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Book by Jean Baudrillard · 4 quotes · Fate, Ifs, Technology

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“A society like the Italian, the very disorder of which renders the action of the State useless and ridiculous, is not without its charm and helps us to grasp this political truth: the principal task of the State today is to justify its own existence. To do so, it has to annihilate society's capacity to survive by itself. Surreptitiously undermining all forms of spontaneous regulation, deregulating, desocializing, breaking down the traditional mechanisms of bodies and antibodies, in order to substitute its artificial mechanisms - such is the strategy of a State locked in a subtle struggle with society - exactly like medicine, which lives off the destruction of natural defences and their replacement by artificial ones. In Rome, Niccolini manages to counter the obsessive fear of terrorism with a cultural revival. To the Romans who no longer dare go out in the evenings he offers festivals, performances, poetry galas. He brings culture down into the street. He combats the terrorist festival with the cultural, advertising festival. He will be criticized for wasteful expenditure, but the only way to fight terrorism is not to create 'solid' institutions, but to put upon the stage a culture that is as sacrificial, eccentric, and ephemeral as the terrorist acts themselves. One festival against the other. If terrorism is a sort of murderous advertising campaign which keeps our imagination on tenterhooks, it can be countered only by a piece of even more effective advertising.”

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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.”

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“As the end of the century approaches, all our culture is like the culture of flies at the beginning of winter. Having lost their agility, dreamy and demented, they turn slowly about the window in the first icy mists of morning. They give themselves a last wash and brush-up, their oscillated eyes roll, and they fall down the curtains.”

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