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Jean Baudrillard

Jean Baudrillard Quotes

Philosopher

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Famous Jean Baudrillard Quotes

“How can he describe such abominations ? And how come he doesn't collapse under the weight of the abominations he describes?' Well it takes exceptional fortitude - or, alternatively, a special form of cowardice. At all events, you have to be abominable to come to terms with abomination. A kind of moral law, of terroristic superstition, denies you the right to speak of anything whatsoever if you are not involved in it. [...]. Either 'You are in cahoots with the object you speak of' or 'You don't know what you are talking about. In fact, speaking of something and being part of it are two quite different things. The finest example is death: you have to be alive to talk about it. But this is true of anything - of politics, economics, art. You have to be a stranger to something to speak about it in a strange – that is to say, original – way.[...] In fact, you have absolutely to collude in what you are speaking about and at the same time to be somewhere else altogether. You have to love it and hate it. You have to be the thing you speak of and to be violently against it. This is the law of hospitality, and it is the law of hostility.”

Abomination
Book:Fragments
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“Challenger and Chernobyl: the only felicitous accidents, like a freeze-frame of the system. In the same way as a photo arrests movement and restores the unforgettable character that it had lost, the Challenger explosion has revived our imagination where space is concerned. The photos of Challenger were only so beautiful because they fixed in our minds the secret destination of the adventure of space travel, whereas its speed only gives us the apparent movement.”

ChernobylChallengerInsustainabilitySpace Program Decay
Book:Cool memories
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“The more intense this hegemonic process of forced integration and integral reality is, the more singularities will rise against it. There will be more "rogue states" - states (like Iran, Palestine) that deliberately exclude themselves from the international community without waiting to be excluded, that exclude themselves from the universal and play their own game, at their own risk and peril. There will be more "rogue events" and more refusal of society by individuals. One could say, inverting Holderlin, that "Where Good grows, there grows the Genie of Evil," ("Da, wo des Gute wiichst, wiichst auch der Genius des Bosen"). This more or less clandestine insurrection of antagonistic forces against the integrist violence of the system is less an effect of the mind, the will or even the desire of human beings than the evil genius of the world itself in refusing globalization. To find the only adversary who will face this allpowerful hegemony, we must look for those beings that are strangers to will, exiled from dialogue and representation, exiled from knowledge and history.”

IranSyriaIsisSimulationBlmMaga
Book:The Agony of Power
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“The tendency of the whole of contemporary culture to become healthy and virtuous again, to recover its intellectual morality, to revive a pedagogic approach to science, history and democracy. The breach opened up by the years 1960-80 is closing; everyone is gearing up for a high-efficiency perspective which is merely an abreactive defence against the imminence of the year 2000. The long period of blackmail by threat of crisis has begun - intellectually too. Back, back to the middle ground, an end to centrifugal passions. What we had dismantled and destroyed in joy, we are rebuilding in sorrow.”

CultureCrisis1968
Book:Cool memories
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“We are merely epigones. The events, the discoveries, the visions are those from the period between 1910 and 1940. We live on like weary commentators on that frenzied period in which the whole invention of modernity (and the lucid presentiment of its end) occurred in a language which still bore the brilliance of style. The highest level of intensity lies behind us. The lowest level of passion and intellectual illumination lies ahead of us. There is something like a general entropic movement in the century, the initial energy dissipating slowly in the sophisticated ramifications of the structural, pictural, ideological, linguistic and psychoanalytic revolutions - the final configuration, that of 'postmodernity' marking the most degraded, most factitious and most eclectic phase, the shattered fetishism of all the idols and the purer signs that have preceded it. Even the great burst of light in the years 1960-80, seen with some critical distance, will merely have been an episode in the involutive course of the century, in terms of powerful new ideas. But a portent all the same. Might a new event produce some surprise? We can say nothing of this, since archives and analysis are twilight tools.”

Modernism1968
Book:Cool memories
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“Of the veil or unveiling, which is the most alienating, the most humiliating, the most insulting? The immense hypocrisy of all those who denounce the veil, but are quite at ease with universal pornography. In any event, the question goes far beyond the veil and the female condition. At issue is a culture of obscenity that cannot but tear away all veils - according to the imperative of transparency. At issue is the profound jealousy of a ragged culture at all the ceremonial cultures - those cultures whose signs enwrap them, whereas our culture is laid bare by its signs themselves. This is merely the beginning of a general de-signification, in which all distinctive marks will become anathema, suspect of masking or even, quite simply, signifying something, and hence potentially terroristic. At the end of the process all that will be left will be lightweight, inoffensive signs - advertising signs or marks of the disembodied fanaticism of fashion. That, no doubt, is where the story of the veil will end.”

FashionPop CultureAbu GhraibWar Pornography
Book:Cool Memories V: 2000 - 2004
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“Water, which in itself is silent, is just waiting to make a noise. In itself completely motionless, it is just waiting to move. Perfectly cold and harsh in itself, it nonetheless has the tepidness of salt and the mineral softness of fabric. Total abhorrence of dominant ideologies. And anti-gulagism is the dominant ideology today. The anti-gulag priests are every bit as bad as the gulag torturers. The sheep have taken over from the beasts of the Apocalypse.”

WaterIdeologyAbu GhraibAnti Gulagism
Book:Cool memories
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“The prostitution of the male body in fashion puts an end to the last heroic privilege of woman - that of being sacrificed to the gaze while concealing herself, precisely thereby, in a second nudity. A fantastic advance by women on the path to total parity: no limits to sexual equality any longer. You can see this too in the picture of the young American woman turned torturer in the jails of Iraq, holding the naked or hooded Arab on a leash, as in some Western, women-only club. Advancement is irresistible. It happens for better and for worse.”

EqualityProstitutionAbu Ghraib
Book:Cool Memories V: 2000 - 2004
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“4. Which gives rise to the truly mysterious question: how does this irresistible global power succeed in undifferentiating the world, in wiping out its extreme singularity? And how can the world be so vulnerable to this liquidation, this dictatorship of integral reality, and how can it be fascinated by it - not exactly fascinated by the real but by the disappearance of reality? There is, however, a corollary to this: what is the source of the fragility of this global power, of its vulnera-bility to minor events, to events that are insignificant in themselves ('rogue events', terrorism, but also the pictures from Abu Ghraib, etc.)?”

AmericaFutureTerrorismFragilitySimulationAbu Ghraib
Book:Why Hasn't Everything Already Disappeared?
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“Before me a scholarly man, of European culture, head of a literary department in one of the great universities of the West. He speaks of it with bitterness, as do almost all his colleagues. Culture is not what it was and he has not the slightest regard for mass culture. He comes from New York and, deep down, he despises California, his colleagues and the decline of standards. He gets 60-80,000 dollars a year and does not have many students or friends. He has lots of ideas, is sincere, proud and awkward. His secret is his python. I see him plunge his gloved hand into its glass case and stroke the reptile's head, which shoots out a voracious tongue and uncoils itself, still famished though it has just devoured a rat. We discuss the diet of snakes. A tortoise slumbers by the fireside in the glow of an artificial wood fire. It is Sunday in Santa Monica. Towards four, the sun drives away the mists of the Pacific. But the snake knows neither night nor day; he is immortal and poisonous and, in the words of the poet, he dreams on the hills of the sky. Which is something his master does not do, he whose reptilian brain identifies with the snake's, and who stares long and hard into his face, even though ordinarily he is incapable of looking people straight in the eye. A perverse couple, the somnambulism of the intellectual mingling with the inner night of the reptile.”

SnakesOld WorldDavid Foster WallaceAcademic Decadence
Book:Cool memories
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“Our entire system, both technical and mental, tends towards oneness, identity and totality, at the cost of an extraordinary simplification. And the whole of our metaphysics and all our neuroses chart the evils and confusions that ensue from that simplification. But duality is indefectible. It is totality that falters in the more or less long term. Any political, economic, moral or mental system that achieves this even virtual totalization, that achieves this kind of perfection, either automatically fractures or duplicates itself to infinity in a simulacrum of itself. Everything that comes close to its definitive formula or its absolute potency can only repeat itself indefinitely or produce a monstrous double - whether it be terrorism or clones. There is never any equilibrium state or state of completion that cannot suddenly be destabilized by a process of automatic reversion. Everything which offends against duality, which is the fundamental rule, everything which aims to be integral, leads to disintegration through the violent resurgence of duality - or in conformity with the principle of evil, whichever you prefer. It is duality and reversibility which everywhere govern the principle of evil. It is duality, liquidated everywhere, conjured away by all possible means, that restores an absence and an emptiness that are generally submerged by a total presence. It is duality that fractures Integral Reality, that smashes every unitary or totalitarian system by emptiness, crashes, viruses or terrorism.”

TerrorismAccidentsOnenessDualityTotalityPandemic Attacks
Author:Jean Baudrillard
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“Exoteric machines - esoteric machines. They say the computer is an improved form of typewriter. Not a bit of it. I collude with my typewriter, but the relationship is otherwise clear and distant. I know it is a machine; it knows it is a machine. There is nothing here of the interface, verging on biological confusion, between a computer thinking it is a brain and me thinking I am a computer. The same familiarity with good old television, where I was and remained a spectator. It was an esoteric machine, whose status as machine I respected. Nothing there of all these screens and interactive devices, including the 'smart' car of the future and the 'smart' house. Even the mobile phone, that incrustation of the network in your head, even the skateboard and rollerblades - mobility aids - are of a quite different generation from the good old static telephone or the velocipedic machine. New manners and a new morality are emerging as a result of this organic confusion between man and his prostheses - a confusion which puts an end to the instrumental pact and the integrity of the machine itself.”

CyborgMachines And Man
Book:Cool Memories IV, 1995-2000
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“Speech always begins with stammering. Acts and action always begin with trembling. There is no continuum of the will. It acts on the body by fits and starts (stossweise) and is the product of an interval, a rapid alternation, between tension and release: to act is to produce a difference - even a slight one - between you and yourself. If you eliminate the intervals, tetany ensues: you shake all over.”

Do Nothing
Book:Cool Memories V: 2000 - 2004
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“Reading a screenful of information is quite a different thing from looking. It is a digital form of exploration in which the eye moves along an endless broken line. The relationship to the interlocutor in communication, like the relationship to knowledge in data-handling, is similar: tactile and exploratory. A computer-generated voice, even a voice over the telephone, is a tactile voice, neutral and functional. It is no longer in fact exactly a voice, any more than looking at a screen is exactly looking. The whole paradigm of the sensory has changed. The tactility here is not the organic sense of touch: it implies merely an epidermal contiguity of eye and image, the collapse of the aesthetic distance involved in looking. We draw ever closer to the surface of the screen; our gaze is, as it were, strewn across the image. We no longer have the spectator's distance from the stage - all theatrical conventions are gone. That we fall so easily into the screen's coma of the imagination is due to the fact that the screen presents a perpetual void that we are invited to fill. Proxemics of images: promiscuity of images: tactile pornography of images. Yet the image is always light years away. It is invariably a tele-image - an image located at a very special kind of distance which can only be described as unbridgeable by the body. The body can cross the distance that separates it from language, from the stage, or from the mirror - this is what keeps it human and allows it to partake in exchange. But the screen is merely virtual - and hence unbridgeable. This is why it partakes only of that abstract - definitively abstract - form known as communication.”

ReadingLookingHologramTotal SimulationTactile Pornography
Book:The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena
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“It is the Left that secrets and desperately reproduces power, because it wants power, and therefore the Left believes in it and revives it precisely where the system puts an end to it. The system puts an end one by one to all its axioms, to all its institutions, and realizes one by one all the objectives of all the historical and revolutionary Left that sees itself constrained to revive the wheels of capital in order to lay siege to them one day: from private property to small business, from the army to national grandeur, from puritan morality to petit bourgeois culture, justice at the university—everything that is disappearing, that the system, in its atrocity, certainly, but also in its irreversible impulse, has liquidated, must be conserved.”

PoliticsPowerLate CapitalismBourgeois Left
Book:Simulacra and Simulation
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“Warhol never tires himself. The agnostic isn't going to tire himself out working for the glory of God, or to prove his existence. Warhol isn't going to tire himself out proving the existence of art. Because, fundamentally, there is no need. We no more need the pathos of art than we need the pathos of suffering or the pathos of desire. A Stoic trait, this. What is good about Warhol is that he is Stoical, agnostic, puritanical and heretical all at the same time. Having all the qualities, he generously credits all around him with them. The world is there, and it's excellent. People are there, and they're OK. They have no need to believe in what they are doing, they're perfect. He is the best, but everyone's a genius. Never before has the privilege of the creator been quashed in such a way, by a kind of maximalist irony. And all without contempt or demagogy: there is in him a kind of airy innocence, a gracious form of the abolition of privileges. There is in him something of the Cathars and the theory of the Perfect.”

WarholComic ConKevin FeigeFranchise MoviesNetflix SeriesPop Is Perfect
Book:The Perfect Crime
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“And it is, indeed, to the more general problem of fetishism that this new twist brings us: after the becoming-sign of the object, the becoming-object of the sign. In the sexual register, the fetish is no longer a sign but a pure object, meaningless in itself - a banal accessory, but one of absolute value, for which there can be no possible exchange. It is that object and no other. But this banal singularity means that any object whatever can become a fetish. Its potentiality is total, precisely because it lies beyond any sexual reference or metaphor. It is the perfect object of sex, its perfect realization, insofar as it substitutes for any real sex - just as Virtual Reality substitutes itself for the real world and in that way becomes the universal form of our modern fetishism. Modern man's immense panoply of information technology has become his true object of (perverse?) desire. Fetishism being, as the name indicates (Feiticho), linked to abstraction and artifice, it is all the more radical for the abstraction being total. If it was possible, in the past, to speak of the fetishism of the commodity, of money, of the simulacrum and the spectacle, that was still a limited fetishism (related to sign-value). There stretches beyond this for us today the world of radical fetishism, linked to the de-signification and limitless operation of the real - to the sign's becoming pure object once again, before or beyond any metaphor.”

LiteralismFetishism
Book:The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact
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“One of the variants of this lethal accomplishment, of this acting-out, is the realization of all metaphors - the collapse of the metaphor into the real. Here, again, we have the phantasm of materializing all that is parable, myth, fable and metaphor. Romain Gary: 'All humanity's metaphors end up becoming realities. I am coming to wonder whether the real aim of science is not a validation of metaphors.”

LiteralismLiteralness
Book:The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact
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“The Cynecure. Looking for the Cynecure (in the palinody of my cenesthesias, as Segalen would say). The Sabbatical form. What was the Stoic dream of our adolescence - detachment - suddenly materializes in maturity. I now find myself out on my own, within a rainbow-hued research structure. Towns are never left alone; there are always works going on - digging, demolition, construction. Knocking down, building up again. Perhaps only certain places in California, completely anaesthetized by domestic luxury and suburban comfort, seem to have come to rest in a fixed and lasting ambience, beyond this perpetual deconstruction. Works are always going on in our bodies too. They are constantly being disturbed, tortured, renovated. Never at rest, never serene. Peace of mind - impossible to keep it more than a few hours. Impatience always gets the upper hand. Everyone aspires to peace and quiet, but they do so today in a thoroughly derisory manner, wherein we see the last moments of the contemplative soul. In the countryside there is always a dog howling. And sterility is hereditary.”

TownsAcademiaCastrationConstructionsBodies And TorturesSynecure
Book:Cool memories
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“There is a fear of catching AIDS , but a fear also of simply catching sex. There is a fear of catching anything whatever which might seem like a passion, a seduction, a responsibility. And, in this sense, it is once again the male who has most deeply fallen victim to the negative obsession with sex. To the point of withdrawing from the sexual game, exhausted by having to bear such a risk, and no doubt also wearied by having historically assumed the role of sexual power for so long. Of which feminism and female liberation have divested him, at least dejure (and, to a large extent, de facto). But things are more complicated than this, because th e male who has been emasculated in this way and stripped of his power, has taken advantage of this situation to fade from the scene, to disappear — doffing th e phallic mask of a power which has, in any event, become increasingly dangerous. This is the paradoxical victory of the movement for feminine emancipation. That movement has succeeded too well and now leaves the female faced with the (more or less tactical and defensive) defaulting of the male. A strange situation ensues, in which women no longer protest against male power, but are resentful of the 'powerlessness' of the male . The defaulting of the male now fuels a deep dissatisfaction generated by disappointment with a sexual liberation which is going wrong for everyone. And this dissatisfaction finds expression, contradictorily, in the phantasm of sexual harassment. This is, then, a very different scenario from traditional feminism. Women are no longer alienated by men, but dispossessed of the masculine, dispossessed of the vital illusion of the other and hence also of their own illusion, their desire and privilege as women. It is this same effect which causes children secretly to hate their parents, who no longer wish to assume the role of parent and seize the opportunity of children's emancipation to liberate themselves as parents and relinquish their role. What we have, then, is no longer violence on the part of children in rebellion against the parental order, but hatred on the part of children dispossessed of their status and illusion as children. The person who liberates himself is never who you though the was. This defaulting o f the male has knock-on effects which extend into the biological order. Recent studies have found a fall in the rate of sperm in the seminal fluid, but, most importantly, a decline of their will to power: they no longer compete to go and fertilize the ovum. There is no competition any more. Are they, too , afraid of responsibility? Should we see this as a phenomenon analogous to what is going on in the visible sexual world, where a reticence to fulfil roles and a dissuasive terror exerted by the female sex currently prevail? Is this an unintended side-effect of the battle against harassment - the assault of sperm being the most elementary form of sexual harassment?”

Sexual HarassmentSexual LiberationAscetismFeminisn
Book:Screened Out
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“Socialization itself is in question. The present crisis, of which the disintegration of the banlieues is only the spectacular form, is the crisis of general disintegration in the face of the ideal demands of sociality. The disturbances in the margins conceal the fact that society as a whole is resisting the systematic colonization of socialization. The bar of total investment in life through society and economics has been set too high. When did we discover that the deepest demands were social and economic, that the only horizon was the horizon of integration and calculation? Capital's coup de force is to make everything dependant on the economic order, to subject all minds to a single mental dimension. Every other issue becomes unintelligible. The displacement of all problems into economic and performance terms is a trap: the belief that everything is granted us virtually, or will be, by the grace of continual growth and acceleration - including, by extension, a universal lifting of prohibitions, the availability of all information and, of course, the obligation to experience jouissance.”

SimulationSocialization
Book:The Agony of Power
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“Entirely in agreement with Salieri when he rails against God for having given humanity the gift of Mozart's divine music, for the sole purpose of making us look ridiculous and plunging us into despair. Salieri sets himself up as Man's champion against divine injustice. It is the same problem as that of the Grand Inquisitor in the Brothers Karamazov. When Christ returns to earth he says to him: 'We manage humanity for its greatest happiness. It has paid for this with its mediocrity. Don't come disturbing this fragile balance with insane promises. ' And he condemns Christ to death once again. Salieri is not mean-spirited: it took pride, not to become jealous of Mozart, but to challenge God and ask: 'Tell it to me plainly, why am I not Mozart?' For God mocked us by throwing Mozart among us in the guise of a vulgar being, who did not even bear the exceptional marks of grace. God is toying with us, and that is unbearable. Mozart must be destroyed. All that challenges God is noble in spirit and superior to gaping, unconditional admiration of His works. We will not have the same problem with Changeux's Neuronal Man, emerging on the horizon like Nietzsche's Last Man, with his cortical and synaptic flatness. Farewell Mozart, farewell Salieri, no more grace, but no more challenges either, such is the solution offered by modern science to the insoluble despair of the difference between men. Signs, signs? Is that all you have to say? People act and people dream, they speak or they don't - none of that is unreal. Shut up and watch. See the philosophical beauty of these closing years of the century, the stars in the sky falling lower as the fateful date approaches, and the interactive horizon of couples in love - all this is beyond doubt, and it moves me to tears . . . The age, the coming age is like a metropolis deserted by its population, cut off from its sources of energy. Are you going to say that, are you going to go on with these twilight rantings? Every century throws the reality principle into question as it closes, but it's over today, finished, done. Everybody works these days. Narrative and moral passions, the philosophical animal spirits, are literally blocking the electronic animal spirits, a thousand times more lively and insignificant. Videos and advertisements, credits, news reports and sports flashes, Dallas, that's television, all that transfers easily, with the minimum of energy, on ephemeral film. But pure television, like pure painting or pure speed, is hard to bear.”

MozartSalieriInsustainabilityGod And HumanityMan And TechnologyPure Postmodernity
Book:Cool memories
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“I no longer even need a window to follow the journey. I can narrate it to myself hour by hour, live it from memory, all of it - canyons, towns, the reflection of the clouds in the rivers. Memory has taken on wings and speed has become an inner quality. A pity. No doubt it was better that this purely fornicatory and imaginary relationship, with her sexual voracity and her ankle bracelets, which we carried on all over the place - in the Badlands, in the Chelsea Hotel, in motels, in the sand, between the sheets - and which always meant immediate lovemaking in the minutes that followed, never satisfied, but just as sweet, and flexible and blonde, her eyes raised like a slavegirl's and her hand outstretched towards her sex, she free and servile, feminine and muscled, laughing and admiring, animal blood and metallic eyes - it was natural that this relationship should finish with a pathetic fellatio on a motel balcony, in the morning mist and a hypothetical child which no doubt was not mine and which I shall never see. I have even forgotten her name, but I have not forgotten the straw scent of her sex, nor the twenty-dollar bet on salt or snow, nor the sudden menstrual nosebleed I had one morning when I saw her arriving at my place in all her Californian splendour.”

Life ExperienceSimulationVirtual Sex
Book:Cool memories
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“The celibacy of the machine entails the celibacy of Telecomputer Man. Thanks to his computer or word processor, Telecomputer Man offers himself the spectacle of his own brain, his own intelligence, at work. Similarly, through his chat line or his Minitel, he can offer himself the spectacle of his own phantasies, of a strictly virtual pleasure. He exorcizes both intelligence and pleasure at the interface with the machine. The Other, the interlocutor, is never really involved: the screen works much like a mirror, for the screen itself as locus of the interface is the prime concern. An interactive screen transforms the process of relating into a process of commutation between One and the Same. The secret of the interface is that the Other here is virtually the Same: otherness is surreptitiously conjured away by the machine. The most probable scenario of communication here is that Minitel users gravitate from the screen to telephone conversations, thence to face-to-face meetings, and ... then what? Well, it's 'let's phone each other', and, finally, back to the Minitel - which is, after all, more erotic because it is at once both esoteric and transparent. This is communication in its purest form, for there is no intimacy here except with the screen, and with an electronic text that is no more than a design filigreed onto life. A new Plato's retreat whence to observe shadow-forms of bodily pleasure filing past. Why speak to one another, when it is so simple to communicate?”

CommunicationSocial NetworkingCelibacyPlato S CaveVirtual SexLive VideosWebcam Shows
Book:The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena
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“Socialism thought it had contracted a legitimate union with History. Without ever having courted it, it thought it was humanly possible to take history for its own. Hardly had it got into bed with it than it became the eternal cuckold. It must be said that history had whored around in lots of ways long before it met socialism, and all that remained was to enjoy the remnants of a corrupt history or the phantom of a vanished one. The last we heard, it had been kidnapped at this century’s end, and no one is willing pay the ransom.”

HistorySocialismCuckoldry
Book:Fragments
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“Soiree in Rome. The women are more attractive than the men - they always are. My first impression is that all the men are ugly (they are producers and film directors) and that all the women are beautiful (they are actresses). On a second view: the men are ugly, but they have character; all the women have something erotic about them, but nothing remarkable - a purely macho society, the world of showbiz. The big scene with the male lead is played out in all its grandeur, from one palazzo to the next in the Roman night. The most beautiful actress I know is marrying a rich director, author of 97 screenplays. This is the rule among the showbiz crowd. As usual I feel alienation from all the men there and solidarity with all the women, whom the men pretend to scorn in order to please them, but to whom they are basically indifferent. It must be nice to live in bodies so beautiful, so ingenuous, and allow the men to dominate you with all their ugliness, wealth and pretensions. It must be marvellous to be a woman. Ultimately, it is this which is fascinating: woman is unimaginable. The more beautiful she is, the more unimaginable.”

ActingBeautyHorrorProducersAlienationMass ProductionPop Culture ReferencesCinematographic Industry
Book:Cool memories
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“Here, more or less, is the present philosophy: a cop beats up an immigrant in a police station - an incidental news item. But this cop had psychological problems - that is a social fact. How can society delegate the exercise of legitimate violence to individuals who are human, all too human, and whose psychology we have recently discovered - cops? This is a real problem (for journalists). The immigrant is beaten up and forgotten - he is not part of the social. The social begins with social psychology and that is always the psychology of the cop. We see the same conversion in the Greenpeace affair: the fact that French agents went off to blow up and sink a troublesome ship is something to be hushed up. But that there were members of these same secret services willing to betray the operation and give information to the press, that is the real problem, and we shall have to act.”

SocialMediaConspiracyImmigrantGreenpeaceSecret AgentsPsychology Of The Cop
Book:Cool memories
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“Impossible to find as otherness per se (obviously a dream); but at the same time---­ irreducible as a symbolic rule of the game, as a rule of the game that governs the world. The promiscuity and general confusion in which differences exist do not affect this rule of the game as such: it is not a rational law, nor is it a demonstrative process - we shall never have either metaphysical or scientific proof of this principle of foreignness and incomprehensibility: we simply have to accept it. The worst thing here is understanding, which is sentimental and useless. True knowledge is knowledge of exactly what we can never understand in the other, knowledge of what it is in the other that makes the other not oneself - and hence someone who can in no sense become separated from oneself, nor alienated by any look of ours, nor instituted by us in either identity or difference. (Never question others about their identity. In the case of America, the question of American identity was never at issue: the issue was America's foreignness.) If we do not understand the savage, it is for the same reason that he does not understand himself (the term 'savage' conveys this foreignness better than all later euphemisms). The rule of exoticism thus implies that one should not be fooled by understanding, by intimacy, by the country, by travel, by picturesqueness, or by oneself. The realm of radical exoticism, moreover, is not necessarily a function of travel: 'It is not essential, in order to feel the shock [of the exotic], to revive the old-fashioned episode of the voyage. [ ... ] The fact remains that such an episode and its setting are better than any other subterfuge for reaching this brutal, rapid and pitiless hand-to-hand conflict and making each blow count.' Travel is a subterfuge, then - but it is the most appropriate one of all.”

FightingKnowledgeTravelFooledRadical Otherness
Book:The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena
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“Não é que as pessoas já não acreditem nela [publicidade] ou a tenham aceitado como rotina. É que, se ela fascinava por este poder de simplificação de todas as linguagens, este poder é-lhe hoje subtraído por um outro tipo de linguagem ainda mais simplificado e, logo, mais operacional: as linguagens informáticas. O modelo de sequência, de banda sonora e de banda-imagem que a publicidade nos oferece, a par com os outros grandes media, o modelo de perequação combinatória de todos os discursos que ela propõe, este contínuum ainda retórico de sons, de signos, de sinais, de slogans que ela domina como ambiente total, está largamente ultrapassado, justamente na sua função de estímulo, pela banda magnética, pelo continuum electrónico que está a perfilar-se no horizonte deste fim de século. O microprocesso, a digitalidade, as linguagens cibernéticas vão muito mais longe no mesmo sentido da simplificação absoluta dos processos do que a publicidade fazia ao seu humilde nível, ainda imaginário e espectacular. E é porque estes sistemas vão mais longe, que polarizam hoje o fascínio outrora concedido à publicidade. E a informação, no sentido informático do termo, que porá fim, que já põe fim, ao reino da publicidade. É isto que assusta e é isto que apaixona. A «paixão» publicitária deslocou-se para os computadores e para a miniaturização informática da vida quotidiana. A ilustração antecipadora desta transformação era o papoula de K. Ph. Dick, este implante publicitário transistorizado, espécie de ventosa emissora, de parasita electrónico que se fixa ao corpo e de que este tem muita dificuldade em libertar-se. Mas o papoula é ainda uma forma intermediária: é já uma espécie de prótese incorporada, mas recita ainda mensagens publicitárias. Um híbrido, pois, mas prefiguração das redes psicotrópicas e informáticas de pilotagem automática dos indivíduos, ao lado do qual o «condicionamento» publicitário parece uma deliciosa peripécia.”

InformáticaPkdPublicidadeCibernéticaThe Simulacra
Book:Simulacra and Simulation
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“There are too many Jews on the France Culture radio station,' says Renaud Camus, and he is accused of racism. But the problem lies elsewhere and goes far beyond the Jewish question. It is, more generally, that there is too much of everything everywhere. Too many people, too many places, too many images on television, 'too many notes in Mozart', too many ideas and too many words to express them - too many old people among the old, too many young people among the young. And, ultimately, the worst of it is that there's too much culture on France Culture.”

RacismTwenty First CenturyRenaud Camus
Book:Cool Memories V: 2000 - 2004
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“When God created man, He saw that he couldn't survive in that solitude and gave him a shadow. But since then man has never stopped selling it to the devil. I knew him in all conditions. Moist in sacrifice, hostile or welcoming, voracious or retractile, excited or indifferent, impulsive and without qualms, dreamy on his best day. That people who share the same genes should be separated by a moral chasm helps us to reassess the values in the name of which they are killing each other.”

IncestPeter SchlemihlFratricide
Book:Cool Memories V: 2000 - 2004
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“The uncertainty to which we are subject results, paradoxically, from an excess of positivity, from an ineluctable drop in the level of negativity. A kind of leukaemia has taken hold of our societies - a kind of dissolution of negativity in a perfused euphoria. Neither the French Revolution, nor the philosophy of the Enlightenment, nor critical utopianism has found its fulfilment through the supersession of contradictions, and if the problems they addressed have been solved, this has been achieved by casting off the negative, by disseminating the energies of everything condemned by society within a simulation entirely given over to positivity and factitiousness, by instituting a definitively transparent state of affairs. Ours is rather like the situation of the man who has lost his shadow: either he has become transparent, and the light passes right through him or, alternatively, he is lit from all angles, overexposed and defenceless against all sources of light. We are similarly exposed on all sides to the glare of technology, images and information, without any way of refracting their rays; and we are doomed in consequence to a whitewashing of all activity - whitewashed social relations, whitewashed bodies, whitewashed memory - in short, to a complete aseptic whiteness. Violence is whitewashed, history is whitewashed, all as part of a vast enterprise of cosmetic surgery at whose completion nothing will be left but a society for which, and individuals for whom, all violence, all negativity, are strictly forbidden. In these circumstances everything which is unable to relinquish its own identity is inevitably plunged into a realm of radical uncertainty and endless simulation.”

Positivity That Creates ChangePeter SchlemihlFactitiousness
Book:The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena
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“The weakness of many novels and films can be seen in the fact that one is forced to interpret them ironically to find any depth in them (mise en abyme is an effect of the same kind). One is everywhere trapped between a literal and an ironic reading. A more or less conscious calculation that aims to disorientate any value judgement. It is particularly flagrant in the field of art, where this studied vagueness as to how a work is to be read has supplanted illusion and aesthetic judgement. Deep down, however, it is reality itself that has become so banal and insignificant that it has induced us into an ironic reading. It has become so homogenized that it breaks off from itself into a parallel reality. It is out of nostalgia that we embed it in another order: in the face of this insignificance, we are forced to hypothesize a more subtle realm beyond, a dimension beyond our grasp. A critical masochism by which all the speculative arts have found success.”

IronyMovie CriticsLiterary CriticsMise En Abyme
Book:Cool Memories V: 2000 - 2004
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“Already God existed only in the desperate attempt to prove his existence. It is the same today with human beings, whose existence we attempt desperately to verify by the very means that make it improbable. Feminism, populism, humanism: all words with the suffix '-ism' are the caricature of their root. Of women, of the people, of the human. Including terrorism: the caricature of terror?”

GodHumanityExistenceIsms
Book:Cool Memories V: 2000 - 2004
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“All our categories have thus entered the age of the factitious: no more wanting - only getting people to want; no more doing - only getting people to do; no more being worth something - merely getting something to be worth something (witness advertising in general); no more knowing - only letting know; and, last but not least, not so much enjoying, not so much taking pleasure, as getting people to enjoy, getting people to take pleasure. This is the great problem of the moment: to take sexual pleasure serves no purpose - we are supposed to give sexual pleasure, whether to ourselves or to others. Such pleasure has become an act of communication: I am your guest, you are my guest - we exchange pleasure as part of a performative interactivity. Anyone who seeks gratification without communication is a pig. Do communication machines have orgasms? That is another story - but if we try to imagine orgasmic machines, we can do so only by reference to the model of communication machines. As a matter of fact, such orgasmic machines already exist in the shape of our own bodies - bodies coaxed into coming by the subtlest of cosmetic and pleasure-inducing technologies.”

WhatsappSexual PleasureTinder Stories
Book:The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena
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“The best thing would perhaps be to remove consciousness surgically in utero, together with irony, criticism and intelligence - all those qualities that are so fragile and so dangerous to existence in general. One might take advantage of this (all in a specialized Psycho-Genetic Institute, akin to the Institute of Zodiacal Semiurgy, where the surgical removal of star signs is practised) to be rid of the Unconscious, the extraction of which, like the extraction of all the irregularities of the genome, would be a great relief for future generations.”

TranshumanismLobotomy
Book:Cool Memories V: 2000 - 2004
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“Exoticism is the acute and immediate perception of an eternal incomprehensibility. What triumphs, then, is not the rule of difference and lack of differentiation but instead an eternal incomprehensibility, the irreducible foreignness of cultures, manners, faces, languages. If savour increases as a function of difference, what could be more savoury than the antagonism of irreducibles, the clash of eternal contrasts? The irredeemability of the object: 'The essential exoticism is that which the Object has for the Subject.' Exoticism as the fundamental law of the intensity of sensations, of the exaltation of the senses, and thus of living itself ...”

ExoticismIncomprehensibility
Book:The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena
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“He illuminates the landscape of society with an intense, ultra sensitive light and brings out a strange, hyperreal relief - a coherent reading, precisely like the light of a laser. The local is a shabby thing. There's nothing worse than bringing us back down to our own little corner, our own territory, the radiant promiscuity of the face to face. A culture which has taken the risk of the universal, must perish by the universal. Exile always offers a marvellous - pathetic or dramatic - distance, a distance which aids judgement, a serenity orphaned by its own world. Deterritorialization, on the other hand, is a demented deprivation. It is like a lobotomy. It has in it something of agony, of the inconstancy and disconnection of circuits. You need an infinite stretch of time ahead of you to start to think, infinite energy to make the smallest decision. The world is getting denser. The immense number of useless projects is bewildering. Too many things have to be put in to balance up an uncertain scale. You can't disappear any more. You die in a state of total indecision. A frenzy of indifference in these times of 'speed'. In the same way as you can counter the acceleration of your molecules with an iced drink, you have to head off artificial euphoria by pulling on the brake of melancholy. Science and technologies could have become extensions of our human faculties, as MacLuhan wanted. Instead, they have devoured them. They have become sarcastic, like the laugh of the same name which devours flesh or like the creatures on the banks of the Styx which destroy the substance of the mental faculties.”

ScienceTechnologyInfinityExileUniversalismLocalDeterritorializationMacluhan
Book:Cool memories
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