Amour / Mort

"Nowadays it's a cliche that the multi national governments through their media are determining the political and other perceptions of their citizens. Worse: 'Just as the overwhelming power of high capitalism forms myths that tower above the collective consciousness, in the same way the mythic region in which the modern consciousness seeks refuge bears the marks of that capitalism: what subjectively was the dream of dreams is objectively a nightmare. To that extent it can be asserted that the inauthentic aspect of that iconic world, namely the distortion of the myths at the hands of later generations who discover themselves and mirror themselves in them, is also its truth. Confronted with an exorbitant unapproachable world of things that casts its alien shadow over him, the individual feels an affinity with the world of myth. What he shares with it is the gesture of falling silent' (1). Not only the inability but also the refusal to believe in or speak the truth - the recourse to myth which turns a theatrical or communicatory gesture into opera - is a phenomenon of the world in which there is cause to fear everything. In this world called 'fear' the middle-class who are now the poverty stricken, dream of their own destruction and at the same time of something else, something or somewhere called 'primitive', a world which is above all non-existent, the world of myths. In this world, only a night of love, of that physical passion which is beyond the emotions manipulated and created by capitalistic society, is the knight, the night to the lives of fear we know, the bearer oblivion to all we hate."

Kathy Acker, 'Opera: The Actual Working of Terror and Ecstacy'

(1) Theodore Adorno 'In Search of Wagner'