/lit/ - Literature

>Again, in this symbolic short-circuit, the gift-exchange is the challenge to oneself and one's own life, and is carried out through death. Not because it expresses the individual's asocial rebellion (the defection of one or millions of individuals does not infringe the law of the system at all), but because it carries in it a principle of sociality that is radically antagonistic to our own social repressive principle. To bury death beneath the contrary myth of security, it is necessary to exhaust the gift-exchange.

>Is it so that men might live that the demand for death must be exhausted? No, but in order that they die the only death the system authorises: the living are separated from their dead, who no longer exchange anything but the form of their afterlife, under the sign of comprehensive insurance. Thus car safety: mummified in his helmet, his seatbelt, all the paraphernalia of security, wrapped up in the security myth, the driver is nothing but a corpse, closed up in another, non-mythic, death, as neutral and objective as technology, noiseless and expertly crafted. Riveted to his machine, glued to the spot in it, he no longer runs the risk of dying, since he is already dead. This is the secret of security, like a steak under cellophane: to surround you with a sarcophagus in order to prevent you from dying.

>Our whole technical culture creates an artificial milieu of death. It is not only armaments that remain the general archetype of material production , but the simplest machine around us constitutes a horizon of death, a death that will never be resolved because it has crystallised beyond reach.

>Living by the production of death, capital has an easy time producing security: it's the same thing. Security is the industrial prolongation of death, just as ecology is the industrial prolongation of pollution.

-- JB/SE&D