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Why Hasn't Everything Already Disappeared?

Book by Jean Baudrillard · 6 quotes · Duality, Abnormal, Abu Ghraib

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Why Hasn't Everything Already Disappeared? Quotes

“The ABNORMAL individual today is the one who now lives only in a unilateral positive adherence to what he is or what he does. Total subjection and adjustment [gestell] (the perfectly normalized being). Countless individuals have gone over to reality, to their own reality, by eliminating all consideration of the dual and the insoluble. And the mystery of this positive crystallization, of this suspension of doubt about the real - necessarily real - world remains entire. This raises the whole question of the intelligence of Evil.”

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“4. Which gives rise to the truly mysterious question: how does this irresistible global power succeed in undifferentiating the world, in wiping out its extreme singularity? And how can the world be so vulnerable to this liquidation, this dictatorship of integral reality, and how can it be fascinated by it - not exactly fascinated by the real but by the disappearance of reality? There is, however, a corollary to this: what is the source of the fragility of this global power, of its vulnera-bility to minor events, to events that are insignificant in themselves ('rogue events', terrorism, but also the pictures from Abu Ghraib, etc.)?”

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“The problem of reference was already an almost insoluble one: how is it with the real? How is it with representation? But when, with the Virtual, the referent disappears, when it disappears into the technical programming of the image, when there is no longer the situation of the real world set over against a light-sensitive film (it is the same with language, which is like the sensitive film of ideas), then there is, ultimately, no possible representation any more.”

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“Fundamentally, the NORMAL human being always lives in a state of dependency or counter-dependency; he is dependent on his model (whatever it may be: model of action, social or imaginary project), but, at the same time, permanently challenging that model. He is motivated and counter-motivated in the same movement. There is no need for psychology or psychoanalysis or, indeed, any human science for this. These sciences exist only to reconcile the irreconcilable. As a consequence, human beings do always both what they need to for their model to succeed and all that is necessary for it to fail. Here again, there's no need of any weakening or perversion or death drive. It is from their primal duality that human beings derive this antagonistic energy. This is the normal human being and everything that sets about reconciling him with himself and finding a solution to the questions raised above is of the order of superstition and mystifIcation.”

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“If their own duplicity deserts human beings, then the roles are reversed: it is the machine that goes gaga, that falters and becomes perverse, diabolic, ventriloquous. The duplicity merrily goes over to the other side. If subjective irony disappears - and it disappears in the play of the digital- then irony becomes objective. Or it becomes silence.”

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“THE GREAT DISAPPEARANCE IS NOT, then, simply that of the virtual transmutation of things, of the mise en abyme of reality, but that of the diversion of the subject to infinity, of a serial pulverization of consciousness into all the interstices of reality. We might say, at a pinch, that consciousness (the will, freedom) is everywhere; it merges with the course of things and, as a result, becomes superfluous. This is the analysis Cardinal Ratzinger (the Pope) himself made of religion: a religion which accommodates to the world, which attunes itself to the (politcal, social) world, becomes superfluous. It is for the same reason — because it became increasingly merged with objective banality — that art, ceasing to be different from life, has become superfluous.”

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