It is this melancholia that is becoming our fundamental passion.
It is no longer the spleen or the vague yearnings of the fin-de-siecle soul.
It is no longer nihilism either, which in some sense aims at normalizing everything through destruction, the passion of resentment.
No, melancholia is the fundamental tonality of functional systems, of current systems of simulation, of programming and information.
Melancholia is the inherent quality of the mode of the disappearance of meaning, of the mode of the volatilization of meaning in operational systems.
And we are all melancholic.
Melancholia is the brutal disaffection that characterizes our saturated systems. Once the hope of balancing good and evil, true and false, indeed of confronting some values of the same order, once the more general hope of a relation of forces and a stake has vanished.
Everywhere, always, the system is too strong: