We are faced with a crisis of identity and disinheritance—in a time of increased banalization and technicization, speaking of “successful” integration in terms of some indefinable notion of being America is to signal its lack of reality. Advocates of liberalizing democracy assistance and their opponents align themselves to a metaphysical quest to re-establish a lost center to humanness.
Baudrillard 6 (Jean, Prof of Phil of Culture and Media Crit @ EGS, The Pyres of Autumn, New Left Review 37, Jan-Feb//Aaron)
Some debaters try to rouse the indifferent masses of the debate space into frenzied activity by invoking a panoply of survival issues—ecology, terrorism, and nuclear weapons—because they place value in an obsessive desire to survive.
Baudrillard 89 (Jean, Prof of Phil of Culture and Media Criticism at European Graduate School, America, p 42-4//Aaron)
The demarcation between life and death is constructed—the exclusion of death is the ultimate exclusion that takes life hostage and condemns it to degradation
Baudrillard 93 (Jean, Prof of Phil of Culture and Media Criticism at EGS, The Symbolic Exchange and Death, p 126-7//Aaron)
Orienting ourselves as enlightened liberal subjects is the flip side of the same coin. Their metaphysical blackmail portrays the strategy of the object as Evil while glorifying the strategy of the subject of knowledge that tries to intervene in the politics surrounding democracy assistance. But, it isn’t the subject that wills the world into existence but rather the object that seduces it—privileging the subject fails and fuels self-hatred through repression.
Baudrillard 90 (Jean, Professor of Philosophy of Culture and Media Criticism at the European Graduate School, Fatal Strategies, p. 111-13//Aaron)
Subjective illusions like agency and responsibility are invoked to persuade us to break free of spectatorship. But this turns liberation into a duty—when we are answerable only to ourselves we lose the symbolic freedom provided by the voluntary servitude of gaming.
Baudrillard 5 (Jean, Prof of Phil of Culture and Media Criticism at EGS, Intelligence of Evil, p 50-5//Aaron)
The subjects’ drive to purify us of Evil by making us answerable only to ourselves breeds ressentiment because we confine ourselves to a victim economy and wallow in misfortune
Baudrillard ‘5 (Jean, Prof of Phil of Culture and Media Criticism at EGS, Intelligence of Evil, p 151-4//Aaron)
The liberal expectation that people should be answerable for every aspect of their current situation is one that mirrors the process of democracy assistance—the USFG and its allies force their subjects to participate in a confessionary complex where they must leverage their identities against the benign image of democracy itself. This forces the liquidation of radical alterity—this is self-servitude par excellance
Baudrillard 93 (Jean, Prof of Phil at EGS, The Transparency of Evil, p 165//Aaron)
This replaces difference with images of the same and results in annihilation
Baudrillard 96 (Jean, Professor of Philosophy of Culture and Media Criticism at the European Graduate School, The Perfect Crime, p. 112-4//Aaron)
Rutgers ___MK___ affirm—
Resolved: the United States Federal Government should substantially increase its democracy assistance for one or more of the following: Bahrain, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Tunisia, Yemen.
Instrumental affirmation is impossible—even if meaning is fixed in the short-term, in the long-term it is oversaturated with meanings and can’t have a particular trajectory
Baudrillard 81(Jean, Professor of Phil of Culture and Media Criticism at the European Graduate School, Simulacra and Simulation, p. 16-17//Aaron)
The rule of symbolic exchange is to return the world and language as we received it: enigmatic and aphoristic. Instead of imposing truths upon the resolution as subjects, we affirm as objects seduced by the resolution. Our affirmation of the resolution is meaningless and participates in the very form and intelligence of evil
Baudrillard 5 (Jean, Prof of Phil of Culture and Media Criticism at EGS, Intelligence of Evil, p 207-13//Aaron)
Subjectivity and power relations aren’t inevitable—neither are real power until you concede to the truth claims that give them power
Baudrillard 90 (Jean, Prof of Phil of Culture and Media Criticism at EGS, Seduction, p 48-9//Aaron)
Evaluate arguments by determining the mode of existence that serves as their principle for debaters in a discursive activity. Instead of falling back on transcendental values that attempt to resuscitate the political in the activity, endorse the strategy of the object as a joyous gesture.
Baudrillard 90 (Jean, Professor of Philosophy of Culture and Media Criticism at the EGS, Fatal Strategies, p. 98-99//Aaron)
No risk of co-option—our discourse can’t be mobilized because we are de-linked from the social
Baudrillard 83 (Jean, Prof of Phil of Culture and Media Criticism at EGS, In the Shadow of Silent Majorities, p 26-8//Aaron)
