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The Agony of Power

Book by Jean Baudrillard · 6 quotes · Simulation, Hegemony, Blm

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The Agony of Power Quotes

“After the sacrifice of value, after the sacrifice of representation, after the sacrifice of reality, the West is now characterized by the deliberate sacrifice of everything through which a human being keeps some value in his or her own eyes. The terrorists' potlatch against the West is their own death. Our potlatch is indignity, immodesty, obscenity, degradation and abjection. This is the movement of our culture - where the stakes keep rising. Our truth is always on the side of unveiling, desublimation, reductive analysis - the truth of the repressed -- exhibition, avowal, nudity - nothing is true unless it is desecrated, objectified, stripped of its aura, or dragged onstage.”

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“However, there are other, more political forms for these tendencies hostile to Western models. All of these countries that we want to acculturate by force with the principles of political and economic rationality, with the global market and democracy, with a universal principle and a history that is not their own, of which they have neither the ends nor the means - all of these countries which make up the rest of the world - they give us the impression (in Brazil for example) that they will never be accultured to this exogenous model of calculation and growth, that they are deeply allergic to it. And in fact do we, Westerners, masters of the world, still have its ends and means? Do we still measure up to this universal undertaking of mastery that now seems to surpass us in every domain and function like a trap of which we are the first victims?”

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“The high point of the struggle against domination was the historic movement of liberation, be it political, sexual or otherwise - a continuous movement, with guiding ideas and visible actors. But liberation also occurred with exchanges and markets, which brings us to this terrifying paradox: all of the liberation fights against domination only paved the way for hegemony, the reign of general exchange -against which there is no possible revolution, since everything is already liberated.”

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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.”

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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.”

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“This hegemonic simulation, a configuration that seems triumphant and unyielding, has its reverse, its revulsive effects. By virtually yielding to this global dynamic and exaggerating it in several ways, all of these would-be emerging countries gradually become submerging instead. They slowly invade the Western sphere, not on a competitive level, but like a ground swell. This invasion occurs in many ways, like a viral infiltration. It is the problem of global, more or less clandestine immigration (Hispanics are literally cannibalizing the United States). But also in the contemporary forms of terror, a true filterable virus, made up of terrorism and counterterrorism, and which is a violent abreaction to global domination, destabilizing it from the inside. The global order is cannibalized by terror.”

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