James Proctor’s Reviews > The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact > Status Update

A power no longer based on anything other than the policing and prevention of events, which no longer has any political will but to dispel ghosts, itself becomes ghostly and vulnerable. Its virtual power - its programming power in terms of software and the like - is total, but as a result it can no longer bring itself into play, except against itself, by all kinds of internal failures.
This is the 'Hell of Power'.

There is a fierce irony here: the irony of an anti-terrorist world system that ends up internalizing terror, inflicting it on itself and emptying itself of any political substance - and going so far as to turn on its own population... a deterrence without cold war, a terror without balance. Or rather a universal cold war, ground into the tiniest interstices of social and political life.

It is absurd, then, to say that contemporary art is worthless and that there's no point to it, since that is its vital function: to illustrate our uselessness and absurdity. Or, more accurately, to make that decay its stock in trade, while exorcizing it as spectacle.

The photograph is the automatic writing of light.

The self-evidence of reality has a shadow of retrospective doubt hovering over it.

The screen reflects nothing. It is as though you are behind a two-way mirror: you see the world, but it doesn't see you, it doesn't look at you. The screen screens out any dual relation (any possibility of 'response').
All that remains is the mental diaspora of images and the extravagant performance of the medium.

This is the miracle: that a fragment of the world, human consciousness, arrogates to itself the privilege of being its mirror. But this will never produce an objective truth, since the mirror is part of the object it reflects.

that for which there is neither a meaning or a definitive reason is an illusion.
The world therefore has all the characteristics of a thoroughgoing illusion... Hence the need to produce all the possible forms of a simulacrum of meaning to mask the original illusoriness.
Thus the simulacrum is not that which hides the truth, but that which hides the absence of truth.

it is in this lucid vision of an endless reversion, in this denial of any objective solution, that the intelligence of evil, if it exists, is grounded.

the worst error, the one committed by all our revolutionary strategists, is to think that they can put an end to the system on the real plane: that is... the imaginary the system itself imposes on them, a system that lives and survives only by getting those who attack it to fight on the terrain of reality, a ground that is always its own.