Parody: Parody, at its origin, is a religious musical genre. We might as well say, it is very possible that the contemporary triumph, not of the simulacrum, but of irony, is the sign of a purification of religion: of cult. Sexual compulsion itself has the structure of a celebration of the sole trait of immanent immortality that marks our body: biological reproduction. For this entirely rational and lucid reason, the sexual affect is the heart of all the anthropoid affects. The rest is metaphysical small talk, in other words, rash maximization of the pleonectic drive whose libidinal manipulation is, for man, the essence, and especially for a philosopher, even and especially communist. As we saw in the section on Desire (see above), for us sexual jouissance is a paradigm of “our” own pleonexia, and more essentially than alimentary necessity. This is because, unlike most other mammals, we can pervert this jouissance by all the convolutions of possible technological repetitions. When the professional metaphysician tells that his functionary work has nothing to do with jouissance, he admits that in reality he only ever deals with jouissance: his own, his singular pleonectic delirium raised to “the universal,” without seeking the opinion of the future concerned (“entire humanity” he considers from his desk).
In the SoN, the word “aesthetic,” for instance, should not be understood in the weak sense of a philosophical examination of art. It must be understood in the strong sense: a theory of affect. I am going to say something completely outrageous for which most of the metaphysical functionaries are not going to forgive me: orgy, debauchery, depravity, pornography are not bad but rather good things. They are a lesser evil, and there is good reason to prescribe making love, instead of war. Why? Because, originarily, all our sexuality has a parodic, in other words, commemorative, in other words, ritualistic and religious, structure. Religions themselves, if humanity does not self-destroy itself before that, will eventually understand and fade away by themselves: the “religions” called “nihilist” like sports, games, and technicized lechery, are in their essence more religious than religion. Religion will sooner or later have to confess the void that inhabits it since the very beginning: and the last priest’s head will fall, when it admits that the empty parodies that humanity gives itself hold better than the “full” parodies of religion, in all its variations. Parody, in its “democratic-nihilistic” form itself, is a participative form of ritual. The Baudelaire of this “nihilism,” Jean-Jacques Schuhl, illustrates this fact in his description of a Pink Floyd concert: “English bands are, first and foremost, bands. They are musicians only secondarily. Music serves as a pretext to do things together, and to say things together.”1
The mimesis of the Inexistent is play. Play is essentially religious, whereas religion is not essentially ludic. This is why the one will eventually disappear, in favor of the globalization of the other.
Aesthetics is the regime whereby the technomimetic animal organizes its affects collectively. We saw that play (see above) was the inevitable form of a humanity getting rid of all supersensible recourses. Because man is originarily parodic being [l’être], he has yet to put behind him the metaphysical binarities which expropriate him from this parodic jouissance, maximizing the binarities produced by the event of appropriation (sensible/intelligible, immanence/transcendence, fallen world/higher world, finite/infinite, etc.). The becoming-play of humanity is a reappropriative becoming, in a very precise sense defined in the passage devoted to the question (see above).
Our whole being [tout notre être], for better or for worse, is marked by the seal of parody. And all our affects are, through and through, parodic: this is what the thought of catharsis became aware of, early in the philosophical “rise.” Because we are the originarily parodic beings [êtres], our own avatars, we are yet to reappropriate our own doubles, which are our sole originals, expropriated by the metaphysical spirit of seriousness. Because we will give ourselves the possibility of this reappropriation, we know already that there never was an age of the “spectacle,” the “simulacrum,” the “postmodern,” nor even and especially not of “nihilism.” Never did we cease to be the imitators of Nothing. To play is to know this.
Yes, art has long been alienated, because it was subjected to great metaphysical, i.e. representational binarities. Only play is the non-representational art dreamed by all the twentieth-century avant-gardes, who finally ended up running into the most originary of all art forms themselves, coinciding with the profoundest mimetic impulse to ever inhabit the human animal: the ludic impulse. Because play is art that is finally accomplished and destined to every human being without exception, and even—who knows?—to animals, it is the only livable political world that humanity can make, if there remains for him any chance of survival.
Provided that we add the following: play is also the art that is as least representational as possible. It is not at all non-representational. Every epistemological, political or aesthetic claim to abolish Representation (see below) leads only to disaster—and technological, political, and artistic disasters always communicate, at some point, around a common claim to having abolished all representation. Play will be the minimally representational art, for being the paradoxical assumption of the indelible anthropological fact that is mimesis, in other words, representation.