‘black painting’ – Ad Reinhardt

Today, life is fast. It vaporizes morals. Futility suits the postmodern, for words as well as things. Bur that doesn’t keep us from asking questions: how to live, and why? You’re not done living because you chalk it up to artifice.

Jean-François Lyotard

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Nihilism no longer wears the dark, Wagnerian, Spenglerian, fuliginous colours of the end of the century. It no longer comes from a weltanschauung of decadence nor from a metaphysical radically born of the death of God and of all the consequences that must be taken from this death. Today’s nihilism is one of transparency, and it is in some sense more radical, more crucial than in its prior and historical forms, because this transparency, this irresolution is indissolubly that of the system, and that of all the theory that still pretends to analyse it.

Jean Baudrillard

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The dissolution of being is a tragic dissolution; and driven by a grievous nostalgia every person keeps asking the other to be something he can no longer be, and to find the weight of being, like a blinded phantom, that he himself can no longer find. The resistance, the permanence; the depth. In the end, we all come away empty-handed, and the loneliness is terrible.

Michel Houellebecq