Post Modernity Quotes

“There is a quality of lightness, easiness, and in some sense blatant unseriousness that pervades Classical Christianity's dialogue with modernity. The Christian intellect has no reason to be intimidated in the presence of later-stage modernity. Christianity has seen too many 'modern eras' to be cowed by this one.”
― Thomas C. Oden, After Modernity...What?

“In the classical imagination, Evil was still a mythical power. There was still a Mephisto or a Frankenstein to embody the principle of Evil. Our evil is faceless and without imagination. We no longer need the Devil to steal our shadows. There are no powers doing battle above our heads, fighting over our souls. No longer any need for the lubricious agency of capital to extort our labour-power from us. We no longer have any shadows, any souls, and we are stakeholders in our own lives.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories IV, 1995-2000

“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

“We labour under the illusion that it is the real we lack the most, but actually, reality is at its height. By our technical exploits, we have reached such a degree of reality and objectivity that we might even speak of an excess of reality, which leaves us far more anxious and disconcerted than the lack of it. That we could at least make up for with utopianism and imagination, whereas there is neither compensation for -- nor any alternative to -- the excess of reality. No longer any possible negation or surpassing, since we are already beyond. No longer any negative energy arising from the imbalance between the ideal and the real -- only a hyperreaction, born of the superfusion of the ideal and the real, of the total positivity of the real.

However, even though we have gone beyond the real, into virtual accomplishment, we still have the unpleasant impression of having missed the end. The whole of modernity had as its aim the coming of this real world, the liberation of men and of real energies, bent upon an objective transformation of the world, beyond all the illusions with which critical analysis has kept philosophy and practice fed. Today, the world has become real beyond our wildest expectations. The real and the rational have been overturned by their very realization.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime