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Cool Memories V: 2000 - 2004

Book by Jean Baudrillard · 50 quotes · Fate, Thought, Simulation

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Cool Memories V: 2000 - 2004 Quotes

“The temptation to fulfil all desires was, in the past, that of evil; temptation by the devil. Today it is good which presides over that fulfilment, but it is no longer the fulfilment of a desire or an impulse of our own. We no longer aspire to anything; we are aspirated, sucked up, by the void. The logic of distinction is, ultimately, a precious vestige of the bygone time of signs and sign-value, the loss of which, though imperceptible in the equivalence of images, is even more serious than the loss of the real. Prestige, challenge, rivalry, privileges - it was, at bottom, the golden age of symbolic violence, the only antidote to democratic erosion and the great game of equality of opportunity. It is doubtless as absurd to wish to eliminate that violence as any other. Is it better to stop the haemorrhage and live in a state of perpetual transfusion?”

DesireViolenceMeaningDistinctionVoidFufillment
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“Satan and witches. If they admit they are in league with him, then they are disobeying him (since he forbids them to admit to being witches) and they are spared. Those who protest their innocence are burned. A bus driver who falsely claims to have been assaulted is found guilty of wasting police time. A police spokesman declares: 'We already have so many problems with genuine violent crime. What are things coming to if we have to deal with the fake kind?' It is for this reason that a fake hold-up was in the past punished more severely than a real one, for faking evil is even more serious than evil. The hoax is evil raised to the second power. And faking good? Isn't a fake 'good deed' worse than a bad one?”

EvilHoaxSecret Agents
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“Unconditional praise of life and happiness. Existenz uber alles! This fierce optimism, this idealism, which sees the worst catastrophes, the worst corruption as having a right to claim mitigating circumstances. The critical spirit is not dead, contrary to the opinion of the Enlightenment nostalgics. It has simply metabolized into all the ironic procedures, all the sardonic artifices in which we play, smugly, on our own incredulity. 'The Last Man, talking to himself while shaking his head incredulously,' said Nietzsche. Excess today, our contemporary 'hubris', is the excess of universal hybridization - like the fluorescent rabbit that is a cross between a rabbit and an octopus - and of making everything copulate with itself like the crepidula fornicata.”

OptimismCritical ThinkingEduardo Kac
Book:Cool Memories V: 2000 - 2004
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“Being secondarily pessimistic - believing that the good always ends up going bad. And secondarily optimistic - believing that the system is best placed to put an end to itself. After the three great revolutions - Galileo and the end of geocentrism, Darwin and the theory of evolution, Freud and the 'discovery' of the Unconscious - our contemporary revolution is that of the virtual and of information technology, and it distances man increasingly from sovereignty over the natural world, of which he was the centre in the days when the earth did not yet revolve around the sun, in the days when he was not yet descended from the apes. He is becoming increasingly eccentric today - a peripheral, artificial extension of his own model.”

OptimismPessimismVirtual Revolution
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“New form of redemption: debt, companies, crimes, scandals - as in the past with slaves, everything must be redeemed. Everything must be transfigured and at the same time, as in the sales, everything must go. Everywhere the tiniest waste product, the slightest desire is being given its hour of glory. But the historic prototype of redemption is that of work, which was granted such moral and historical value only so as to enable the slave to accede to it as a free man. In this way the curse fulfils itself.”

WorkRedemptionPrivate Property
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“He suddenly felt a pain that was as violent as if it were real. Existence, similar to the stucco angel whose extremities meet in a curved mirror, comes back, almost by necessity, to a state of radicality and silence. The ideal existence is the one that lasts long enough to come back to this point of origin. Those who forge straight ahead will never know where they have come from.”

ExistenceSilenceSimulationRadicality
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“Cloning must be sacrilege to the doctrines of metempsychosis, as it interrupts the sequence of reincarnations and the migration of souls. But it is also sacrilegious where the laws of evolution are concerned, since it is tantamount to an unlimited perpetuation of the species. In the body, a will to help begins to form. It is the body that chooses, among the innumerable pathogenic elements at its disposal, the illness that will purify you by diet and fever.”

SoulEvolutionExtinctionCloningMetempsychosis
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“Chance does not exist. Either the universe obeys objective laws or it is of the order of will. But not of a will like our own: an inhuman will, in which all beings, minerals, animals, stars and elements are endowed with effective determination. Where the effect is an added extra, regardless of the cause, where the event is an added extra, regardless of history - chance being merely the intersection of all these wills. A universe consisting of antagonistic impulses, in which everything is lucky or ill-fated - isn't that more uplifting than the mere preoccupation with causes and consequences? The downplaying of reality is a philosophical intuition and there is, therefore, nothing 'negationist' about it. The virtual, in its project of liquidating the real technically, is truly negationist.”

ChanceFateMarvel Cinematic UniverseSuperhero Reference
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“The fragment is like a broken mirror - ideas don't have the time to reflect themselves in it or, as a result, to feel sorry for themselves. They run ahead of their shadows or their reflections. To run ahead is to move towards an unforeseeable outcome, but one whose path is made for it in advance. Birds too run ahead of those who see them. The event also runs ahead of history. It is what opens up untimely perspectives in a world brought totally up to date.”

FateComentary
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“Of multiple unfathomable coincidences or complicities, we say: 'It's too good to be true.' And we invoke the Unconscious. But the Unconscious itself is too good to be true. Behind all that might there not be some cruel divinity or some external fate? But we prefer the id and the drives that are the psychical reappropriation of these things. We prefer our perverse desires, our masochism and our death drive to the ill-will of the gods. If it isn't I, ego, then it's the id. If it isn't the id, it's its brother. That is always better than an external demon.”

FatePsychoanalysis
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“The lesson to be drawn from X's fatal fall after leaving a moronic show: only go to shows where you would not mind dying immediately after seeing them. One cannot reasonably trust in the will, that 'rational' strategy that works only one time in ten. One has, rather, to clear the decks around a decision, leave it hanging, then let oneself slide into it, as though being sucked in, with no thought for causes and effects. To be willed by the decision itself; in a sense, to give in to it. The decision then becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

FatePop Culture References
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“If one resolves to be what one is, origins, filiation and all traces in general seem an undesirable supplement. Naive, captive, subliminal duplicity. Whatever happens, the double -that internalized otherness - dissociates itself from one's official being. In the face of this internal division, how is it with the unity of the real world? The distance of the child from those who see him as innocent, the wicked delight that takes root in the form of cunning, the innate sense of having his own preserve, which will never leave him, even if he becomes a civilized being. 'The point at which the intuition forms in the child that other people exist who think differently is the point at which he learns to lie.' Later on, he will perfect that duplicity by learning to lie to himself.”

Fate
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“Hell will be the perpetual duty of conviviality and communication: endlessly greeting people who recognize you and whom you don't recognize. The hell of the signs you no longer decipher and which you are forced to manipulate as in a dream. The hell of the ghostly ideas that signal to you from a very great distance and which you are no longer able to formulate. The hell of the words, names and faces you can't recall. Impossible to imagine dying anywhere else than in the silence of the desert. Of all things, not to pass away amid sound and fury. To recover the only freedom, which is that of space and emptiness.”

Hell2001 A Space Odyssey
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“There is as little reason to speak of corruption in the political order as of perversion in the psychical order. Our entire mental universe may be said to be perverse: there are in it only defences and evasions, phantasms and duplicity, not to mention obsession and cruelty, ressentiment and the many different nuances of character. Everything about it is immoral. That is how it is, end of story. Any attempt at mental regulation is as pointless as the endeavour of moralizing the social world. The balance is always, as Mandeville rightly said, that of evil by evil. Ideas do not give forth light and their light source is elsewhere. But they have a shadow and that shadow moves with the sun.”

IdeasCorruptionMorals
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“We shall never know whether thought is an imposture, and that is providential. 'The people is, in some cases, so enlightened that it is no longer indifferent to anything' (Montesquieu). That is indeed the end point: when there is no longer anything about which there is nothing to say. Verdict of a Chinese writer on a monstrous tree that is at once a blackberry and a bamboo: 'any disorder appearing in nature is the sign of a hidden disorder in the administration of the Empire ... Order restored in nature clearly indicates satisfaction in heaven.' Our current blossoming of monsters and clones, hybrids and chimeras, our systematic mixing of mores and cultures, sexes and genes, cannot but attest to an irremediable disorder in the highest spheres of the Empire.”

RevolutionThoughtEmpireArtificiality
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“Thinking takes on first a conceptual, metaphorical form. Then a subjective, affective form. Then an animal, instinctive form. Then a reflex, automatic form. At that point, it is simply a function equivalent to the circulation of the blood and artificial respiration. Writing is the living alternative to the worst of what it says . There was a dramaturgy of art and language: transfiguring the real into lyricism and violence, giving history a heroic, bloodstained ending. It seems today that art and language have the opposite function of making everything conform to ordinariness: without end and without resolution.”

WritingThought
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“Lichtenberg speaks somewhere of the 'freedom to think, without danger, for the truth'. By this he doubtless understands the right of speaking the truth without the danger of being thrown into prison by the monarch. But if, by removing a comma, we read, instead, the freedom to think 'without danger for the truth', things become much more interesting. For then it becomes a question of the capacity to think without imperilling truth (without risk of unveiling it). It is no longer the freedom of thought at odds with power, but the truth itself at odds with the freedom to think. The whole relationship between thought and truth is at issue. There is a profound difference between the thought that wants to make truth shine out and the thought that wants to keep it secret. But you can also wish for both at the same time.”

TruthThoughtSimulation
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“The conscious decision to make a movement corresponds to an electrical event in the brain that happens 200 to 300 milliseconds after the beginning of the movement.' 'The experience of free determination of the will is nothing but an awareness of past events projected into the future' (Atlan). This precession of the act over the will, of the movement over the decision is interesting. It is the very question of thought: is there, in thought itself, something that precedes thought? More broadly, it is the question of the world: is there, before the Big Bang, something that precedes the world? This enquiry is essentially metaphysical. No point falling back on 'neuronal electricity'!”

ThoughtFree Will
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“There is something worse than being unmasked: not being unmasked. Thus the crime will have kept on leaving clues, and illusion itself cannot bear to remain illusion. It is constantly prostituting itself to the world and actualizing itself in full view. Thinking is as difficult as walking in the snow without leaving tracks. Or else you have to go back over your tracks step by step, like the child in The Shining, pursued by his father in the labyrinth of ice. Political power exists only because we want absolutely none of it. And the political sphere is there only to mask this defection on our part by a trompe-l'oeil system of representation. But life, such as it is, we want too. And force, potency. That too we want, irresistibly. But perhaps less deeply than we want its opposite.”

PowerImpotenceKubrick
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“The champions of the digital adopt an absurd line of argument (absurd in the sense of Freud's story of the kettle): 1. It is a revolution, an absolute advance. 2. At any rate, we have no choice, the process is irreversible. But it must be one or the other: if it is inevitable, there's no point representing it as an ideal dimension. And if it's destined to win out, there's no point claiming it is best. Any form of irony or offhandedness about one's own ideas is wounding to one's interlocutor.”

ImpotenceDigital Technology
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“No mechanic now for modern cars, no doctor now for modern pathologies. The infinitesimal calculus of viral pathologies, unlocatable by traditional diagnostics, has entirely outstripped the mechanics of the body, just as the electronics of the modern car have outstripped the knowledge of its user. But one can imagine an electronic 'smartness' of the body (like 'smart' cars or houses) that would inform you of all its anomalies, or even, by a kind of GPS effect, of your position in the space of human relations.”

AndroidsTeslaTranshumanismElon Musk
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“All these dreams of helplessness, distress, of forking paths, of being locked up miles from anywhere, all these confused, indescribable episodes, are expressions of the fact that one is coming close to a secret zone, an impassable line - not at all, as the conventional interpretation has it, the bar of repression, but something more subtle of which we are the repressed.”

RepressionBifurcation
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“The global power's domination of the rest of the world mirrors the hegemony of the human race over other living creatures. Now, it is not clear how this 'superiority' of the human species over all the others would be given up. Indifference to politics is said to be due to the disintegration of the social bond. In fact, it is quite the opposite. It is the wide scope for action within civil society and the intensification of communication networks - together with the promotion of a freedom whose perpetual benefits we enjoy, but of which we no longer have the concept - that create the absenteeism from oneself and from others of which political absenteeism is merely a symptom.”

ImperialismAnthropocentrismAbsenteeism
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“The lack of distinction between the real and the virtual is the obsession of our age. Everything in our current affairs attests to this, not to mention the big cinematic productions: The Truman Show, Total Recall, Existenz, Matrix, etc. This question has always been there behind literature and philosophy, but it has been present metaphorically, as it were, implicitly, through the filter of discourse. The 'encoding/decoding' of reality was done by discourse, that is to say, by a highly complex medium, never leaving room for a head-on truth. The encoding/decoding of our reality is done by technology. Only what is produced by this technical effect acquires visible reality. And it does so at the cost of a simplification that no longer has anything to do with language or with the slightest ambivalence and which, therefore, puts an end to this subtle lack of distinction between the real and the virtual, as subtle as the lack of distinction between good and evil. Through special effects, everything acquires an operational self-evidence, a spectacular reality that is, properly speaking, the reign of simulation. What the directors of these films have not realized (any more than the simulationist artists of New York in the eighties) is that simulation is a hypothesis, a game that turns reality itself into one eventuality among others.”

Cinema90s2000s
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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“The generations steeped in the virtual will never have known the Real. But that is not so serious if we accept that the Real is merely a referential illusion. More serious is the case of those who, steeped in sex and images of sex, will never have known pleasure. But this is nothing in relation to the possibility, for future generations, of never knowing death. With so many spectacles, festivals, symposiums, art fairs and book fairs, the desire for a sudden cultural recession, or at least for a period of latency, for long enough to recover the savour of a book or the silence of images. Zero (degree zero, zero risk, Ground Zero, zero deaths) is the current form of perfection, empty, sterile and faultless. It is the nil-sum equation, defined by the elimination of all variables. In this sense, there is no longer any difference between the perfection of life and that of death.”

DeathPerfectionZeroPornographyPandemiaMillenialsCultural Recession
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“Nothing distinguishes a natural intelligence from something that can give off all the outward signs of it, and this includes faltering before the test of truth. So one can give off all the outward signs of power, and this includes faltering before the test of strength. A simulation which produces, with just the requisite degree of derision, the image of an illusory normality.”

Artificial IntelligenceSimulationNatural Intelligence
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“The tiredness induced by a long walk expresses itself first in a trancelike state, where insidious, aggressive thoughts bubble up without your realizing it, then in mild hallucinations, before ending in euphoric confusion. The hypochondriacal obsession. Once all protection is secured, it is from the inside that the body is overexposed to all assaults and disruptions. Against the disorders that ensue there is only the character armour, which does not even allow the signals from the body to show through. Wariness of one's nearest and dearest, as though they were potential witnesses for the prosecution in your existence, evidence of guilt in a trial that is permanently suspended. The panda that is having trouble reproducing: they show him porn films to rouse his libido.”

PornThe TrialDom Quixote
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“The little orange, trapezoidal, translucent sail on the river, the boatmen keeping their balance. Further on, the bride in her palanquin, and the husband on horseback ahead of her. A whole parade of luminous figures. In fact, what we have here is a fake traditional Korean wedding and a TV shoot. But whether or not the ritual is authentic, there is the same racial beauty in all the faces. The Diagonal of the Madman, The Parallax of Evil, The Ecliptic of Sex, The Hypotenuse of Death. Given the low likelihood of a meeting in this life or a future existence, the only hope is for a meeting in a previous life.”

SimulationMulti CulturalismTestamento Geometrico
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“There are many ways of being witty and intelligent - almost as many as of not being, They are often the same. Like free electrons on the planet of the apes, with a time window on to a parallel universe. The only solution to the mechanization of man is Ie devenir-machine: becoming-machine. Warhol had seen this. He was the apotheosis of the machinic: total automatism, all trace of the human gone. The dream of the virtual era, by contrast, is to wrest the machine from machinicity, to make it intelligent and soulful, 'interactive', to turn it into an associate 'anthropoid' with the same affective and intellectual, sexual and reproductive functions - and, lastly, the same viruses and melancholia.”

IntelligenceDehumanizationLiteralness
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“The profoundly negationist character of information, the demand for which has no concern for any historical reality or any moral meaning. Shoah or no Shoah, if Hitler were alive he would be on all the screens. Might Network Man be the model for the disabled person of the future? It is perhaps to him, rather than to the paralytic, that we shall have forcibly to restore the use of his body. An illness that breaks out opportunely just before the departure date and ends exactly on the day the trip was scheduled to end.”

PandemicMarvelDisneyNegationismThanosNetwork Man
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“A three-dimensional shadow? A hologrammatic shadow? The Graz Tower: a building in the form of a shadow. This is, in itself, a misconception: what makes a shadow a shadow is the two dimensions (it is the same with the image). Even the zebra's shadow has no stripes. Ubu incarnate: we lag irreparably behind stupidity. Where do you rate your pain on a sliding scale from 0 to 10? 0= no pain, 10 = unbearable. It's a bit like plucking daisy petals: he loves me, he loves me not ... They are the petals of pain.”

PainShadowsLagging
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“Thirty thousand years ago there lived 'another human species' - the Neanderthals. Tremendous. If it is true, it is symbolically more important than the fact that man is descended from the apes. The shadow of this vanished human species weighs heavy on all our anthropology, since our entire concept of evolution privileges the exclusive universality of a single humanity, ours, the one that survived. And what if it were not the only one? Then that's the end of our privilege. If we had to eliminate this twin, this prehistoric double, to ensure our hegemony, if this other species had to disappear, then the rules of the game of being human are no longer the same. And where does this passion for universality come from, this lust to eliminate every other race? (It is a good bet that if any other race emerged from space, our first aim would be to subjugate or destroy it.) Why is it that in twin forms there always has to be one that dies? Why do we always have to wipe out duality everywhere to establish the monopoly of a species, a race, a subject? Having said this, it is not certain that we really did win out. What if we were carrying that double within us like a dead twin? And perhaps many others, in a kind of Unconscious, the stubborn heir to all the previous murders. Having achieved the unity of the species, for the greater glory of Homo sapiens, are we not now duplicating ourselves for the worse - in that artificial twinness of the clone, in which the species, denying its origins once and for all, prolongs itself as spectre in an infinite repetition? Over the screen of our consciousness and our Unconscious hovers the shadow of this original crime, the traces of which we shall doubtless never recover.”

HumanityDualityNeanderthals
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“Death is only ever that free future we dream of when we put off everything and consign all things to their future occurrence. Objectively, the world is an illusion: it can only appear to us. Subjectively, it is the opposite: we regard it spontaneously as real. But one may propose the opposite: subjectively, the world is an illusion of our senses. Objectively, it has force of reality. Asymptote, clinamen, parallax, metalepsis - these are dance patterns, this is a whole non-linear geometry of theoretical space. Patterns of near-contact and reversal, of approaching the truth without ever succumbing to it.”

Testamento Geometrico
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