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America

Book by Jean Baudrillard · 3 quotes · America, World, Ifs

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America Quotes

“We criticize Americans for not being able either to analyse or conceptualize. But this is a wrong-headed critique. It is we who imagine that everything culminates in transcendence, and that nothing exists which has not been conceptualized. Not only do they care little for such a view, but their perspective is the very opposite: it is not conceptualizing reality, but realizing concepts and materializing ideas, that interests them. The ideas of the religion and enlightened morality of the eighteenth century certainly, but also dreams, scientific values, and sexual perversions. Materializing freedom, but also the unconscious. Our phantasies around space and fiction, but also our phantasies of sincerity and virtue, or our mad dreams of technicity. Everything that has been dreamt on this side of the Atlantic has a chance of being realized on the other. They build the real out of ideas. We transform the real into ideas, or into ideology.”

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“The United States is utopia embodied. You should not judge their crisis in the same way as we judge ours – the crisis of the old European countries. We have a crisis of historical ideals caused by the impossibility of realizing them. They have a crisis of a realized utopia as a consequence of its duration and continuity. The idyllic conviction of Americans that they are the center of the world, a higher power and an absolute role model is not such a delusion. It is based not so much on technological resources and military forces as on a miraculous belief in the existence of an embodied utopia – a society that, with what it may seem unbearable innocence, is based on the idea that it has achieved everything that others only dreamed of: justice, abundance, rights, wealth, freedom; America knows it, it believes it, and in the end, others also believe it.”

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