Home > Work > Cool Memories V: 2000 - 2004
101 " There is as little reason to speak of corruption in the political order as of perversion in the psychical order. Our entire mental universe may be said to be perverse: there are in it only defences and evasions, phantasms and duplicity, not to mention obsession and cruelty, ressentiment and the many different nuances of character. Everything about it is immoral. That is how it is, end of story. Any attempt at mental regulation is as pointless as the endeavour of moralizing the social world. The balance is always, as Mandeville rightly said, that of evil by evil. Ideas do not give forth light and their light source is elsewhere. But they have a shadow and that shadow moves with the sun. "
― Jean Baudrillard , Cool Memories V: 2000 - 2004
102 " The Other should be a glorious, not a pitiful Other, an object of admiration not of commiseration, the object of a challenge, not that interactive, democratic Other which is not even really your equal.The Other exists more intensely in the dual relation, in rivalry and challenge, than in interaction, conviviality and cosy multiculturalism. "
103 " Humanity needs injustice, which it can savour through the bitterness, the self-directed Schadenfreude that is one of the variants on the spectrum of misfortune. This mortification is particularly noticeable among the most celebrated, who like to see themselves as betrayed and misunderstood.It is the practice of evil, and hence, in a sense, the inhuman that is the distinctive mark of the human in the animal kingdom .The definition of man is narrowing to the point of merging with his mastication coefficient, his loadbearing polygon, his basic metabolism and his intelligence quotient. "
104 " It is almost normal to lead a double life when you are alone. It is much more difficult when there are two of you.At last, a genuine madman in the street - someone who doesn't need amobile phone to talk to himself.Some encounters stay in the memory thanks to the tone of voice, which you remember on an infra-red scale, so to speak, without being able to pin-point it. "
105 " He who has everything will keep what he has. From him who has nothing, even that will be taken away.Philosophy leads to death, sociology leads to suicide.Shrivelled anus, short-windedness, limp member, short-sightedness, angioplastied ventricle, urethral polyps - but a clear, hard head. "
106 " Choose: of all wars, the one that will not take place.Of all possibilities, the least probable. Of all concepts, the most inconceivable.Of all meditations, the most untimely.Of all possible enemies, the one beneath all suspicion. "
107 " Paris-Plage: the operation would be perfect if an oil slick drifted in to pollute this pretty little beach. Then the illusion would be total: the beach attendants would be transformed into ecological clean-up agents; they would have stopped sunbathing stupid. WTC: no trace of the bodies of the 3,000 victims. It's as though they had been dropped into quicklime. All the images without the sound, silent, vitrified, pellicularized. The scrap metal and the rubble are auctioned off. The event has more or less vanished into thin air.The pope has reached the state of 'martyr', that is to say, of witness: witness to the possibility that the human race can live beyond death. Living experience of brain-death, of spirituality on a life-support system, of automatic piloting of the vital functions in their death throes.A great model for future generations "
108 " It is the same with endings as it is with death - the dream is never to arrive at them, and simultaneously to pass beyond.'Each of the moments separating me from the ordeal seemed infinitely divisible - the particle of time to come being always the one that would enable me at last to face reality and concentrate' (Updike).Another miracle of division: given that life expectancy is constantly increasing, we gain time against the final reckoning as we go on. Thanks to the indefinite interval involved, and applying the paradox of Achilles and the tortoise, we shall never catch up with death.We have become virtually immortal. "
109 " Being secondarily pessimistic - believing that the good always ends up going bad. And secondarily optimistic - believing that the system is best placed to put an end to itself.After the three great revolutions - Galileo and the end of geocentrism, Darwin and the theory of evolution, Freud and the 'discovery' of the Unconscious - our contemporary revolution is that of the virtual and of information technology, and it distances man increasingly from sovereignty over the natural world, of which he was the centre in the days when the earth did not yet revolve around the sun, in the days when he was not yet descended from the apes. He is becoming increasingly eccentric today - a peripheral, artificial extension of his own model. "
110 " Concordance between a 'real' situation and a discourse ought to be an indication of 'truth', but it is, for that very reason, philosophically unbearable. "