Abra Los Ojos Quotes

“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

“Thought, too, while scattering its traces, leaves the literalness of the world intact, leaves intact the pure literalness of objects, though it sends their meaning up in smoke.
Shadowing the world - following the word like its shadow to cover up its tracks and to show that, behind its supposed ends, it is going nowhere.
It is in this way that thought connects up with the event of the world - not with the occurrence of a totality that is nowhere to be found, but with the occurrence of the world as it is, in its unpredictable coming-to-pass.
It is in this way that we attain to the literalness, the material imagining, of the world, by the elimination of whatever obstacle may be between the image and the gaze.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact

“We do not have to plump for the one or the other [extreme].
We experience the simultaneous attraction and repulsion of the event and the non-event. Just as, according to Hannah Arendt, we are confronted in any action with the unforeseeable and the irreversible.
But, since the irreversible today is the movement towards virtual ascendancy over the world, towards total control and technological 'enframing', towards the tyranny of absolute prevention and technical security, we have left to us only the unpredictable, the luck of the event.
And just as Mallarmé said that a throw of the dice would never abolish chance - that is to say, there would never be an ultimate dice throw which, by its automatic perfection, would put an end to chance - so we may hope that virtual programming will never abolish events.
Never will the point of technical perfection and absolute prevention be reached where the fateful event can be said to have disappeared.
There will always be a chance for the troubling strangeness [das Unheimliche] of the event, as against the troubling monotony of the global order.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact