevated to power through cold war rhetoric. The perpetual cold war that every state wages against its citizens is particularly odious because it is adopted and artificially maintained; mere shadows of deeply rooted stupidity have now become the sole conduits for life in society. The same goes for the simulation of military power at the planetary level of cold war. An entire society sent into space with its masks of military power, an entire civilian society exorcized in its mask of bureaucracy.

Moribund society, stopped cold at the appearance of death, on a final stage, which it cultivates like a madman blind to his own reality.

But in addition: Soviet society survives because of this bureaucratic comedy, because of this obscene comedy. Confronted with its ideological objectives and its presented goals, Soviet society would immediately collapse––that’s what we always hope in the West, but in vain, because that society lasts, and if it lasts, it’s because of a collective complicity that revolves around the comedy of ideology, the comedy of bureaucracy. We must never forget this essential given: that a society, whatever its structure, exists primarily because of a collective complicity in scorning its own model. And this complicity is common both to State and to citizens, to the dominators and those dominated. This changes the entire analysis of power.

It is because of this denial of the model social contract––as it is joined to complicity––that we are saved. There’s the secret rule of the social bond. And it is the perversity of those enlightened with political reason of any stripe that makes them want to abolish this secret, break this secret complicity, and force all that is social to come to the surface, in a visible operation, in the obscenity of the obvious.

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There is a kind of miracle of obscenity in the faded splendor of artificial paradises, as long as they are scaled to their particular culture. In America, space gives scope even to the blandness of suburbs, funky towns, to the insignificance and laughable ease of life. Miracle of ice cream, of whiskey, of the steak house and the desert motel: prodigy of ease mixed up with the fatal quality of the desert. Miracle of obscenity, truly American: total availability, the transparency of all functions in space, that remain indigestible in its vast expanse and that can only be exorcised through speed.

The Italian miracle is the miracle of the scene.

The American miracle is the miracle of the obscene.

Luxury of the senses against deserts of insignificance.

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The obscenity of sexual liberation, the pornography of information, of participation, of free expression, of living well, etc. Happily we are only playing the comedy of obscenity, just as other societies play the comedy of ideology, just as the Italian plays the comedy of confusion, of anarchy and terrorism, just as we watch ourselves play the media game of the “alienated” and “prostituted” female body (which really brings us to a real obscenity, the laws of repression)––if all of this were true, it would be unbearable. If all of this were true, we would really be stuck in obscenity, in other words stuck in the naked truth, primary, without artifice but not without pretension––the made pretension of things proclaiming their authenticity.

Happily, we’re not there yet, for when push comes to shove, as always, things reverse themselves, and this ability to reverse protects their secret.

In the midst of the orgy, a man whispers into a woman’s ear: “WHAT ARE YOU DOING AFTER THE ORGY?”