Snap Judgment

• We disappear behind our images (The Lucidity Pact, 85)
• …the image, too, disappears, overcome by reality, what is sacrificed in this operation is not so much the real as the image (Impossible Exchange, 145)
• The image cannot be prevented from proliferating indefinitely (The Ecstasy of Communication, 36).
• In a system where life is ruled by value and utility, death becomes a useless luxury, and the only alternative. (Symbolic Exchange and Death)
• Our true necropolises are no longer the cemeteries, hospitals, wars, hecatombs; death is no longer where we think it is, it is no longer biological, psychological, metaphysical, it is no longer even murder: our societies’ true necropolises are the computer banks or the foyers, blank spaces from which all human noise has been expunged, glass coffins where the world’s sterilised memories are frozen
• ‘By dint of washing, soaping, furbishing, brushing, painting, sponging, polishing, cleaning and scouring, the grime from the things washed rubs off onto living things’ (Victor Hugo). The same goes for death: by dint of being washed and sponged, cleaned and scoured, denied and warded off, death rubs onto every aspect of life. Our whole culture is hygienic, and aims to expurgate life from death (Baudrillard)
• Death, like mourning, has become obscene and awkward, and it is good taste to hide it, since it can offend the well-being of others.

Every death and all violence that escapes the State monopoly is subversive; it is a prefiguration of the abolition of power. Hence the fascination wielded by great murders, bandits or outlaws, which is in fact closely akin to that associated with works of art: a piece of death and violence is snatched from the State monopoly in order to be put back into the savage, direct and symbolic reciprocity of death, just as something in feasting and expenditure is retrieved from the economic in order to be put back into useless and sacrificial exchange, and just as something in the poem or the artwork is retrieved from the terrorist economy of signification in order to be put back into the consumption of signs. This alone is what is fascinating in our system

• Aphorisms and proper names are characterised by their capacity for surviving the deaths of those who employ them or are designated by them, and are therefore structured by the possibility of death. – Derek Attridge. “Introduction: Aphorism Countertime” Jacques Derrida Acts of Literature.
• Something said briefly can be the fruit of much long thought: but the reader who is a novice in this field, and has as yet reflected on it not at all, sees in everything said briefly something embryonic, not without censuring the author for having served him up such immature and unripened fruit. – Friedrich Nietzsche

நன்றி: IJBS Special Issue – Table of Contents – October 2007: “Remembering Baudrillard”