It is no longer the age of cruelty or the age of terror, but the age of cynicism, accompanied by a strange piety. (The two taken together constitute humanism: cynicism is the physical immanence of the social field, and piety is the maintenance of a spiritualized Urstaat; cynicism is capital as the means of extorting surplus labour, but piety is this same capital as God-capital, whence all the forces of labour seem to emanate.) This age of cynicism is that of the accumulation of capital--an age that implies a period of time, precisely for the conjunction of all the decoded and deterritorialized flows. [AO: 225]