The Transparency of Evil Quotes

“Travel was once a means of being elsewhere, or of being nowhere. Today it is the only way we have of feeling that we are somewhere. At home, surrounded by information, by screens, I am no longer anywhere, but rather everywhere in the world at once, in the midst of a universal banality - a banality that is the same in every country. To arrive in a new city, or in a new language, is suddenly to find oneself here and nowhere else. The body rediscovers how to look. Delivered from images, it rediscovers the imagination.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena

“Everyone seeks their look. Since it is no longer possible to base any claim on one's own existence, there is nothing for it but to perform an appearing act without concerning oneself with being - or even with being seen. So it is not: I exist, I am here! but rather: I am visible, I am an image -look! look! This is not even narcissism, merely an extraversion without depth, a sort of self-promot­ing ingenuousness whereby everyone becomes the manager of their own appearance.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena

“Silence is banished from our screens; it has no place in communication. Media images (and media texts resemble media images in every way) never fall silent: images and messages must follow one upon the other without interruption. But silence is exactly that - a blip in the circuitry, that minor catastrophe, that slip which, on television for instance, becomes
highly meaningful - a break laden now with anxiety, now with jubilation, which confirms the fact that all this communication is basically nothing but a rigid script, an uninterrupted fiction designed to free us not only from the void of the television screen but equally from the void of our own mental screen, whose images we wait on with the same fascination.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena

“Each category is generalized to the greatest possible extent, so that it eventually loses all specificity and is reabsorbed by all the other categories. When everything is political, nothing is political anymore, the word itself is meaningless. When everything is sexual, nothing is sexual any more, and sex loses its determinants. When everything is aesthetic, nothing is beautiful or ugly any more, and art itself disappears.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena

“If men create intelligent machines, or fantasize about them, it is either because they secretly despair of their own intelligence or because they are in danger of succumbing to the weight of a monstrous and useless intelligence which they seek to exorcize by transferring it to machines, where they can play with it and make fun of it. By entrusting this burdensome intelligence to machines we are released from any responsibility to knowledge, much as entrusting power to politicians allows us to disdain any aspiration of our own to power.
If men dream of machines that are unique, that are endowed with genius, it is because they despair of their own uniqueness, or because they prefer to do without it - to enjoy it by proxy, so to speak, thanks to machines. What such machines offer is the spectacle of thought, and in manipulating them people devote themselves more to the spectacle of thought than to thought itself.
It is not for nothing that they are described as 'virtual', for they put thought on hold indefinitely, tying its emergence to the achievement of a complete knowledge. The act of thinking itself is thus put off for ever. Indeed, the question of thought can no more be raised than the question of the freedom of future generations, who will pass through life as we travel through the air, strapped into their seats. These Men of Artificial Intelligence will traverse their own mental space bound hand and foot to their computers. Immobile in front of his computer, Virtual Man makes love via the screen and gives lessons by means of the teleconference. He is a physical - and no doubt also a mental cripple. That is the price he pays for being operational. Just as eyeglasses and contact lenses will arguably one day evolve into implanted prostheses for a species that has lost its sight, it is similarly to be feared that artificial intelligence and the hardware that supports it will become a mental prosthesis for a species without the capacity for thought.
Artificial intelligence is devoid of intelligence because it is devoid of artifice.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena

“For everything that has not successfully transcended itself can only fall prey to revivals without end.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena

“Something escapes us, and we are escaping from ourselves, or losing ourselves, as part of an irreversible process; we have now passed some point of no return, the point where the contradictoriness of things ended, and we find ourselves, still alive, in a universe of non-contradiction, of enthusiasm, of ecstasy - of stupor in the face of a process which, for all its irreversibility, is bereft of meaning.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena

“At the fourth, the fractal (or viral, or radiant) stage of value, there is no point of reference at all, and value radiates in all directions, occupying all interstices, without reference to anything whatsoever, by virtue of pure contiguity. At the fractal stage there is no longer any equivalence, whether natural or general. Properly speaking there is now no law of value, merely a sort of epidemic of value, a sort of general metastasis of value, a haphazard proliferation and dispersal of value. Indeed, we should really no longer speak of 'value' at all, for this kind of propagation or chain reaction makes all valuation possible.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena

“A thing which has lost its idea is like the man who has lost his shadow, and it must either fall under the sway of madness or perish.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena

“All liberation affects Good and Evil equally. The liberation of morals and minds entails crimes and catastrophes. The liberation of law and pleasure leads inevitably to the liberation of crime.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena

“Surely the extraordinary success of artificial intelligence is attributable to the fact that it frees us from real intelligence, that by hypertrophying thought as an operational process it frees us from thought's ambiguity and from the insoluble puzzle of its relationship to the world. Surely the success of all these technologies is a result of the way in which they make it impossible even to raise the timeless question of liberty. What a relief! Thanks to the machinery of the virtual, all your problems are over! You are no longer either subject or object, no longer either free or alienated - and no longer either one or the other: you are the same, and enraptured by the commutations of that sameness. We have left the hell of other people for the ecstasy of the same, the purgatory of otherness for the artificial paradises of identity. Some might call this an even worse servitude, but Telecomputer Man, having no will of his own, knows nothing of serfdom. Alienation of man by man is a thing of the past: now man is plunged into homeostasis by machines.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena

“Power itself is founded largely on disgust. The whole of advertising, the whole of political discourse, is a public insult to the intelligence, to reason - but an insult in which we collaborate, abjectly subscribing to a silent interaction. The day of hidden persuasion is over: those who govern us now resort unapologetically to arm-twisting pure and simple. The prototype here was a banker got up like a vampire, saying, 'I am after you for your money' . A decade has already gone by since this kind of obscenity was introduced, with the government's blessing, into our social mores. At the time we thought the ad feeble because of its aggressive vulgarity. In point of fact it was a prophetic commercial, full of intimations of the future shape of social relationships, because it operated, precisely, in terms of disgust, avidity and rape. The same goes for pornographic and food advertising, which are also powered by shamelessness and lust, by a strategic logic of violation and anxiety. Nowadays you can seduce a woman with the words, 'I am interested in your cunt' . The same kind of crassness has triumphed in the realm of art, whose mounds of trivia may be reduced to a single pronouncement of the type, 'What we want from you is stupidity and bad taste' . And the fact is that we do succumb to this mass extortion, with its subtle infusion of guilt.
It is true in a sense that nothing really disgusts us any more. In our eclectic culture, which embraces the debris of all others in a promiscuous confusion, nothing is unacceptable. But for this very reason disgust is nevertheless on the increase - the desire to spew out this promiscuity, this indifference to everything no matter how bad, this viscous adherence of opposites. To the extent that this happens, what is on the increase is disgust over the lack of disgust. An allergic temptation to reject everything en bloc: to refuse all the gentle brainwashing, the soft-sold overfeeding, the tolerance, the pressure to embrace synergy and consensus.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena

“We are all transsexuals, just as we are biological mutants in potentia. This is not a biological issue, however: we are all transsexuals symbolically.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena

“[...]Telecomputer Man is assigned to an apparatus, just as the apparatus is assigned to him, by virtue of an involution of each into the other, a refraction of each by the other. The machine does what the human wants it to do, but by the same token the human puts into execution only what the machine has been programmed to do. The operator is working with virtuality: only apparently is the aim to obtain information or to communicate; the real purpose is to explore all the possibilities of a program, rather as a gambler seeks to exhaust the permutations in a game of chance. Consider the way the camera is used now.
Its possibilities are no longer those of a subject who ' 'reflects' the world according to his personal vision; rather, they are the possibilities of the lens, as exploited by the object. The camera is thus a machine that vitiates all will, erases all intentionality and leaves nothing but the pure reflex needed to take pictures. Looking itself disappears without trace, replaced by a lens now in collusion with the object - and hence with an inversion of vision. The magic lies precisely in the subject's retroversion to a camera obscura - the reduction of his vision to the impersonal vision of a mechanical device. In a mirror, it is the subject who gives free rein to the realm of the imaginary. In the camera lens, and on-screen in general, it is the object, potentially, that unburdens itself - to the benefit of all media and telecommunications techniques.
This is why images of anything are now a possibility. This is why everything is translatable into computer terms, commutable into digital form, just as each individual is commutable into his own particular genetic code. (The whole object, in fact, is to exhaust all the virtualities of such analogues of the genetic code: this is one of artificial intelligence's most fundamental aspects.) What this means on a more concrete level is that there is no longer any such thing as an act or event which is not refracted into a technical image or onto a screen, any such thing as an action which does not in some sense want to be photographed, filmed or tape-recorded, does not desire to be stored in memory so as to become reproducible for all eternity. No such thing as an action which does not aspire to self-transcendence into a virtual eternity - not, now, the durable eternity that follows death, but rather the ephemeral eternity of ever-ramifying artificial memory.
The compulsion of the virtual is the compulsion to exist in potentia on all screens, to be embedded in all programs, and it acquires a magical force: the Siren call of the black box.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena

“Where is the freedom in all this? Nowhere! There is no choice here, no final decision. All decisions concerning networks, screens, information or communication are serial in character, partial, fragmentary, fractal. A mere succession of partial decisions, a microscopic series of partial sequences and objectives, constitute as much the photographer's way of proceeding as that of Telecomputer Man in general, or even that called for by our own most trivial television viewing. All such behaviour is structured in quantum fashion, composed of haphazard sequences of discrete decisions. The fascination derives from the pull of the black box, the appeal of an uncertainty which puts paid to our freedom.
Am I a man or a machine? This anthropological question no longer has an answer. We are thus in some sense witness to the end of anthropology, now being conjured away by the most recent machines and technologies. The uncertainty here is born of the perfecting of machine networks, just as sexual uncertainty (Am I a man or a woman? What has the difference between the sexes become?) is born of increasingly sophisticated manipulation of the unconscious and of the body, and just as science's uncertainty about the status of its object is born of the sophistication of analysis in the microsciences.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena

“Once upon a time there was much talk of the apathy of the masses. Their silence was the crucial fact for an earlier generation. Today, however, the masses act not by deflection but by infection, tainting opinion polls and forecasts with their multifarious phantasies. Their abstention and their silence are no longer determining factors (that stage was still nihilistic); what counts now is their use of the cogs in the workings of uncertainty. Where the masses once sported with their voluntary servitude, they now sport with their involuntary incertitude. Unbeknownst to the experts who scrutinize them and the manipulators who believe they can influence them, they have grasped the fact that politics is virtually dead, and that they now have a new game to play, just as exciting as the ups and downs of the stock market. This game enables them to make audiences, charismas, levels of prestige and the market prices of images dance up and down with an intolerable facility. The masses had been deliberately demoralized and de-ideologized in order that they might become the live prey of probability theory, but now it is they who destabilize all images and play games with political truth.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena

“Wherever exchange is impossible, what we encounter is terror. Any radical otherness at all is thus the epicentre of a terror: the terror that such otherness holds, by virtue of its very existence, for the normal world. And the terror that this world exercises upon that otherness in order to annihilate it.
Over recent centuries all forms of violent otherness have been incorporated, willingly or under threat of force, into a discourse of difference which simultaneously implies inclusion and exclusion, recognition and discrimination.
Childhood, lunacy, death, primitive societies - all have been categorized, integrated and absorbed as parts of a universal harmony. Madness, once its exclusionary status had been revoked, was caught up in the far subtler toils of psychology. The dead, as soon as they were recognized in their identity as such, were banished to outlying cemeteries - kept at such a distance that the face of death itself was lost. As for Indians, their right to exist was no sooner accorded them than they were confined to reservations. These are the vicissitudes of a logic of difference.
Racism does not exist so long as the other remains Other, so long as the Stranger remains foreign. It comes into existence when the other becomes merely different - that is to say, dangerously similar. This is the moment when the inclination to keep the other at a distance comes into being.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena

“In this sense, therefore, inasmuch as we have access to neither the beautiful nor the ugly, and are incapable of judging, we are condemned to indifference. Beyond this indifference, however, another kind of fascination emerges, a fascination which replaces aesthetic pleasure. For, once liberated from their respective constraints, the beautiful and the ugly, in a sense, multiply: they become more beautiful than beautiful, more ugly than ugly.
Thus painting currently cultivates, if not ugliness exactly - which remains an aesthetic value - then the uglier-than-ugly (the 'bad', the 'worse', kitsch), an ugliness raised to the second power because it is liberated from any relationship with its opposite. Once freed from the 'true' Mondrian, we are at liberty to 'out-Mondrian Mondrian'; freed from the true naifs, we can paint in a way that is 'more naif than naif', and so on. And once freed from reality, we can produce the 'realer than real' - hyperrealism. It was in fact with hyperrealism and pop art that everything began, that everyday life was raised to the ironic power of photographic realism. Today this escalation has caught up every form of art, every style; and all, without discrimination, have entered the transaesthetic world of simulation.
There is a parallel to this escalation in the art market itself. Here too, because an end has been put to any deference to the law of value, to the logic of commodities, everything has become 'more expensive than expensive' - expensive, as it were, squared. Prices are exorbitant - the bidding has gone through the roof. Just as the abandonment of all aesthetic ground rules provokes a kind of brush fire of aesthetic values, so the loss of all reference to the laws of exchange means that the market hurtles into unrestrained speculation.
The frenzy, the folly, the sheer excess are the same. The promotional ignition of art is directly linked to the impossibility of all aesthetic evaluation.
In the absence of value judgements, value goes up in flames. And it goes up in a sort of ecstasy.
There are two art markets today. One is still regulated by a hierarchy of values, even if these are already of a speculative kind. The other resembles nothing so much as floating and uncontrollable capital in the financial market: it is pure speculation, movement for movement's sake, with no apparent purpose other than to defy the law of value. This second art market has much in common with poker or potlatch - it is a kind of space opera in the hyperspace of value. Should we be scandalized? No. There is nothing immoral here. Just as present-day art is beyond beautiful and ugly, the market, for its part, is beyond good and evil.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena

“It is not even remotely a matter of rehabilitating the Aboriginals, or finding them a place in the chorus of human rights, for their revenge lies elsewhere. It lies in their power to destabilize Western rule. It lies in their phantom presence, their viral, spectral presence in the synapses of our brains, in the circuitry of our rocketship, as 'Alien'; in the way in which the Whites have caught the virus of origins, of Indianness, of Aboriginality, of Patagonicity. We murdered all this, but now it infects our blood, into which it has been inexorably transfused and infiltrated. The revenge of the colonized is in no sense the reappropriation by Indians or Aboriginals of their lands, privileges or autonomy: that is our victory. Rather, that revenge may be seen in the way in which the Whites have been mysteriously made aware of the disarray of their own culture, the way in which they have been overwhelmed by an ancestral torpor and are now succumbing little by little to the grip of 'dreamtime'. This reversal is a worldwide phenomenon. It is now becoming clear that everything we once thought dead and buried, everything we thought left behind for ever by the ineluctable march of universal progress, is not dead at all, but on the contrary likely to return - not as some archaic or nostalgic vestige (all our indefatigable museumification notwithstanding), but with a vehemence and a virulence that are modern in every sense - and to reach the very heart of our ultrasophisticated but ultra-vulnerable systems, which it will easily convulse from within without mounting a frontal attack. Such is the destiny of radical otherness - a destiny that no homily of reconciliation and no apologia for difference is going to alter.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena

“We can no longer speak Evil.
All we can do is discourse on the rights of man - a discourse which is pious, weak, useless and hypocritical, its supposed value deriving from the Enlightenment belief in a natural attraction of the Good, from an idealized view of human relationships (whereas Evil can manifestly be dealt with only by means of Evil).
What is more, even this Good qua ideal value is invariably deployed in a self-defensive, austerity-loving, negative and reactive mode. All the talk is of the minimizing of Evil, the prevention of violence: nothing but security. This is the condescending and depressive power of good intentions, a power that can dream of nothing except rectitude in the world, that refuses even to consider a bending of Evil, or an intelligence of Evil.
There can be a 'right' to speech only if speech is defined as the 'free' expression of an individual. Where speech is conceived of as a form implying reciprocity, collusion, antagonism or seduction, the notion of right can have no possible meaning.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena

“Olumsuzlama dünyanın en basit şeyidir. Bu yüzden hedefte anlaşamayan büyük kitleler burda buluşur.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena

“Reading a screenful of information is quite a different thing from looking. It is a digital form of exploration in which the eye moves along an endless broken line. The relationship to the interlocutor in communication, like the relationship to knowledge in data-handling, is similar: tactile and exploratory. A computer-generated voice, even a voice over the telephone, is a tactile voice, neutral and functional. It is no longer in fact exactly a voice, any more than looking at a screen is exactly looking. The whole paradigm of the sensory has changed. The tactility here is not the organic sense of touch: it implies merely an epidermal contiguity of eye and image, the collapse of the aesthetic distance involved in looking. We draw ever closer to the surface of the screen; our gaze is, as it were, strewn across the image. We no longer have the spectator's distance from the stage - all theatrical conventions are gone. That we fall so easily into the screen's coma of the imagination is due to the fact that the screen presents a perpetual void that we are invited to fill. Proxemics of images: promiscuity of images: tactile pornography of images. Yet the image is always light years away. It is invariably a tele-image - an image located at a very special kind of distance which can only be described as unbridgeable by the body.
The body can cross the distance that separates it from language, from the stage, or from the mirror - this is what keeps it human and allows it to partake in exchange. But the screen is merely virtual - and hence unbridgeable. This is why it partakes only of that abstract - definitively abstract - form known as communication.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena

“A strategy of this kind is far from innocent. It is the strategy adopted by children. Whereas adults make children believe that they, the adults, are adults, children for their part let adults believe that they, the children, are children. Of these two strategies the second is the subtler, for while adults believe that they are adults, children do not believe that they are children. They are children, but they do not believe it. They sail under the flag of childhood as under a flag of convenience. The ruse (and the seduction) is total. Children are not far removed, in fact, from Schnitzler's microbes: they are, as it were, a different species, and their vitality and development announce the eventual destruction of the superior - adult - world that surrounds them. Childhood haunts the adult universe as a subtle and deadly presence. It is in this sense that the child is other to the adult: the child is the adult's destiny, the adult is his most subtly distilled form. The child nevertheless repudiates the adult - all the while moving within him with all the grace of those who have no will of their own.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena

“One may be no longer capable of belief, yet remain capable of believing in those who believe. One may be no longer capable of loving, except for loving someone who loves. One may no longer know what one wants, yet want what someone else wants. A kind of generalized derogation is occurring, whereby wish, ability and knowledge, though not forsaken, are being surrendered to another, a second agency. Already, in any case, the filter of screens, photographs, video images and news reporting allows us access only to that which has already been seen by others. We are indeed incapable of apprehending anything that has not already been seen. We have assigned machines the task of seeing for us - just as, before long, we shall assign computers the task of making all our decisions. All our functions, even organic and sensory ones, are relayed by satellite. A comparison may even be drawn with the mental division of pleasure: just as desire is not need, so pleasure is not satisfaction. Desire and pleasure repose on need and satisfaction, which are strategies of the abovementioned second agency.
At all events, it is better to be controlled by someone else than by oneself. Better to be oppressed, exploited, persecuted and manipulated by someone other than by oneself.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena

“The only way to avoid encountering someone is to follow him (according to a principle opposed to the principle of the labyrinth, where you follow someone so that you do not lose him). Implicit in the situation, however, is the dramatic moment when the one being followed, suddenly intuiting, suddenly becoming conscious that there is someone behind him, swings round and spots his pursuer. Then the rules are reversed, and the hunter becomes the hunted (for there is no escaping laterally). The only truly dramatic point is this unexpected turning-round of the other, who insists upon knowing and damns the consequences.
This reversal does in fact occur in the Venice scenario. The man comes towards her and asks her: 'What do you want?' She wants nothing. No mystery story, no love story. This answer is intolerable, and implies possible murder, possible death. Radical otherness always embodies the risk of death.
S.'s anxiety revolves entirely around this violent revelation: the possibility of getting herself unmasked - the very thing she is trying to avoid. 'I cannot go on following him. He must be uneasy, he must be wondering if I am here, behind him - surely he is thinking about me now - so I shall have to keep track of him in some other way.'
S. could have met this man, seen him, spoken to him. But in that case she would never have produced this secret form of the existence of the Other. The Other is the one whose destiny one becomes, not by making his acquaintance in difference and dialogue but by entering into him as into something secret, something forever separate. Not by engaging in a conversation with him as interlocutor, but by entering into him as his shadow, as his double, as his image, by embracing the Other the better to wipe out his tracks, the better to strip him of his shadow. The Other is never the one with whom we communicate: he is the one whom we follow - and who follows us.
The other is never naturally the other: the other must be rendered other by being seduced, by being made alien to himself, even by being destroyed - if there is no alternative (but in fact there are subtler ways of achieving this end).”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena

“It is not absurd to suppose that the extermination of man begins with the extermination of man's germs. One has only to consider the human being himself, complete with his emotions, his passions, his laughter, his sex and his secretions, to conclude that man is nothing but a dirty little germ - an irrational virus marring a universe of transparency. Once he has been purged, once everything has been cleaned up and all infection - whether of a social or a bacillary kind - has been driven out, then only the virus of sadness will remain in a mortally clean and mortally sophisticated world.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena

“Photography is our exorcism. Primitive society had its masks, bourgeois society its mirrors, and we have our images.
We believe that we bend the world to our will by means of technology. In fact it is the world that imposes its will upon us with the aid of technology, and the surprise occasioned by this turning of the tables is considerable.
You think you are photographing a scene for the pleasure of it, but in fact it is the scene that demands to be photographed, and you are merely part of the decor in the pictorial order it dictates. The subject is no more than the funnel through which things in their irony make their appearance. The image is the ideal medium for the vast self-promotion campaign undertaken by the world and by objects - forcing our imagination into self-effacement, our passions into extraversion, and shattering the mirror which we hold out (hypocritically, moreover) in order to capture them.
The miraculous thing about the present period is that appearances, so long reduced to a voluntary servitude, have now become sovereign, and turned back towards (and against) us by means of the very technology from which we had earlier evicted them. Today they come from elsewhere, from their own place, from the heart of their banality, of their objectality: they surge forth on all sides, multiplying of their own accord, and joyfully. (The joy of taking photographs is an objective joy, and anyone who has never felt the objective transports of the image, some morning, in some town or desert, will never understand the pataphysical delicacy of the world.)”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena

“In the face of the threats of a total weightlessness, an unbearable lightness of being, a universal promiscuity and a linearity of processes liable to plunge us into the void, the sudden whirlpools that we dub catastrophes are really the thing that saves us from catastrophe. Anomalies and aberrations of this kind re-create zones of gravity and density that counter dispersion. It may be hazarded that this is how our societies secrete their own peculiar version of an accursed share, much after the fashion of those tribal peoples who used to dispose of their surplus population by means of an oceanic suicide: the homeopathic suicide of a few serving to maintain the homeostatic balance of the group.
So the actual catastrophe may turn out to be a carefully modulated strategy of our species - or, more precisely, our viruses, our extreme phenomena, which are most definitively real, albeit localized, may be what allow us to preserve the energy of that virtual catastrophe which is the motor of all our processes, whether economic or political, artistic or historical.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena

“The simulation of Western values is universal once one gets beyond the boundaries of our culture. Is it not true, though, that in our heart of hearts we ourselves, who are neither Alakaluf nor Aboriginal, neither Dogon nor Arab, fail signally to take our own values seriously? Do we not embrace them with the same affectation and inner unconcern - and are we not ourselves equally unimpressed by all our shows of force, all our technological and ideological pretensions? Nevertheless, it will be a long time before the utopian abstraction of our universal vision of differences is demolished in our own eyes, whereas all other cultures have already given their own response - namely, universal indifference.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena

“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.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena