The Illusion of the End Quotes

“All we have left of liberty is an ad-man's illusion.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End

“Every set of phenomena, whether cultural totality or sequence of events, has to be fragmented, disjointed, so that it can be sent down the circuits; every kind of language has to be resolved into a binary formulation so that it can circulate not, any longer, in our memories, but in the luminous, electronic memory of the computers. No human language can withstand the speed of light. No event can withstand being beamed across the whole planet. No meaning can withstand acceleration. No history can withstand the centrifugation of facts or their being short-circuited in real time (to pursue the same train of thought: no sexuality can withstand being liberated, no culture can withstand being hyped, no truth can withstand being verified, etc.).”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End

“No religion has ever demanded as much of the individual as such, and it might be said that. radical individualism is the very form of religious integrism [fundamentalism]. The modern religion of selfabnegation, of all-out operationality - the worst one of all since it recoups all the energy of irreligion, all the energy released by the eclipsing of traditional religions. This is the greatest irreligious conversion in history. By comparison with this voluntary holocaust, this escalation of sacrifice, the so-called return of religion which we pretend to fear - these occasional upsurges of religiosity or traditional integrism - is negligible. It merely conceals the fundamental integrism of this consensual society, the terroristic fundamentalism of this new sacrificial religion of performance. It masks the fact that society as a whole is moving towards religious metastasis. Religious effects are taken too seriously in their religious dimension and not seriously enough as effects, that is, as masking the true process. This is a screen tumour, a fixation abscess which, by focusing it, allows the evil to be exorcized at little cost, sparing the need to analyse the whole society, to analyse 'democratic' society, which is virtually converted to integrism and revisionism, to security and protectionism and, at the same time, to the techniques of crude promotion and intimidation.
This 'post-modern' individualism arises not out of a problematic of liberty and liberation, but out of a liberalization of slave networks and circuits, that is, an individual diffraction of the programmed ensembles, a metamorphosis of the macro-structures into innumerable particles which bear within them all the stigmata of the networks and circuits - each one forming its own micro-network and micro-circuit, each one reviving for itself, in its micro-universe, the now useless totalitarianism of the whole.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End

“Might one suggest to the people that they storm the opera house and tear it down on the symbolic date of 14 July? Might one suggest that they parade the bloody heads of our modern cultural governors on the end of pikestaffs?
But we no longer make history. We have become reconciled with it and protect it like an endangered masterpiece. Times have changed.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End

“In any case, in all registers - sex, culture, the economy, the media, politics - the concepts of liberty and liberation are diametrically opposed, unconditional liberation being the surest way of keeping liberty at bay. Liberty operates in a field that is limited and transcendent, in the symbolic space of the subject, where he is confronted with his own finality, his own destiny, whereas liberation operates in a potentially unlimited space. It is a quasi-physical process (its prototype is the liberation or release of energy) which pushes every function, every force, every individual to the limit of its possibilities and even beyond, where it is no longer answerable for its own actions. That is why liberty is a critical form, whereas liberation is a potentially catastrophic form. The former confronts the subject with his own alienation and its overcoming. The other leads to metastases, chain reactions, the disconnection of all elements and, finally, the radical expropriation of the subject. Liberation is the effective realization of the metaphor of liberty and, in this sense, it is also its end. There is no resolving the dilemma posed by these two. But the present system has found the final solution to both - in liberalization. Not the free subject any longer, but the liberal individual. No longer the liberation, but the liberalization of exchanges. From liberty to liberation, from liberation to liberalization. The extreme point of highest dilution, minimal intensity, where the problem of liberty cannot even be posed any longer.
And, in the process, the concept of alienation disappears. This new, cloned, metastatic, interactive individual is not alienated any longer, but self-identical. He no longer differs from himself and is, therefore, indifferent to himself. This indifference to oneself is at the heart of the more general problem of the indifference of institutions or of the political [le politique], etc., to themselves.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End

“Another form of this identity mania is our contemporary individualism. Neo-individualism, bent on performance and entrepreneurial heroism, athletic individualism (Alain Ehrenberg) - possibly neohedonistic, syncretic and tribal - bears no relation to the hero of bourgeois individualism. This latter, the hero of subjectivity, of breaking with the old, of free will and Stirner's radical singularity, is well and truly dead. Even Riesman's 'self-directed' individuality has disappeared from the horizon of the social as it has from the purview of the human sciences. The neo-individual is, by contrast, the purest product of 'other-directedness': an interactive, communicational particle, plugged into the network, getting continuous feedback, · and with a clear vision of the podium in his mind's eye. Everyone is ready to turn themselves, depending on their various advantages or handicaps, into an autonomous micro-particle. And why not? This is the age of the daily invention of new particles. Why should the innumerable particles of our society not each demand their own identity and personal 'charm'? Obviously, this gives rise to chaotic sets and Brownian motion, in which freedom is merely the statistical endproduct of impacts between singularities and no longer, therefore, in any sense a philosophical problem.
This individual is not an individual at all. He is a pentito of subjectivity and alienation, of the heroic appropriation of himself. His only aim is the technical appropriation of the self. He is a convert to the sacrificial religion of performance, efficiency, stress and time-pressure - a much fiercer liturgy than that of production - total mortification and unremitting sacrifice to the divinities of data [information], total exploitation of oneself by oneself, the ultimate in alienation.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End

“No solution has been found to the dramatic situation of the under-developed, and none will be found since their drama has now been overtaken by that of the overdeveloped, of the rich nations. The psychodrama of congestion, saturation, super-abundance, neurosis and the breaking of blood vessels which haunts us - the drama of the excess of means over ends - calls more urgently for attention than that of penury, lack and poverty.
That is where the most imminent danger of catastrophe resides, in the societies which have run out of emptiness.
Artificial catastrophes, like the beneficial aspects of civilization, progress much more quickly than natural ones. The under-developed are still at the primary stage of the natural, unforesee-able catastrophe. We are already at the second stage, that of the manufactured catastrophe - imminent and foreseeable - and we shall soon be at that of the pre-programmed catastrophe, the catastrophe of the third kind, deliberate and experimental. And, paradoxically, it is our pursuit of the means for averting natural catastrophe - the unpredictable form of destiny - which will take us there. Because it is unable to escape it, humanity will pretend to be the author of its destiny. Because it cannot accept being confronted with an end which is uncertain or governed by fate, it will prefer to stage its own death as a species.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End

“Now that the problem of the Wall is out of the way, we can see that it perhaps provided more protection for the West than for Eastern Europe. Now that the triumphal illusion of the West annexing the East - for the greater glory of democracy, of course - has faded, we can sense that it might be the other way about: the East gobbling up the West by blackmailing it with poverty and human rights.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End

“It is possible, then, that the countries of Eastern Europe will pass on to us this model of viral collapse, of a virulence deconstructive of power. In exchange, we might pass on to them our liberal virus, our compulsion for objects and images, media and communication, a virus, in our case, which devastates civil society. One virus for another. At bottom, this could be seen as the last episode in the Cold War, a kind of reciprocal contamination between the two blocs formerly shielded from one another by the existence of the Wall. Behind the apparent victory of the West, it is clear, on the contrary, that the strategic initiative came from the East, not by aggression this time, but by disintegration, by a kind of offensive self-liquidation, catching the whole of the West unawares. In the eternal state of deterrence between the two blocs, a situation from which there was no apparent issue, the advantage could be gained only by the side which, one way or another, ended up disarmed. By force of circumstance, which may have equated with a perception of his own weakness, Gorbachev was able to take this strategic tack of disarmament, the real deconstruction of his own bloc, and thereby of the entire world order. This was, in a way, dying communism's witty parting shot, since the quasi-voluntary destabilization of the Eastern bloc, with the complicity of its peoples, is also a destabilization of the West.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End

“So long as there is a finalistic conception of life and death, the soul, the afterlife and immortality are given, like the world, and there is no cause to believe in them. Do you believe in reality [le réel]? No, of course not: it exists but we do not believe in it. It is like God. Do you believe in God? No, of course not: God exists, but I don't believe in him. To wager that God exists and to believe in him - or that he doesn't exist and not to believe in him - is of such banality as almost to make us doubt the question, while the two propositions 'God exists, but I don't believe in him' and 'God doesn't exist, but I believe in him' both, paradoxically, suggest that, if God exists, there is no need to believe in him, but that if he does not exist, there is every need to believe in him. If something does not exist, you have to believe in it. Belief is not the reflection of existence, it is there for existence, just as language is not the reflection of meaning, it is there in place of meaning.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End