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The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact

Book by Jean Baudrillard · 3 quotes · Reality, Pop Culture, Simulation

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The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact Quotes

“And it is, indeed, to the more general problem of fetishism that this new twist brings us: after the becoming-sign of the object, the becoming-object of the sign. In the sexual register, the fetish is no longer a sign but a pure object, meaningless in itself - a banal accessory, but one of absolute value, for which there can be no possible exchange. It is that object and no other. But this banal singularity means that any object whatever can become a fetish. Its potentiality is total, precisely because it lies beyond any sexual reference or metaphor. It is the perfect object of sex, its perfect realization, insofar as it substitutes for any real sex - just as Virtual Reality substitutes itself for the real world and in that way becomes the universal form of our modern fetishism. Modern man's immense panoply of information technology has become his true object of (perverse?) desire. Fetishism being, as the name indicates (Feiticho), linked to abstraction and artifice, it is all the more radical for the abstraction being total. If it was possible, in the past, to speak of the fetishism of the commodity, of money, of the simulacrum and the spectacle, that was still a limited fetishism (related to sign-value). There stretches beyond this for us today the world of radical fetishism, linked to the de-signification and limitless operation of the real - to the sign's becoming pure object once again, before or beyond any metaphor.”

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Book:The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact
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“One of the variants of this lethal accomplishment, of this acting-out, is the realization of all metaphors - the collapse of the metaphor into the real. Here, again, we have the phantasm of materializing all that is parable, myth, fable and metaphor. Romain Gary: 'All humanity's metaphors end up becoming realities. I am coming to wonder whether the real aim of science is not a validation of metaphors.”

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“The virtuality of war is not, then, a metaphor. It is the literal passage from reality into fiction, or rather the immediate metamorphosis of the real into fiction. The real is now merely the asymptotic horizon of the Virtual. And it isn't just the reality of the real that's at issue in all this, but the reality of cinema. It's a little like Disneyland: the theme parks are now merely an alibi - masking the fact that the whole context of life has been disneyfied. It's the same with the cinema: the films produced today are merely the visible allegory of the cinematic form that has taken over everything - social and political life, the landscape, war, etc. - the form of life totally scripted for the screen. This is no doubt why cinema is disappearing: because it has passed into reality. Reality is disappearing at the hands of the cinema and cinema is disappearing at the hands of reality. A lethal transfusion in which each loses its specificity. If we view history as a film - which it has become in spite of us - then the truth of information consists in the postsynchronization, dubbing and sub-titling of the film of history.”

RealityCinemaLiteralismVirtualizationDisneyficationMilitary Entertainment Complex
Book:The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact
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