Selected translations

Lionel Ruffel, Forever Decameron (2020)

“It is needless to say that death awaits. Still, there is something else that is even more frightening: uncontrollable flows of information. A virus like the plague—at the risk of an obvious anachronism—appears to be nothing more than a spreading flow of information. It causes mutations and transforms human bodies by enlarging them with boils, blotches, and animal or vegetal characteristics. The plague destroys each individual’s humanity, just as it destroys each social group’s ties and attachments. Everything becomes contaminated upon contact with the sick. The disease not only attacks bodies in good health—which, of course, is classic—but it also has an effect on clothes, which it transforms into nodes of connection.”

Lionel Ruffel, A Dangerous Book (2018)

“The book is simultaneously material and immaterial; its two-sided nature is the same as that of capitalism, which invests objects with magical qualities by fetishizing them. But thanks to the idea of authority, the book occupies a position at the very top of the hierarchy of merchandise. The book constitutes a separate universe, one that is entirely distinct from action, one without an exterior, its own island of intensity.”