Exhibition value, which signals the fulfillment of capitalism, cannot be derived from the Marxian opposition between use value and exchange value.

Instead of affirming that “transparency creates trust,” one should instead say, “transparency dismantles trust.” The demand for transparency grows loud precisely when trust no longer prevails.

If culture consisted of particular figures, miens, gestures, narratives, and actions, then the pornographication of the visual today would take place as deculturalization. Pornographic, deculturalized images offer nothing to read. They function like advertisements—by direct, tactile, and infectious means. They are posthermeneutic.

Strident calls for transparency point to the simple fact that the moral foundation of society has grown faulty, that moral values such as honesty and uprightness are losing their meaning more and more.

Negativity implemented through separation (secret, secretus), fencing-off, and isolation constitutes cult value. In the society of positivity, things become commodities; they must be displayed in order to be; cult value disappears in favor of exhibition value.

Transparency and truth are not identical. Truth is a negative force insofar as it presents and asserts itself by declaring all else false.

it is emphatically invoked in connection with the freedom of information. The omnipresent demand for transparency, which has reached the point of fetishism and totalization, goes back to a paradigm shift that cannot be restricted to the realm of politics and economics.

The Spirit is slow because it tarries with the negative and works through it. The system of transparency abolishes all negativity in order to accelerate itself. Tarrying with the negative has given way to racing and raving in the positive.

The punctum interrupts the continuum of information. It expresses itself as a rift, a fracture. It constitutes a site of utmost intensity and density, inhabited by something indefinable. It lacks all transparency,