Radical Exoticism Quotes

“This is Radical Exoticism: the rule governing the world. It is not a law, for the law is the universal principle of understanding, the regulated interplay of differences, moral, political and economic rationality. It is a rule - and, like all rules, implies an arbitrary predestination. Consider languages, none of which is reducible to any other. Languages are predestined, each according to its own rules, its own arbitrary determinants, its own implacable logic. Each obeys the laws of communication and exchange, certainly, but at the same time it answers to an indestructible internal coherence; a language as such is, and must forever remain, fundamentally untranslatable into any other language.
This explains why all languages are so 'beautiful' - precisely because they are foreign to one another.
A law is never ineluctable: it is a concept, founded upon a consensus. A rule, by contrast, is indeed ineluctable, because it is not a concept but a form that orders a game. Seduction illustrates this well. Eros is love - the force of attraction, of fusion, of conjunction. Seduction is the far more radical figure of disjunction, distraction, illusion and diversion, a figure that alters essence and meaning, alters identity and the subject. And, contrary to common belief, entropy is on the side not of universal disjunction but of conjunction and fusion, of love and understanding - on the side of the proper use of differences. Seduction - exoticism - is an excess of the other, of otherness, the vertiginous appeal of what is 'more different than different' : this is what is irreducible - and this is the true source of energy.
In this predestined world of the Other, everything comes from elsewhere - happy or unhappy events, illnesses, even thoughts themselves. All imperatives flow from the non-human - from gods, beasts, spirits, magic. This is a universe of fatality, not of psychology. According to Julia Kristeva we become estranged from ourselves by internalizing the other, and this estrangement from ourselves takes the form - among others - of the unconscious. But in the world of fatality the unconscious does not exist. There is no universal form of the unconscious, as psychoanalysis claims, and the only alternative to unconscious repression is fatality - the imputation of everything to a completely nonhuman agency, an agency which is external to the human and delivers us from it.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena

“The very scale of the efforts made to exterminate the Other is testimony to the Other's indestructibility, and by extension to the indestructible totality of Otherness.
Such is the power of this idea, and such is the power of the facts.
Radical otherness survives everything: conquest, racism, extermination, the virus of difference, the psychodrama of alienation. On the one hand, the Other is always-already dead; on the other hand, the Other is indestructible.
This is the Great Game.
The ultimate inscrutability of beings, as of peoples.
Segalen: 'The inscrutability of races, which is merely the extension to races of the inscrutability of individuals.'
The survival of exoticism depends entirely on the impossibility of encounter, fusion and the exchange of differences. Fortunately, all this is an illusion - the illusion of subjectivity itself.
All that endures is the foreignness of the foreigner, the irredeemability of the object.
No psychology: psychology is always the worst way to go.
Avoid all psychological, ideological and moral forms of the Other - eschew the metaphor of the Other, the Other as metaphor.
Seek the Other's 'cruelty', the Other's unintelligibility, the Other as spectre: constrain the Other to foreignness, violate the Other in his foreignness.
Running to ground of metaphor: sublime form of metaphorical violation.
Radical anti-ethnology, anti-universalism, anti-differentialism.
Radical exoticism versus the pimping of differences.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena