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The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena

Book by Jean Baudrillard · 5 quotes · Otherness, Fate, Other

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The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena Quotes

“The risibility of our altruistic 'understanding' is rivalled only by the profound contempt it is designed to conceal. For 'We respect the fact that you are different' read: 'You people who are underdeveloped would do well to hang on to this distinction because it is all you have left' . (The signs of folklore and poverty are excellent markers of difference.) Nothing could be more contemptuous - or more contemptible - than this attitude, which exemplifies the most radical form of incomprehension that exists. It has nothing to do, however, with what Segalen calls 'eternal incomprehensibility' . Rather, it is a product of eternal stupidity - of that stupidity which endures for ever in its essential arrogance, feeding on the differentness of other people. Other cultures, meanwhile, have never laid claim to universality. Nor did they ever claim to be different - until difference was forcibly injected into them as part of a sort of cultural opium war. They live on the basis of their own singularity, their own exceptionality, on the irreducibility of their own rites and values. They find no comfort in the lethal illusion that all differences can be reconciled - an illusion that for them spells only annihilation. To master the universal symbols of otherness and difference is to master the world. Those who conceptualize difference are anthropologically superior - naturally, because it is they who invented anthropology. And they have all the rights, because rights, too, are their invention. Those who do not conceptualize difference, who do not play the game of difference, must be exterminated. The Indians of America, when the Spanish landed, are a case in point. They understood nothing about difference; they inhabited radical otherness. (The Spaniards were not different in their eyes: they were simply gods, and that was that.) This is the reason for the fury with which the Spaniards set about destroying these peoples, a fury for which there was no religious justification, nor economic justification, nor any other kind of justification, except for the fact that the Indians were guilty of an absolute crime: their failure to understand difference. When they found themselves obliged to become part of an otherness no longer radical, but negotiable under the aegis of the universal concept, they preferred mass self-immolation - whence the fervour with which they, for their part, allowed themselves to die: a counterpart to the Spaniards' mad urge to kill. The Indians' strange collusion in their own extermination represented their only way of keeping the secret of otherness.”

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“This being is the other after the death of the Other - not the same other at all: the other that results from the denial of the Other. The only interaction involved, in reality, belongs to the medium alone: to the machine become invisible. Mechanical automata still played on the difference between man and machine, and on the charm of this difference - something with which today's interactive and simulating automata are no longer concerned. Man and machine have become isomorphic and indifferent to each other: neither is other to the other. The computer has no other. That is why the computer is not intelligent. Intelligence comes to us from the other - always. That is why computers perform so well. Champions of mental arithmetic and idiots savants are autistic - minds for which the other does not exist and which, for that very reason, are endowed with strange powers. This is the strength, too, of the integrated circuit (the power of thought-transference might also be considered in this connection). Such is the power of abstraction. Machines work more quickly because they are unlinked to any otherness. Networks connect them up to one another like an immense umbilical cord joining one intelligence and its twin. Homeostasis between one and the same: all otherness has been confiscated by the machine. Does otherness survive anywhere after being banished from this entire psychodramatic superstructure? Is there a physics as well as a metaphysics of the Other? Is there a dual, not just a dialectical, form of otherness? Is there still a form of the Other as destiny, and not merely as a psychological or social partner of convenience?”

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“Consequently the other is all of a sudden no longer there to be exterminated, hated, rejected or seduced, but instead to be understood, liberated, coddled, recognized. In addition to the Rights of Man, we now also need the Rights of the Other. In a way we already have these, in the shape of a universal Right to be Different. For the orgy is also an orgy of political and psychological comprehension of the other - even to the point of resurrecting the other in places where the other is no longer to be found. Where the Other was, there has the Same come to be. And where there is no longer anything, there the Other must come to be. We are no longer living the drama of otherness. We are living the psychodrama of otherness, just as we are living the psychodrama of 'sociality', the psychodrama of sexuality, the psychodrama of the body - and the melodrama of all the above, courtesy of analytic metadiscourses. Otherness has become sociodramatic, semiodramatic, melodramatic.”

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Book:The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena
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“All we do in psychodrama - the psychodrama of contacts, of psychological tests, of interfacing - is acrobatically simulate and dramatize the absence of the other. Not only is otherness absent everywhere in this artificial dramaturgy, but the subject has also quietly become indifferent to his own subjectivity, to his own alienation, just as the modern political animal has become indifferent to his own political opinions. This subject becomes transparent, spectral (to borrow Marc Guillaume's word) - and hence interactive. For in interactivity the subject is the other to no one. Inasmuch as he is indifferent to himself, it is as though he had been reified alive - but without his double, without his shadow, without his other. Having paid this price, the subject becomes a candidate for all possible combinations, all possible connections. The interactive being is therefore born not through a new form of exchange but through the disappearance of the social, the disappearance of otherness.”

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Book:The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena
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