The desiring assemblage always emits ironic enunciations, the bridge
over which one can walk only if one shares an intensity.
It is said that in the period of the First World War, in a bar in Zurich,
Vladimir Illich Lenin and Tristan Tzara met, without ever having asso-
ciated before.
The language of Lenin tried to create the world with the strength of
the will, of law, of power.
Tzara used language as irony, as the creation of worlds in which will,
law and power were suspended.
If they had understood each other, the twentieth century would
have been lighter. If they had been friends, they would have under-
taken the construction of small crafts able to navigate on the ocean of
chaos: rafts for all the exiles who travelled away from the arid and
warlike lands of late-modern capitalism.140 Thought, Friendship and Visionary Cartography9780230_221192_13_cha12.pdf 10/3/08 11:36 AM Page 140