Quotessence
Home / Books / The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact

The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact

Book by Jean Baudrillard · 2 quotes · Reality, Pop Culture, Simulation

Filter quotes by topic

The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact Quotes

“Or, rather, there is a duel between them: death toys with life, life toys with death. Which of the two succumbs? Stanislaw Lec reverses the terms here: it is not we who defend ourselves against death, it is death that defends itself against us: 'Death resists us, but it gives in in the end.' Nothing else so stunning as this has ever been said about death. Needless to say, this dual relationship has nothing to do with interactivity, which is a parody of it. There is nothing interactive in the antagonistic process of reversibility and becoming. The feminine and the masculine are not 'interactive': that is ridiculous. Life and the world are not interactive -life isn't a question-and-answer session or a video game. There is nothing interactive in words when they are articulated in language. Interactivity is a gigantic mythology, a mythology of integrated systems or of systems craving integration, a mythology in which otherness is lost in feedback, interlocution and interface - a kind of generalized echography.”

“Fortunately, there are other, more poetic ways of ridding oneself of freedom - that of gaming, for example, where what is at stake is not a freedom subject to the law, but a sovereignty subject to rules. A more subtle and paradoxical freedom which consists in a rigorous observance, an enchanted form of voluntary servitude that is, as it were, the miraculous combination of master and slave: in gaming no one is free, everyone is both the master and the slave of the game.”