best. sentence. ever.

this weekend i began, with frightfully limited success, the process of researching my most imminent term paper. in mundane terms, the goal is offer thoughtful, analytic readings of Sans soleil and 2046. given a more poetic tenor, however, one might say i was triangulating the distance between the psyches of two men:

Chris Marker

Wong Kar-wai

and so i began my research at the beach with a satchel full of books, two bottles of water, and not enough sunscreen. the tops of my feet will attest to this fact, but this is beside the point.

the point is that my reading led me to what may be the greatest, most convoluted sentence ever written in French and then translated into English. its length and punctuation alone are enough to make Gabriel Marquez tremble in envy, and i read it time and again, wondering what it would sound like in its native tongue. in an attempt simultaneously reject and reinforce further mystification,
i have annotated key terms:

"At the end of a society's historical enterprise to no longer recognize that it has any but a utilitarian function, and given the individual's anxiety faced with the concentration-camp form of the social link whose appearance seems to crown this effort, existentialism can be judged on the basis of the justifications it provides for the subjective impasses that do, indeed, result therefrom: a freedom that is never so authentically affirmed as when it is within the walls of a prison; a demand for commitment that expresses the inability of pure consciousness to overcome any situation; a voyeuristic-sadistic idealization of sexual relationships; a personality that achieves self-realization only in suicide; and a consciousness of the other that can only be satisfied by Hegelian murder."

- Jacques Lacan

from "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function"