“Simulacra are today accepted everywhere in their realist version: simulacra exist, simulation exists. It is the intellectual and fashionable version of this vulgarization which is the worst: all is sign, signs have abolished reality, etc. Who would have thought ten years ago that the sign would so quickly have become part of this kind of stereotyped language? Like 'proletariat', 'dialectics' and 'the unconscious'. These terms won't even have made it to the year 2000.

The Tempest acted by mongols before an ultra-chic audience of ministers and stars. Kennedy Foundation. All the Shakespearian mongols will be received tomorrow by the Pope. A society's flirtation with its worst dregs. Who are the mongols right now?”