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IO

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IO’s Bookshelves

to-read‎ (5)
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“The strategy of power has long seemed founded on the apathy of the masses. The more passive they were, the more secure it was. But this logic is only characteristic of the bureaucratic and centralist phase of power. And it is this which today turns against it: the inertia it has fostered becomes the sign of its death.”
― Jean Baudrillard, In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities

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“And so art is everywhere, since artifice is at the very heart of reality. And so art is dead, not only because its critical transcendence is gone, but because reality itself, entirely impregnated by an aesthetic which is inseparable from its own structure, has been confused with its own image. Reality no longer has the time to take on the appearance of reality. It no longer even surpasses fiction: it captures every dream even before it takes on the appearance of a dream.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Simulations (Semiotext

tags: post-modernism, post-structuralism, the-orders-of-simulacra

48 likes

“The vulgar crowd always is taken by appearances, and the world consists chiefly of the vulgar.”
― Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince

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“We need a visible past, a visible continuum, a visible myth of origin to reassure us as to our ends, since ultimately we have never believed in them.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Simulations (Semiotext

tags: post-modernism, post-structuralism

22 likes

“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.”
― Franz Kafka

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