If the celebrity inherited the privilege of acting as a zone of indistinction between law and violence (0.10, 1.17, 1.18, 3.2), its most recent incarnation, encouraged by mass media, crystallizes yet another indistinction which was latent since the Regency. Its basic formula is found in the figure of Beau Brummell, whose manners, according to Barbey d’Aurevilly, were nothing but “the fusion of the movements of body and spirit” (2.6). As an individual the celebrity configures itself as a zone of indistinction between the inside and the outside of the world.

This new indistinction originates in a circumstance we have already examined, namely, that the person of the sovereign and of the celebrity merges the public and the private; the images of the outside and the inside on the social level. The traditional function of genealogy, to legitimize by transferring from the private to the public sphere (1.12)—which during the 19th century was assumed by the fashionable novels—is now achieved through mass media. It is fashion magazines and showbiz programs that keep the genealogies of the modern world, chronicles that often become true mythologies which blur the boundaries between the real and the fictitious in the minds of the public (2.2).