User:DionysosProteus/Sandbox

Jean Genet's 1957 masterpiece The Balcony dramatises simulacra as mimetic enactments of fantasy in a brothel, aligned with acting, roleplaying, and, by means of (premature) burial ritual, power, Death and eternity in the form of an undead ideological image.^[1]

Wikipedia hits in November 2008

^ In its scene set in a studio made to resemble a funeral parlour, the Envoy philosophises from the threat of a successful revolution: "If, as it would seem, we are all moving towards death, we actually go even further. I mean that our reason offers us, the living, the image of what we shall be in death; that is, in men's consciousnesses. We have only one preoccupation: that of suggesting a definitive statue to posterity, whether it be absurd or familiar, tender or severe, lovable or brutal, but one that should be perpetually impressive: eternal. Alas, our living eyes will never succeed in seeing ourselves in real death, nor our dead eyes in seeing ourselves in future consciousness, so we have therefore invented and perfected the elegant feat of fixing ourselves in life according to eternal attitudes." Wright and Hands (1991, 63). See also Wright and Hands (1991, 67-68).