The concentration camps, by making death itself anonymous (making it impossible to find out whether a prisoner is dead or alive), ...robbed death of its meaning as the end of a fulfilled life. In a sense they took away the individual's own death, proving that henceforth nothing belonged to him and he belonged to no one. His death merely set a seal on the fact that he had never existed.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Neither dead nor alive, the hostage is suspended by an incalculable outcome. It is not his destiny that awaits for him, nor his ow...n death, but anonymous chance, which can only seem to him something absolutely arbitrary.... He is in a state of radical emergency, of virtual extermination.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In our world of big names, curiously, our true heroes tend to be anonymous. In this life of illusion and quasi-illusion, the perso...n of solid virtues who can be admired for something more substantial than his well-knownness often proves to be the unsung hero: the teacher, the nurse, the mother, the honest cop, the hard worker at lonely, underpaid, unglamorous, unpublicized jobs.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What culture lacks is the taste for anonymous, innumerable germination. Culture is smitten with counting and measuring; it feels o...ut of place and uncomfortable with the innumerable; its efforts tend, on the contrary, to limit the numbers in all domains; it tries to count on its fingers.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Films are seen in large, silent, darkened theaters, where intense light beams are projected from behind toward luminous surfaces i...n front. There is an enforced and anonymous collectivity of the audience because, for any screening, all viewers are physically present at the same time in the relatively enclosed space of the theater. In contrast to this cocoon-like, enveloping situation is the fragmentary, dispersed, and varied nature of television reception. The darkness is dissolved, the anonymity removed.... While the aura of cinema spectatorship produces hypnotic fascination, the atmosphere of television enables just the opposite--because the lights are more likely to be on, one can get up and return, do several things at once, watch casually, talk to other people, or even decide to turn the television off.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Public opinion, a vulgar, impertinent, anonymous tyrant who deliberately makes life unpleasant for anyone who is not content to be... the average man.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Popular art is dominated throughout by the star system, not only in its actors but in all its elements, whatever the medium. Every... work of art, to be sure, has its dominant elements, to which the rest are subordinate. But in popular art it is the dominant ones alone that are the objects of interest, the ground of its satisfaction. By contrast, great art is in this sense pointless; everything in it is significant, everything makes its own contribution to the aesthetic substance. The domain of popular art is, paradoxically, an aristocracy, as it were: some few elements are singled out as the carriers of whatever meaning the work has while the rest are submerged into an anonymous mass. The life of the country is reduced to the mannered gestures of its king. It is this that gives the effect of simplification and standardization.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
L.A. is the ultimate anonymous city: except when you choose not to be, you are generally alone. New Yorkers are never alone. It's ...surprising that street crime happens here at all, since muggings and rapes require solitude for the proper intimacy between criminal and victim, and in New York you have to go looking for a genuinely deserted block of street. Furthermore, whereas at night it can get dark in some parts of L.A., New Yorkers are never without light, at least the artificial kind.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Most people aren't appreciated enough, and the bravest things we do in our lives are usually known only to ourselves. No one throw...s ticker tape on the man who chose to be faithful to his wife, on the lawyer who didn't take the drug money, or the daughter who held her tongue again and again. All this anonymous heroism.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Gay men are guardians of the masculine impulse. To have anonymous sex in a dark alleyway is to pay homage to the dream of male fre...edom. The unknown stranger is a wandering pagan god. The altar, as in prehistory, is anywhere you kneel.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »