De wereld als markt en strijd

To reach the otherwise philosophical goal I am setting myself I will need, on the contrary, to prune. To simplify. To demolish, one by one, a host of details. In this I will be aided, moreover, by the simple play of historical forces. The world is becoming more uniform before our eyes; telecommunications are improving; apartment interiors are enriched with new gadgets. Human relationships become progressively impossible, which greatly reduces the quantity of anecdote that goes to make up a life. And little by little death's countenance appears in all its glory.

Our civilization, he says, suffers from vital exhaustion. In the century of Louis XIV, when the appetite for living was great, official culture placed the accent on the negation of pleasure and of the flesh; repeated insistently that mundane life can offer only imperfect joys, that the only true source of happiness was in God. Such a discourse, he asserts, would no longer be tolerated today. We need adventure and eroticism because we need to hear ourselves repeat that life is marvellous and exciting; and it's abundantly clear that we rather doubt this.

most people vaguely admit that every relationship, in particular every human relationship, is reduced to an exchange of information (if of course you include in the notion of information messages of a non-neutral, that is, gratifying or punitive, nature). Under these conditions it doesn't take long for a thinker on information technology to be transformed into a thinker on social evolution. His discourse will often be brilliant, and hence convincing; the affective dimension may even be built into it.

I was starting to feel like vomiting, and I had a hard-on; things were at a pretty pass. I said 'Excuse me a moment,' and crossed the discothèque in the direction of the toilets. Once inside I put two fingers down my throat, but the amount of vomit proved feeble and disappointing. Then I masturbated with altogether greater success.

successive sexual experiences accumulated during adolescence undermine and rapidly destroy all possibility of projection of an emotional and romantic sort; progressively, and in fact extremely quickly, one becomes as capable of love as an old slag. And so one leads, obviously, a slag's life; in ageing one becomes less seductive, and on that account bitter. One is jealous of the younger, and so one hates them. Condemned to remain unvowable, this hatred festers and becomes increasingly fervent; then it dies down and fades away, just as everything fades away. All that remains is resentment and disgust, sickness and the anticipation of death.

I feel as if things are falling apart within me, like so many glass partitions shattering. I walk from place to place in the grip of a fury, needing to act, yet can do nothing about it because any attempt seems doomed in advance. Failure, everywhere failure. Only suicide hovers above me, gleaming and inaccessible.

It was also on a 26th of May that I'd been conceived, late in the afternoon. The coitus had taken place in the living room, on a fake Pakistani rug. At the moment my father took my mother from behind she'd had the unfortunate idea of stretching out a hand and caressing him on the testicles, so adroitly that ejaculation was produced. She'd felt pleasure, but not true orgasm. They'd eaten cold chicken afterwards. That was thirty-two years ago now; at that time you could still find real chicken.