| 
  • If you are citizen of an European Union member nation, you may not use this service unless you are at least 16 years old.

  • You already know Dokkio is an AI-powered assistant to organize & manage your digital files & messages. Very soon, Dokkio will support Outlook as well as One Drive. Check it out today!

View
 

JeanBaudrillard

Page history last edited by PBworks 17 years ago

 

(1929-2007)

 

"Everywhere one seeks to produce meaning, to make the world signify, to render it visible. We are not, however, in danger of lacking meaning; quite to the contrary, we are gorged with meaning and it is killing us. [...]

 

"What is the point of saying that the world is ecstatic, that it is ironic, that the world is objective? It is those things, that's that. What is the point of saying that it is not? It is so anyway. What is the point of not saying it at all? What theory can do is to defy the world to be more: more objective, more ironic, more seductive, more real or more unreal, what else? It has meaning only in terms of this exorcism. It thus takes on the power of a fatal sign, even more inexorable than reality, and which can perhaps protect us from this inexorable reality, this objectivity, from this brilliance of the world, whose indifference would enrage us if we were lucid.

 

"Let us be Stoics: if the world is fatal, let us be more fatal than it. If it is indifferent, let us be more indifferent. We must conquer the world and seduce it through an indifference that is at least equal to the world's.

 

"To counter the acceleration of networks and circuits the world will seek slowness, inertia. In the same movement, however, it will seek something more rapid than communication: the challenge, the duel. On the one side, inertia and silence. On the other, challenge and the duel. The fatal, the obscene, the reversible, the symbolic, are not concepts, since nothing distinguishes the hypothesis from the assertion. The enunciation of the fatal is also fatal, or it is not at all. In this sense it is indeed a discourse where truth has withdrawn (just as one pulls a chair out from under a person about to sit down)."

 

Folder

Jean Baudrillard, The Ecstasy of Communication. Trans. Bernard and Caroline Schutze. Ed. Sylvere Lotringer. New York: Semiotext(e), 1988: here.

Comments (0)

You don't have permission to comment on this page.