By agreeing to appear on television shows without worrying about whether you’ll be able to say anything, you make it very clear that you’re not there to say anything at all but for, altogether different reasons, chief among them the desire to be seen.
Berkeley said “to be is to be perceived.” For some of our thinkers (and our writers), to be is to be perceived on television, which means, when all is said and done, to be perceived by journalists, to be, as the saying goes, on their “good side”, with all the compromises and concessions that implies.
This means churning out regularly and as often as possible works whose principal function, as Gilles Deleuze used to say, is to get them on television. So the television screen today becomes a sort of mirror for Narcissus, a space for narcissistic exhibitionism.
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