#the system of objects

Objects allow us to apply the work of mourning to ourselves right now, in everyday life, and this in turn allows us to live - to live regressively, no doubt, but at least to live. A person who collects is dead, but he literally survives himself through his collection, which (even while he lives) duplicates him infinitely, beyond death, by integrating death itself into the series, into the cycle.

There is a moral to be drawn from the following little tale. We are in the eighteenth century. An illusionist well versed in clockwork has devised an automaton. An automaton so perfect, with movements so fluid and natural, that when the illusionist and his creation appear on the stage together, the audience cannot tell which is which. The illusionist then finds himself obliged to make his own gestures mechanical, and – in what is really the pinnacle of his art – to alter his own appearance slightly so as to give his show its full meaning; the spectators would eventually chafe if they were left in doubt as to which of the two figures was “real”, and the neatest solution is that they should take the man for the machine, and vice versa.

The very will to live, fragmented, disappointed, signified, is condemned to repeat itself and repeatedly abolish itself in a succession of objects.

The systematic and limitless process of consumption arises from the disappointed demand for totality that underlies the project of life [...] Consumption is irrepressible, in the last reckoning, because it is founded upon a lack.