Innocuousness Quotes

“In this sense, in precisely the same way as Canetti conceives vengeance, evil too is automatic.
You cannot will it. That is an illusion and a misconception. The evil you can will, the evil you can do and which, most of the time, merges with violence, suffering and death, has nothing to do with this reversible form of evil. We might even say that those who deliberately practise evil certainly have no insight into it, since their act supposes the intentionality of a subject, whereas this reversibility of evil is the reversibility of a form.
And it is, at bottom, the form itself that is intelligent, insightful: with evil it is not a question of an object to be understood; we are dealing with a form that understands us.
In the 'intelligence of evil' we have to understand that it is evil that is intelligent, that it is it which thinks us - in the sense that it is implied automatically in every one of our acts.
For it is not possible for any act whatever or any kind of talk not to have two sides to it; not to have a reverse side, and hence a dual existence. And this contrary to any finality or objective determination.
This dual form is irreducible, indissociable from all existence. It is therefore pointless to wish to localize it and even more so to wish to denounce it. The denunciation of evil is still of the order of morality, of a moral evaluation.
Now, evil is immoral, not in the way a crime is immoral, but in the way a form is. And the intelligence of evil itself is immoral - it does not aspire to any value judgement, it does not do evil, it speaks it.
The idea of evil as a malign force, a maleficent agency, a deliberate perversion of the order of the world, is a deep-rooted superstition.
It is echoed at the world level in the phantasmic projection of the Axis of Evil, and in the Manichaean struggle against that power.
This is all part of the same imaginary.
Hence the principle of the prevention, the forestalling, the prophylaxis, of evil; rather than morality or metaphysics, what we have today is an infection, a microbial epidemic, the corruption of a world whose predestined end is presumed to lie in good.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact