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p18 (The world of wrestling)

We are therefore dealing with a real Human Comedy, where the most socially-inspired nuances of passion (conceit, rightfulness, refined cruelty, a sense of `paying one's debts') always felicitously find the clearest sign which can receive them, express them and triumphantly carry them to the confines of the hall.  It is obvious that at such a pitch, it no longer matters whether the passion is genuine or not.  What the public wants is the image of passion, not passion itself.  There is no more a problem of truth in wrestling than in the theatre.  In both, what is expected is the intelligible representation of moral situations which are usually private.  This emptying out of interiority to the benefit of its exterior signs, this exhaustion of the content by the form, is the very principle of triumphant classical art.  Wrestling is an immediate pantomime, infinitely more efficient than the dramatic pantomime, for the wrestler's gesture needs no anecdote, no decor, in short no transference in order to appear true.


p25

In wrestling, nothing exists except in the absolute, there is no symbol, no allusion, everything is presented exhaustively.  Leaving nothing in the shade, each action discards all parasitic meanings and ceremonially offers to the public a pure and full signification, rounded like Nature.  This grandiloquence is nothing but the popular and age-old image of the perfect intelligibility of reality.  What is portrayed by wrestling is therefore an ideal understanding of things; it is the euphoria of men raised for a while above the constitutive ambiguity of everyday situations and placed before the panoramic view of a univocal Nature, in which signs at last correspond to causes, without obstacle, without evasion, without contradiction.


p34 (Blind and dumb criticism)

All this means in fact that one believes oneself to have such sureness of intelligence that acknowledging an inability to understand calls in question the clarity of the author and not that of one's own mind.  One mimics silliness in order to make the public protest in one's favour, and thus carry it along advantageously from complicity in helplessness to complicity in intelligence.  It is an operation well known to salons like Madame Verdurin's: `I whose profession it is to be intelligent, understand nothing about it; now you wouldn't understand anything about it either; therefore, it can only be that you are as intelligent as I am.'


p35

But if one fears or despises so much the philosophical foundations of a book, and if one demands so insistently the right to understand nothing about them and to say nothing on the subject, why become a critic?  To understand, to enlighten, that is your profession, isn't it?  You can of course judge philosophy according to common sense; the trouble is that while `common sense' and `feeling' understand nothing about philosophy, philosophy, on the other hand, understands them perfectly.  You don't explain philosophers, but \emph{they} explain you.  You don't want to understand the play by Lefebvre and Marxist, but you can be sure that Lefebvre the Marxist understands your incomprehension perfectly well, and above all (for I believe you to be more wily than lacking in culture) the delightfully `harmless' confession you make of it.


p39  (The poor and the proletariat)

But it is precisely because Chaplin portrays a kind of primitive proletarian, still outside Revolution, that the representative force of the latter is immense.  No socialist work has yet succeeded in expressing the humiliated condition of the worker with so much violence and generosity.  Brecht alone, perhaps, has glimpsed the necessity, for socialist art, of always taking Man on the eve of Revolution, that is to say, alone, still blind, on the point of having his eyes opened to the revolutionary light by the `natural' excess of his wretchedness.  Other works, in showing the worker already engaged in a conscious fight, subsumed under the Cause and the Party, give an account of a political reality which is necessary, but lacks aesthetic force.