Cities are distinguished by the catastrophic forms they presuppose and which are a vital part of their essential charm. New York is King Kong, or the blackout, or vertical bombardment: Towering Inferno. Los Angeles is the horizontal fault, California breaking off and sliding into the Pacific: Earthquake.

You are born modern, you do not become so.

One can speak of an alterity of desire - a paradigm defined outside the tired, tacitly accepted regime, but one comes up short when attempting to posit a framework of desire beyond available, known desires.

This false distance is present everywhere: in spy films, in Godard, in modern advertising, which uses it continually as a cultural allusion. It is not really clear in the end whether this 'cool' smile is the smile of humour or that of commercial complicity. This is also the case with pop, and its smile ultimately encapsulates all its ambiguity: it is not the smile of critical distance, but the smile of collusion

The world is not dialectical - it is sworn to extremes, not to equilibrium, sworn to radical antagonism, not to reconciliation or synthesis. This is also the principle of evil.

The sickly cultural pathos which the whole of France indulges in, that fetishism of the cultural heritage.

Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real.