Intelligence Of Evil Quotes

“We can no longer speak Evil.
All we can do is discourse on the rights of man - a discourse which is pious, weak, useless and hypocritical, its supposed value deriving from the Enlightenment belief in a natural attraction of the Good, from an idealized view of human relationships (whereas Evil can manifestly be dealt with only by means of Evil).
What is more, even this Good qua ideal value is invariably deployed in a self-defensive, austerity-loving, negative and reactive mode. All the talk is of the minimizing of Evil, the prevention of violence: nothing but security. This is the condescending and depressive power of good intentions, a power that can dream of nothing except rectitude in the world, that refuses even to consider a bending of Evil, or an intelligence of Evil.
There can be a 'right' to speech only if speech is defined as the 'free' expression of an individual. Where speech is conceived of as a form implying reciprocity, collusion, antagonism or seduction, the notion of right can have no possible meaning.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena

“In all these forms of disavowal, nay-saying and denial, what is at work is not a dialectic of negativity or the 'work of the negative'. It is no longer a question of a thought critical of reality, but of a subversion of reality in its principle, in its very self-evidence. The greater the positivity, the more violent is the - possibly silent - denial. We are all dissidents of reality today, clandestine dissidents most of the time.
If thought cannot be exchanged for reality, then the immediate denial of reality becomes the only reality-based thinking. But this denial does not lead to hope, as Adorno would have it: 'Hope, as it emerges from reality by struggling against it to deny it, is the only manifestation of lucidity.' Whether for good or for ill, this is not true.
Hope, if we were still to have it, would be hope for intelligence of - for insight into - good. Now, what we have left is intelligence of evil, that is to say, intelligence not of a critical reality, but of a reality that has become unreal by dint of positivity, that has become speculative by dint of simulation.
Because it is there to counter a void, the whole enterprise of simulation and information, this aggravation of the real and of knowledge of the real, merely gives rise to an evergreater uncertainty. Its very profusion and relentlessness simply spreads panic. And that uncertainty is irredeemable, as it is made up of all the possible solutions.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact

“Despairing of an aim, salvation or an ideal, we invent for ourselves the easiest solution: happiness.
Here again we begin with utopia - the ideal of happiness - and end in achieved happiness, the highest stage of happiness. The same abreaction to integral happiness as to integral
reality or freedom: these are all unbearable.
In the end, it is the opposite form of misfortune, the victim ideology, that triumphs.
Being incapable of accepting thought (the idea that the world thinks us, the intelligence of evil), we invent the easiest solution, the technical solution: Artificial Intelligence.
The highest stage of intelligence: integral knowledge.
This time the rejection will arise perhaps from a resistance on the part of things themselves to their digital transparency or from a failure of the system in the form of a major accident.
Against all the sovereign hypotheses are ranged the easiest solutions.
And all the easiest solutions lead to catastrophe.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact

“Every easy solution, pushed to its extreme - Integral Reality, integral freedom, integral happiness, integral information (the highest stage of intelligence, the highest stage of reality, the highest stage of freedom, the highest stage of happiness) - finds a response in a violent abreaction: disavowal of reality, disavowal of freedom, disavowal of happiness, viruses and dysfunctions, spectrality of real time, mental resistance; all the forms of secret repulsion in respect of this ideal normalization of existence.
Which proves that there still exists everywhere, in each of us, resisting the universal beatification, an intelligence of evil.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact

“The ABNORMAL individual today is the one who now lives only in a unilateral positive adherence to what he is or what he does. Total subjection and adjustment [gestell] (the perfectly normalized being). Countless individuals have gone over to reality, to their own reality, by eliminating all consideration of the dual and the insoluble. And the mystery of this positive crystallization, of this suspension of doubt about the real - necessarily real - world remains entire. This raises the whole question of the intelligence of Evil.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Why Hasn't Everything Already Disappeared?