After the best book, the most beautiful woman, or the finest desert you've ever seen, you tell yourself this is where the rest of your life begins.

In fact, something else happens: another book, another woman, another desert. And the rest of your life becomes life itself. It was merely the illusion of the end.

The only solution to the drugs problem is to make drugs a universal medium of exchange, the new general equivalent. That way, they would no longer be consumed. Shifting from use-value to exchange-value, they would become as abstract as gold or paper. You could store several thousand tons of drugs as international reserve funds, the way they do with gold at Fort Knox. For Gold Exchange Standard, read: Narcotic Exchange Standard.

Who are you then, J.B., you who speak of simulacra, but a simulacrum yourself?

Answer: it is because I exist that I can advance the hypothesis of the universal simulacrum and simulation. You who are already unreal cannot envisage the unreality of things. You who are merely the shadows of yourself cannot advance the hypothesis of transparency.

Storage of pleasure [jouissance] in the speculative circuits of capital (the Stock Exchange). Just as energy is stored in superconductors, with a view to recovering it one day. But isn't this, rather, a way of getting rid of it? The storage of pleasure is the pleasure of storage.

But from what point does one intervene in one's own dreams, from the inside, without waking? And from what point does one intervene in reality, from the inside, though without believing in it?

I found her so beautiful in black only because I dreamt of her dead. In fact, it was because I dreamt of her as a widow. What I was in love with in her was the allegory of my own death. But I possessed that allegory physically--which is an original form of the work of mourning.

The funniest thing, all the same, is this 'probably'. The scientific community 'asserts' that something has probably never existed! It is difficult to be more objective.

I have dreamt of a force-five conceptual storm blowing over the devastated real.

The points-based driving license is an excellent formula. But it is scandalous that this outstanding idea should apply only to behaviour on the roads. It ought to be extended to the whole of existence with the creation of an existential licence along these same lines. For every offence against the moral legislation on behaviour, you would be docked existence points. When you had used up all your points, your licence would be withdrawn. In this way, the highways and byways of existence would be safer and, moreover, less crowded, once all those who did not know how to behave were removed. And they would not, in fact, then have any occasion to behave well or badly any more since, by definition, unlike what happens with the driving licence, the withdrawal of the living licence would be a definitive act [...]

Europe--the very archetype of the contemporary event: a vacuum-packed phantasmagoria. It will have taken place neither in heads nor in dreams, nor in anyone's natural inspiration, but in the somnambulistic space of the political will, of dossiers and speeches, of calculations and conferences--and in the artificial synthesis of opinion that is universal suffrage severely orientated and controlled as a function of the cunning idealism of leaders and experts.

It is a bit like the simulation, deep in the desert, of the Capricorn One expedition to Mars: Europe as virtual reality, to be slipped into like a datasuit. This, perhaps, is the perfection of democracy