manipulation (it is no longer of the order of directive power and of the gaze, but of the
order of tactility and commutation). See also the state/family circularity assured by the
fluctuation and metastatic regulation of the images of the social and the private (J.
Donzelot, La police des/amilles [The policing of families]).
Impossible now to pose the famous question: "From what position do you speak?" -
"How do you know?" "From where do you get your power?" without hearing the
immediate response: "But it is of you (from you) that I speak" - meaning, it is you who
are speaking, you who know, you who are the power. Gigantic circumvolution,
circumlocution of the spoken word, which is equal to a blackmail with no end, to a
deterrence that cannot be appealed of the subject presumed to speak, leaving him without
a reply, because to the question that he poses one ineluctably replies: but you are the
answer, or: your question is already an answer, etc. - the whole strangulatory
sophistication of intercepting speech, of the forced confession in the guise of freedom of
expression, of trapping the subject in his own interrogation, of the precession of the reply
to the question (all the violence of interpretation lies there, as well as that of the
conscious or unconscious management of the "spoken word" [parole]).
This simulacrum of the inversion or the involution of poles, this clever subterfuge, which
is the secret of the whole discourse of manipulation and thus, today, in every domain, the
secret of any new power in the erasure of the scene of power, in the assumption of all
words from which has resulted this fantastic silent majority characteristic of our time - all
of this started without a doubt in the political sphere with the democractic simulacrum,
which today is the substitution for the power of God with the power of the people as the
source of power, and of power as emanation with power as representation. Anti-
Copernican revolution: no transcendental instance either of the sun or of the luminous
sources of power and knowledge - everything comes from the people and everything
returns to them. It is with this magnificent recycling that the universal simulacrum of
manipulation, from the scenario of mass suffrage to the present-day phantoms of opinion
polls, begins to be put in place.
8. PPEP is an acronym for smallest possible gap, or "plus petit écart possible."-TRANS.
9. Paradox: all bombs are clean: their only pollution is the system of security and of
control they radiate as long as they don't explode.

acceleration. They are this excrescent, devouring, process that annihilates all growth and
all surplus meaning. They are this circuit short-circuited by a monstrous finality.
It is this point of inertia and what happens outside this point of inertia that today is
fascinating, enthralling (gone, therefore, the discreet charm of the dialectic). If it is
nihilistic to privilege this point of inertia and the analysis of this irreversibility of systems
up to the point of no return, then I am a nihilist.
If it is nihilistic to be obsessed by the mode of disappearance, and no longer by the mode
of production, then I am a nihilist. Disappearance, aphanisis, implosion, Fury of
Verschwindens. Transpolitics is the elective sphere of the mode of disappearance (of the
real, of meaning, of the stage, of history, of the social, of the individual). To tell the truth,
it is no longer so much a question of nihilism: in disappearance, in the desertlike,
aleatory, and indifferent form, there is no longer even pathos, the pathetic of nihilism -
that mythical energy that is still the force of nihilism, of radicality, mythic denial,
dramatic anticipation. It is no longer even disenchantment, with the seductive and
nostalgic, itself enchanted, tonality of disenchantment. It is simply disappearance.
The trace of this radicality of the mode of disappearance is already found in Adorno and
Benjamin, parallel to a nostalgic exercise of the dialectic. Because there is a nostalgia of
the dialectic, and without a doubt the most subtle dialectic is nostalgic to begin with. But
more deeply, there is in Benjamin and Adorno another tonality, that of a melancholy
attached to the system itself, one that is incurable and beyond any dialectic. It is this
melancholia of systems that today takes the upper hand through the ironically transparent
forms that surround us. It is this melancholia that is becoming our fundamental passion.
It is no longer the spleen or the vague yearnings of the fin-de-siecle soul. It is no longer
nihilism either, which in some sense aims at normalizing everything through destruction,
the passion of resentment (ressentiment).*2 No, melancholia is the fundamental tonality
of functional systems, of current systems of simulation, of programming and information.
Melancholia is the inherent quality of the mode of the disappearance of meaning, of the
mode of the volatilization of meaning in operational systems. And we are all
melancholic.
Melancholia is the brutal disaffection that characterizes our saturated systems. Once the
hope of balancing good and evil, true and false, indeed of confronting some values of the
same order, once the more general hope of a relation of forces and a stake has vanished.
Everywhere, always, the system is too strong: hegemonic.
Against this hegemony of the system, one can exalt the ruses of desire, practice
revolutionary micrology of the quotidian, exalt the molecular drift or even defend
cooking. This does not resolve the imperious necessity of checking the system in broad
daylight.
This, only terrorism can do.
It is the trait of reversion that effaces the remainder, just as a single ironic smile effaces a
whole discourse, just as a single flash of denial in a slave effaces all the power and