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The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena

Book by Jean Baudrillard · 2 quotes · Otherness, Fate, Other

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The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena Quotes

“By contrast, the constellations of unwillingness, of repulsion and disgust, are more solid than ever. It seems that this has generated a new energy, a counterenergy, a force that has taken the place of desire in us, a viral abreaction in response to whatever has replaced the world, the body and sex for us. Today only distaste is determined - tastes are determinate no longer. Only rejections are violent - projects are violent no longer. Our actions, our undertakings, our sicknesses have less and less in the way of 'objective' motives: they arise for the most part from a concealed self-disgust, an unacknowledged empty legacy which causes us to try to get rid of our energy by whatever means. A kind of exorcism, then, rather than a will to action. Could this be the principle of Evil in a new form, one not far removed from magic - whose epicentre, as we know, is, precisely, exorcism?”

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Book:The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena
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“Laughter itself is more often than not a vital abreaction to the disgust we feel for the monstrous mixing and promiscuity that confront us. But for all that we may gag on the absence of differentiation, it still fascinates us. We love to mix everything up, even if it simultaneously repels us. The reaction whereby the organism seeks to preserve its symbolic integrity is a vital one, even if the price paid is life itself (as in the rejection of a transplanted heart). Why would bodies not resist the arbitrary swapping of organs and cells? Also: why do cells, in cancer, refuse to carry out their assigned functions?”

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Book:The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena
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