Introduction

I don't think I've ever hesitated quite so much over the choice of a topic for a public lecture. Usually it's just the opposite: either I very quickly have a fairly precise hunch about the main thrust of my line of thinking, or I give up any idea of giving a lecture--because I'm not a masochist by nature.

Here, this second hypothesis of throwing in the towel was discounted right away. Why? For the simple fact that I am a longtime friend of Didier Malgor. And because this conference was being held under the aegis of Bouvard and P‚cuchet, a tale of stupidity but also of friendship, here I am, whereas I would rather have been in the country.

Nowadays, however, even in the country you can watch TV, hotspot of stupidity, if ever there was. And everyone is agreed about this, that TV is indeed a machine that churns out stupidity. For the philosophers, Bourdieu, Virilio, Deleuze to name just three, phenomena of loss of reality, loss of referent, and loss of otherness produced by the TV spectacle all manufacture the realm of sameness. But in a more immediate way most TV viewers are aware when they watch the 8 p.m. news that they are witnessing a show that has nothing to do with them. TV is the number one popular show, that has helped the viewer to effect a Machiavellian split.

At the movies, the movie-goer identifies with a character and finds himself in a moral--or immoral--relationship with the world. The TV viewer derives some mischievous pleasure in seeing the demonstration of (his) stupidity on TV. He isn't totally taken in by it, but he wallows in it nonetheless.

Far from prompting the viewer to switch off the TV set, the voyeurism linked with stupidity reassures him in a position of observer, outside the world he lives in. An observer whose free will is all summed up in a remote control to channel surf, i.e. to see the same thing.

For me, needless to say, it is not a matter of diminishing the philosophers who attempt to manufacture concepts and withstand the consensus on TV viewers, as afflicted by the malady of a deliberate removal of the consciousness.

Their challenges contrast: the first try to manufacture concepts, the second are the products of contemporary simulation and cloning. Passiveness and a clear conscience in the person who is no longer a subject, but not yet an object.

In a way, if the televised representation of the world offers the image of incoherence, chaos and stupidity, does this not legitimize laziness, and stupidity that is proud of itself?

PRESENTATION OF THE REPORT

But what are we to choose in that living encyclopaedia of stupidity: a day of television? I thought it might be more interesting to look at things from the aspect of a more neutral genre: news reporting.

So I've selected a report made by two France 2 TV-journalists in 1989 in Kosovo, and broadcast on the 8 p.m. news--at ten past eight, to be precise. But my position with regard to this report is not purely external because I know Michel Mompontet well, and respect his work. Any critical position is rendered all the more exacting by affective and intellectual proximity.

The report in question is already some ten years old. This is so that I can sidestep any topical factor, the better to stand back from it. It is a somewhat special report shot in semi-clandestine conditions. Let us quickly go over one or two aspects of the situation at that time in Yugoslavia. In 1989, Milosevic had just been elected, his political agenda being the reunification of Greater Serbia (Montenegro, Serbia, Kosovo). The news coming out of Kosovo was non-existent, apart from a few AFP dispatches. This film team thus decided to go to Kosovo, having first set out to do a report on Yugoslav industry in Belgrade.

PROJECTION

1. F for Fake

1.1 Report analysis

1.1.1 Analysis of the topic lead-in (Christine Ockrent)

"At least 24 dead last month, more than 600 arrests and a state of emergency for months. Today, there is order in Kosovo. This Yugoslavian province, with its mainly Albanian population denounced, denounces Serb domination. Yesterday, once more, the Yugoslav President justified the continued state of emergency in this region bordering on Albania.

This is the first foreign television team to manage to gain access here, Michel Mompontet and Jean Corneille"

It is extremely rare for journalists presenting the TV news to make a mistake in verbal conjugation. In shifting from the imperfect to the present, Christine Ockrent confused what came across to viewers. The present is the time of the scoop, and what is topical, the latest, cannot be conjugated in the past tense.

"Denounced, denounces"... the hesitation seems to be a slip and may introduce a doubt into the TV viewer's mind.

Fake interview with Fidel Castro, killing-fields of Timisaora, landing scene at Mogadiscio, the viewer is already accustomed to the deceptiveness and trickery of TV news reports...

1.1.2 The opposition between minority, Christian Serbs and majority Moslem Albanians

That particular morning, like every Friday, day of prayer, the Muezzin's call. Yet we are in a socialist country marked by cooperative management, and in a Serb and Christian province. The church is nevertheless in evidence here, right close by, image of co-existence between three million Albanian Moslems and just 200,000 Serbs who hold the real reins of power. This is a deceptive picture of things.

The report opens with a bottom-to-top vertical vista ending with the symbolic picture--described here as conflictual--between Christian Serbs and Moslem Albanians: on one side a mosque, on the other a church. The commentary assumes the tone of denunciation: oppression of majority Albanians by Serbs who are nevertheless in the minority.

The opposition between Serbs and Albanians is constructed by the use of voice-offs and pictures: on the one hand a visibly poor Albanian (at least, we are told he is Albanian); on the other, a group of quite well-dressed young folk, "visibly" Serbs.

For two months the province of Kosovo has been in a state of virtual civil war.

Phase two of this ideological construct: statement of Serb repression: first proof, a house destroyed by the civil war. In terms of a destroyed house, an attentive observer only sees an unfinished house--there is obviously too much being read into the news.

The majority Albanians, in their poverty, are no longer putting up with Serb domination imposed by the Belgrade government. The lid has blown off, there is a curfew, a state of emergency, dozens of dead, 600 arrests.

Second proof--EVN (European Video News) pictures of demonstrations. The specific nature of EVN ideas resides in the live aspect, in other words, image-rich: jerky camera work, slight blurredness of the picture, mess of bodies which "prove" the presence of a witness. The EVN images are taken as direct proof. TV ethics with regard to EVN stipulate the inclusion of the date and even the time and place of shooting, as well as the source, for pictures filmed by executioners have nothing to do with pictures filmed by victims. Here, nothing of the sort. These images are presumably images untainted by any manipulation, but also without any stated origin... in other words, they are make-believe images. Jean-Luc Godard perfectly defined this shift from reality to make-believe: "What bothers me today in relation to this representation of war taken up by fiction is the ricochet effect there is in the images of war today on TV screens the world over. In other words, the commentary, the moment shown (shorter and shorter, incidentally) looks more like a make-believe image than the reality that a cameraman has been sent to film".

These pictures of demonstrators may be read like make-believe images. There is a hint of something set up, if only in the filming, and in a certain way the editing.

The police would try on several occasions to confiscate these pictures shot unbeknownst to them.

No proof of the presence of the army must find its way abroad.

The TV viewer's doubt is confirmed precisely when the commentator confirms that The police would try [...] on several occasions [...] to confiscate these pictures shot unbeknownst to them, and this even when you can see soldiers checking papers on the screen. How come the soldiers didn't see this camera six feet from them, and filming them? Improbability of the situation which means that the viewer proceeds from doubt to certainty: this report is a pure propaganda exercise, if not a fake.

1.2. Epidemic of falsehood

An outcome akin to that of the libel of a coup, everything is manipulation, set-up, in the filming and in the editing alike.

Deception--or exaggeration, which comes to the same thing--of the commentary on the violence of the repression, on military checks, on interviews with students, deception of pictures filmed in the reflections of windows, technique of espionage which, far from lending the pictures a degree of reality, here becomes an effect of style, deception to do with the cause of the visible impact on the plateglass window of a bar which, in the detail, is intended to offer evidence of confrontation, but on the contrary becomes an element of reading too much into things, proving the set-up, and, in the end of the day, deceptive editing by the manipulation of archival imagery.

2--Words dilute imagery

Both as a strategy to protect a power in power and as a desire to get rid of everything that doesn't make sense, journalistic techniques imprison imagery and pictures in something one-dimensional.

Fear of the nonsense of images or rather a proliferation spreading their meaning. The pictures become one-way. Elimination of the multi-layered aspect of imagery and sounds. And all of a sudden, nothing is seen, and nothing is believed. Words dilute imagery.

This image is deceptive.

Eager to denounce the apparently peaceful co-existence between Serbs and Albanians that the picture of the proximity between church and mosque might have us believe, but in fact above all to show that there is something other than the spoken truth, it is even declared that the images are lying to us, without becoming aware that the viewer will have doubts not about what official communiqu‚s tell us but about the pictures themselves.

And all of a sudden everything is untrue.

3--Starting from the conclusion

We would be considerably off target if we said that the commentary is off and the pictures are on. The very opposite is the case: the commentary alone has to be read and seen. The technique of overlay, text on picture, does make it possible, needless to say, to understand the English, but it is used once more to hide the image, and assert the dominance of the read over the seen.

The journalistic news account only aims at one thing: to wind things up. It even starts from the conclusion.

The event in itself, as transmitted by images loses its quality of experience. There is no longer any recipient, no longer any dialogue, because it is a matter of winding things up even before there has been any attempt to understand.

4--Dummy and/or cynic

But in all this, haven't I made the same mistake? Haven't I started out from the conclusion, because all this argument is only here to demonstrate what I had already decided to demonstrate, ahead of time. In this report, in fact, everything is true--that goes without saying.

The issue is not one of truth or falsehood, or of subject and predicate. Stupidity is here, in the forgotten fact that there is a route between truth and falsehood, subject and object.

Where truth and falsehood aim at a morality, in other words at a form of censorship, the route aims at experience. For it is to no avail to prove, by demonstration, the shoah or Hiroshima. To want to demonstrate their truth is already tantamount to showing a doubt, the possibility of forgetfulness.

Nowadays, everything prompts us to forget about reality, the real. "Corpses are proof of the reality of war, but people in the process of dying are not filmed. Dead people are first and foremost corpses and numbers. This involves staving off death; it is the horror of the image that gives rise to self-censorship, and means that someone in the process of dying is never filmed".

This is, indeed, what is at issue: the suppression of death. Our death. And so, in consequence, our life.

During the Gulf War, we all remember that virtual image transmitted by satellite, of a Patriot missile destroying an industrial target by going down the chimney: punctuality, reliability, accuracy; a surgical strike, a clean war. Neither life nor death, just unlived-in targets and missiles with their own "smart" intelligence (Pentagon Projection). Stupidity denies death, pain, mourning, and life too. It denies everything that has to do with otherness and the human experience.

4.1 The place of the dummy

"World events, a civil war, a massacre, a famine, all this ought to affect our consciousness, because what is always involved is the human question, in other words, ourselves. Our fate is linked to that of all mankind.

"However, our grasp of events is not first and foremost a matter of awareness, and even less so a matter of experience" (Claude Romano, L'‚v‚nement et le monde).

How could it be any other way? TV bears a heavy responsibility in this sacrifice and removal of experience. It does not speak for (cf. Deleuze Animal) the TV viewer but in place of the TV viewer. The viewer is ruled out of the game and ends up in the place of the dummy (dummy: game terminology. The person who, after drawing lots, does not join in a round of a game and pays his share), without any chance of intelligence, judgement and action. Pivotal position of stupidity. He is asked neither to judge, nor to understand, nor even to believe. He is simply asked to stare stupidly at an aquarium that does not even contain any goldfish... until the commercials.

4.2. The place of the cynic

But the link that brings the TV viewer and the TV set together at 8 p.m., news time, but also suppertime, is a perverse one.

We have clearly seen how the viewer was "demoralized" by an alienating commentary and the depiction of a world in pieces, smithereened, and incomprehensible.

But what happens if the viewer is rendered distraught by an event, deeply moved and affected, if his feelings do not tally with the chattering impact, but with silence. The impact is in fact superficial, similar in this respect to chitchat. What's more, this is what it mainly produces.

If, by chance, images and sounds become the place of an experience, an emotion lived through. (Kurd projection), then the question is right away raised of knowing whether these images should have been broadcast, and whether such a broadcast does not have to do with pure voyeurism. We tend to forget that the voyeur is the person who hides in order to take a peep, while we now hide so as not to see the images which must be governed by the impersonal formulae: It is said... and the: There is... For all emotion has become intolerable for us, not politically correct... We prefer to hear the world by dialling 3615, which is what the TV viewer does, when he chooses between two solutions. In the first instance, channel surfing guarantees that he can run away to other milder climes, towards endless comforting programmes about animals. This TV viewer abandons his civic freedom.

Or else he opts for cynicism, a degeneration of the word which now only serves to deny reality. Cynical, an adjective that stems from "dog" (canis), which, in medical terms, means a spasm, a convulsive twitch of the cheeks, whereby the lips part and show the teeth, like an annoyed dog. A dog ready to bite. Why so much hatred? By denying any quality of experience in what lies beyond his humdrum daily round, the cynic defends a territory, the territory of his home, his garden, his mother country, and blood. He is not stupid. His art lies in cultivating stupidity in order to deny any kind of otherness. Stupidity is the infinite reign of the same.

Conclusion

In talking to you about television, I have indirectly been talking to you about my position as an artist. An artist, needless to say, can be someone who denounces, someone who becomes committed (engag‚), someone who manipulates, someone who channel surfs, someone who practises execration, someone who thinks that art is dead... It is true that the contemporary art scene nowadays often wears the grimacing mask of cynicism, for in it otherness has turned into a category of the Same, a mere letter in a listing:

--"What are we going to do?"-- Don't think about it! Let's copy! The page must be filled, "the monument" must be finished--Equality of everything, good and evil, Beauty and ugliness, the meaningless and the typical [...]"

We should no longer be able to utter the word "contemporary" if we want art not to become a mere compilation of topical events. Perhaps we should talk about the untopicality of art.

And if I've talked to you about TV, it's not to pinpoint TV as a symbol of stupidity. TV is no more stupid than we are. What it lacks is the trajective, the time of experience, but it's not TV that avoids these things, it is we who flee them.

PROJECTION/DELEUZE

"I think that one of the grounds for thinking is a certain shame at being a human being. I think that the human being, the artist, the writer who has said this in the deepest way is Primo Levi. He managed to talk about this shame of being a human being. What was predominant when he returned home from the concentration camps was the shame of being a human being. It's a sentence that is at once very splendid and, I think, very beautiful, but it isn't abstract. It's very concrete. The shame of being a human being. But it doesn't mean all the stupid things that people would have it mean. It doesn't mean that we are all murderers, or that we're all guilty. For example, we are all guilty in the face of Nazism. Primo put it so well: it doesn't mean that executioners and victims are one and the same. Nobody will have us believe this, they won't have us muddling the executioner with the victim. The shame of being a human being does not mean that we are all the same, all compromised [...] but it does mean several things. It's a complex feeling, it is not a unified feeling. The shame of being a human being means both: how did human beings manage to do that? how did human beings--that is human beings other than I myself, manage to do that?, and secondly, how, all the same, have I myself come to terms with this? I didn't become an executioner, but I came to terms with things sufficiently to survive, and then there's a certain shame at having survived, in the place of certain friends who didn't survive. So it's a very complex feeling. I think that at the root of art there is this idea or this very keen feeling of a certain shame at being a human being which means that art consists in freeing the life that man has put behind bars. Man is forever putting life behind bars, killing life, the shame of being a human being. The artist is a person who frees a life, a powerful life, a life that is more than personal; it is not his life."

Gilles Deleuze, L'Ab‚c‚daire, "R as in Resistance"

Many artists forget this, "the shame of being a human being", and this doesn't mean that artists must turn into Saints. No, "just Christians or atheists, in our universal schizophrenia we need to believe in this world" (G.Deleuze in Cin‚ma 2: Image Temps p. 223, Minuit, 1985), and the artist's primary job is to believe in this world.

Translated from the French by Simon Pleasance & Fronza Woods

Isidore Isou, Pr‚cisions sur ma po‚sie et moi, Paris, Aux escaliers de Lausanne, 1950, p. 59.

Mme de Sta‰l, De la litt‚rature consid‚r‚e dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales, 1800 [excerpt from chapter II, 3, "De l'‚mulation"].

Mme de Sta‰l, op.cit., I, 13, "Des trag‚dies de Shakespeare".

This quote from MoliŠre (Dom Juan, II,1) is the title-page quotation in the novella collection Les Jeunes-France.

Baudelaire, Fus‚es, in Oeuvres complŠtes, vol. I, Paris, Gallimard, "BibliothŠque de la Pl‚iade", 1975, p. 662.

Ibid., p. 662.

Flaubert, excerpt from Angoisses, in M‚moires d'un fou, Novembre et autres textes de jeunesse, Paris, Flammarion, "GF", p. 258.

TholomyŠs: see Les Mis‚rables, Gallimard, NRF, La Pleiade Collection, pp. 146-174 (I, book 3). Mr. Bamatabois: ibid, pp. 220-223 (I, book 5, chap. 12).

Les Mis‚rables, ibid., pp. 55-58 (I, book 1, chap. 8).

Ibid., p. 221.

Ibid., p. 737.

Mallarm‚, Po‚sies, "Les Fenˆtres" (1863), in Oeuvres complŠtes, Paris, Gallimard, Pleiade, p. 32.

J.-K. Huysmans, En m‚nage, U.G.E., 10/18, p. 375.

J.-K. Huysmans, En rade, 1887, Gallimard, Folio, 1984, p. 115.

Letter reproduced in G. Guiches, Le Banquet, Paris, Spes, 1926, p. 121. Borrowed, completed and commented by Jean de Palacio, in the Revue des Sciences humaines, February-March, 1978, no. 170-171, "Ecriture romanesque et ‚criture artistique", p. 204. Quoted from the J. de Palacio edition.

Mallarm‚, "Les Fenˆtres", Po‚sies, op.cit., p.32.

"When it is a matter of carrying out the work you have planned, get the hell out of here! You see, I'm quite afraid that, in art, we haven't played the part played in love by those poor devils who, after hankering after a woman for a long while, can't stan dit once they have her in their arms". Op.cit., pp. 373-374.

De Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, published in 1887 by Tresse & Stock.

Villers de l'Isle-Adam, Contes cruels (1883), Paris, Garnier, 1968, p. 158.

St‚phane Mallarm‚'s Correspondances, edited by Henri Mondor and Jean-Pierre Richard, Paris, Gallimard, 1959. On this subject see Alan W. Riatt's excellent analysis, Villiers de l'Isle-Adam et le mouvement symboliste, Paris, Jos‚ Corti, 1986, pp. 165-184, where this letter is quoted on p. 184.

Jules Renard, L'Ecornifleur (1892), chap. XII, Oeuvres, vol. I, Gallimard, Pl‚aide, 170, p. 330.

From L…-bas (1891) on, and then in En route, La Cath‚drale, L'Oblat, Les Foules de Lourdes.

Maurice BarrŠs, Le Jardin de B‚r‚nice (1891), Paris, Livre de Poche, 1964, p. 390 ("La m‚thode de B‚r‚nice").

Ibid., p. 405.

Ibid., p. 405. The narrator here tells his old companion who shared his intellectual experiences--the Simon of Un homme libre.

Les D‚racin‚s (1897). See in particular the episode of Hugo's funeral, where we find this expression describing the populace in favourable terms: "this prodigious mixture of enthusiasts and rakes, fools and good and simple minds, is organized as one single formidable body [...] Ah! that the poor popular giant, the subconscious monster, would really be a creator [...]" Le Livre de Poche, 1967, p. 466.

Francis Jammes, De l'Ang‚lus de l'aube … l'ang‚lus du soir (1898), Mercure de France, 1941, p. 3.

Ibid., p. 12.

Ibid., p. 256.

Choix de poŠmes, Paris, Mercure de France, 1947, p. 130.

Quoted in Paul Claudel, Th‚ƒtre, Paris, Gallimard, Pl‚iade, 1992, pp. 1241-1241.

Ibid., Tˆte d'or, p. 31. This gambit featured in the second version of 1894 (ibid., p. 171).

Lois psychologiques de l'‚volution des peuples (1894), Alcan, 1895, p. 61.

Paul Val‚ry, Oeuvres, Gallimard, Pl‚iade, vol. II, p. 12.

Maurice BarrŠs, L'Appel du soldat, Livre de Poche, 1975, dedicated to Jules Lemaitre, p.9.

Le R‚el, trait‚ de l'idiotie, Editions de Minuit, Paris, 1977.

Revue de l'art no. 26, 1974.

Gherardo Ortalli, La Peinture infamante du XIIIe au XVIe siŠcle, G‚rard Monfort, Paris, 1995.

E.H. Gombrich, Aby Warburg, An Intellectual Biography, London, 1970.

Maurice Blanchot, Le Livre … venir, Gallimard, Paris, 1959.

J.-K. Huysmans, Marthe, Jean Gay, Brussels, 1876.

Jorge Luis Borges, "Le Biathanatos" in Enquˆtes, Gallimard, Paris, 1957.

Guy Debord, Pan‚gyrique, G‚rard Lebovici, Paris, 1989.

Les Idiots, diary and script, Alpha Bleue/Les Films du Losange,/ Liberator Productions, 1998.

Twilight of the Idols [Cr‚puscule des Idoles, in Oeuvres philosophiques complŠtes VIII, Paris 1974, translated by Jean-Claude H‚mery, p. 82-83.]

Cr‚puscule des Idoles, op.cit., p. 125.

The Case of Wagner [Le cas Wagner, in Oeuvres philosophiques complŠtes VIII, p. 53. Christianity is invariably associated by Nietzsche with the "lowest" populations. See L'Antechrist in Oeuvres philosophiques complŠtes VIII, p. 178.]

In The Antichrist, Nietzsche introduces the Christian vocabulary thus: "This faith is formulated no more than this--it lives, it bewares of formulae. Doubtless, the hazards of the environment, of language, of earlier culture, all determine a certain number of concepts: primitive Christianity handles solely Judaeo-Semitic concepts (the bread and wine in the Last Supper are part of this, this idea wrongly distorted by the Church, like everything that is Jewish). But one must beware of seeing herein anything more than a symbolic language, a semiotics, an opportunity for parables...", in Oeuvres philosophiques complŠtes VIII, p. 190.

Le cas Wagner, op.cit., p. 55.

Fragments posthumes. D‚but 1888-d‚but Janvier 1889, in Oeuvres philosophiques complŠtes XIV, Paris, 1977, translated by Jean-Claude H‚mery, p. 243.

Nietzsche contra Wagner in Oeuvres philosophiques complŠtes VIII, p. 349.

L'Ant‚christ, op.cit., p. 231.

L'Ant‚christ, op. cit., p. 231.

The Genealogy of Morals [La G‚n‚alogie de la morale, Paris, 1971, translated by Isabelle Hildenbrand and Jean Gratien, p. 172]

Daybreak [Aurore, Paris, 1970, translated by Julien Hervier, p. 15.]

"Whence does it come that, since Plato, all the philosophical architects of Europe have built in vain? That everything they themselves clung to sincerely and seriously as aere perennius threatens to crumble or is already lying in ruins? Oh, what falsehood in the reply that today everything is still being held in readiness for this question: "Because they have all overlooked the presupposition, the examination of the foundations, a critique of reason in its entirety"--this fatal answer given by Kant which, in truth, has not attracted us, we other modern philosophers, on to a more certain or less deceptive terrain! (-- and, an additional question, was it not a bit odd to demand that an instrument should criticize its own rightness and its own qualification? that the intellect should "recognize" its value, its strength and its limits? and was it not even a little absurd?--). The real answer would rather have been that all the philosophers have built under the spell of morals, even Kant,--- that their design was apparently aimed at certainty, the "truth", but, in fact, at "majestic moral edifices"... This enthusiastic project did indeed make Kant the deserving son of his century, which, more than any other century, merits the name, the century of enthusiasm: Kant was also happily this, incidentally, with regard to the most valuable aspects of this century (for example, through that large dose of sensualism that was introduced into his theory of knowledge). He, too, had been bitten by the Rousseau bug, that moral tarantula; he, too, harboured in the depths of his soul the thinking of moral fantasy that another disciple of Rousseau felt and declared himself destined to carry out. I refer to Robespierre..." Aurore, op.cit., p. 15.

Aurore, op.cit., p. 164.

L'Ant‚christ, op.cit., p. 211.

For Kant's text I refer to the Paris 1986 edition of Oeuvres philosophiques, vol. III, and in particular pp. 500-502. An early example of obedience is expressed by Kant in his analysis of decency: "Decency, the inclination to prompt in someone else a sense of respect in our regard through our good manners (concealment of what might arouse contempt), also gave, as an authentic foundation of all real sociability, the first sign of man's formation as a moral creature. A modest start, which nevertheless made its mark by offering a quite new orientation to the way of thinking, is more important than the whole endless series of cultural advances that then ensured", p. 508.

Ecce Homo in Oeuvres philosophiques complŠtes VIII, p. 320.

For Nietzsche, one of the main functions of religion is the abolition of boredom: "On the Origin of religions--The essential invention of the founders of religions is first and foremost to establish a certain way of life, a certain everyday moral praxis, which acts as disciplina voluntatis and at the same time does away with boredom..." The Gay Science, Paris 1982, p. 251.

"The subtlest and most active animals are alone capable of boredom.-- It would indeed be an idea for a great poet to treat God's boredom on the seventh day of creation," Human, All-Too-Human [Humain, trop Humain II, Paris, 1968, p. 260.]

Ecce Homo, op. cit., p. 273.

Ecce Homo, op. cit., p. 320.

Ecce Homo, op.cit., pp.324-325.

For a history of this passage, see Montinari, "Eine neur Abscnitt in Nietzsches Ecce Homo", in Nietzsche Lesen, Berlin, 1982, pp. 120-168. Nietzsche's sister wrote in her biography of her brother: "In that period, he wrote a few pages where, in strange fantasies, there is a mixture of the legend of Dionysos-Zagreus, the passion of the Gospels and their closest contemporaries: the god torn asunder by his foes roams, revived, on the banks of the Po, and then sees everything he as ever loved, his ideals, the ideals of the present time in general, far beneath him..." quoted in Oeuvres philosophiques complŠtes VIII, p. 516. I would also mention that, for Nietzsche, the Po is associated with the foundation of the Roman templum: " It has been recognized that in the representation of nature by Italians, who divided nature up mathematically, could only have come about in the plains, probably in the Po plains; the whole region was presented as a single, huge templum, bounded by the Po as decumanus maximus, and by its Alpine and Apennine tributaries as cardines. This where the elements of geometric representation took root, which travellers had brought back from the East. This is where a sublime system saw the light of day", Le service divin des Grecs , Paris, 1992, translation by Emmanuel Cattin, p. 64.

Ecce Homo, op.cit., p. 341.

Gustave Flaubert, Le Dictionnaire des id‚es re‡ues.

Gilles Deleuze, Diff‚rence et r‚p‚tition, Paris, PUF, 1968, p. 196.

Gustave Flaubert, Bouvard et P‚cuchet, edited by Claudine Gothot-Marsch, Gallimard/Folio, 1979, Sc‚nario Ms gg 10 fo 67 r 9.

Id. Scenario Ms gg fo 32 r.

Ibid, p. 319.

"The image must cease to be secondary in relation to a claimed prime object and must lay claim to a certain primacy, just like the original, then the origin will lose their privileges of initial powers... There is no original any more, but an everlasting sparkle where the absence of origin is dispersed, in the burst of detour and return." Maurice Blanchot, "Le rire des dieux", NRF, July 1965.

Gilles Deleuze, op. cit., p. 198.

Idem, p. 197.

This term should be understood as close to its etymology as possible. Formidare means to fear, dread. Formidable means considerable and frightening.

Letter to Bouilhet in 1855: "Shit rises into my mouth;, I'd like to make a pƒt‚ of it, with which I'll smear the 19th century".

Letter to George Sand in 1875.

"One nearly always dies not knowing one's own name".

F.W. Schelling, Essays, Paris, Aubier, 1946, p. 257 and pp. 265-267.

Gustave Flaubert, Bouvard et P‚cuchet, ‚dition Claudine-Gothot-Mersch, Folio/Gallimard, Paris, 1979.

Jean-Luc Godard, Entretiens avec No‰l Simsolo, France-Culture, 1998.

Michel Mompontet, interview with Pascal Convert, capc Mus‚e de Bordeaux, 1997.

On the concept of experience, read Claude Romano, L'‚vŠnement et le monde, PUF, Paris, 1998.

Gilles Deleuze, Image-Temps, Minuit, Paris, 1985, p. 223.

Translated from the French by Simon Pleasance & Fronza Woods.

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