Random Transmissions 5: Eco & Baudrillard

To love someone is to isolate him from the world, wipe out every trace of him, dispossess him of his shadow, drag him into a murderous future. It is to circle around the other like a dead star and absorb him into a black light ~ Jean Baudrillard

A narrator should not supply interpretations of his work; otherwise he would have not written a novel, which is a machine for generating interpretations ~ Umberto Eco

Either you have not to be serious and seem it, or to be serious and not seem it. Those who combine being serious with seeming serious are insignificant ~ Jean Baudrillard

I've always said that I learned the English I know through two sources -- Marvel Comics and Finnegans Wake ~ Umberto Eco

Some idea swimming in the blue gelatine of the reptilian brain, seeking out the gossamer-thin difference between illusion and the real ~ Jean Baudrillard

The author should die once he has finished writing. So as not to trouble the path of the text ~ Umberto Eco

The zealous enemies of stupidity have forgotten that it is both the illness and the vaccine, and that you have to have been inoculated with it to be able to exorcise it. And because it is extraordinarily contagious, you can't rage against it without falling into its trap.
A special mention must go to second-degree stupidity, that stupidity which has already turned around upon itself and come out on the other side reinforced by a whole sophisticated and ironic critical apparatus of intelligence and culture ~ Jean Baudrillard

I would define the poetic effect as the capacity that a text displays for continuing to generate different readings, without ever being completely consumed ~ Umberto Eco

Perhaps our eyes are merely a blank film which is taken from us after our deaths to be developed elsewhere and screened as our life story in some infernal cinema or dispatched as microfilm into the sidereal void ~ Jean Baudrillard

Lying about the future produces history ~ Umberto Eco

The specific idiocy of our time is, sadly, no longer differentiated from its intelligence. It is merged with it. It is no longer uneducated, but is indeed overinformed and has the same reflex vivacity as artificial intelligence. It is the degree Xerox of stupidity which merges with the degree Xerox of intelligence ~ Jean Baudrillard

When all the archetypes burst out shamelessly, we plumb the depths of Homeric profundity. Two cliches make us laugh but a hundred cliches moves us because we sense dimly that the cliches are talking among themselves, celebrating a reunion . . . Just as the extreme of pain meets sensual pleasure, and the extreme of perversion borders on mystical energy, so too the extreme of banality allows us to catch a glimpse of the Sublime ~ Umberto Eco

Memory is a dangerous function. It retrospectively gives meaning to that which did not have any. It retrospectively cancels out the internal illusoriness of events, which was their originality. But if events retained their original, enigmatic form, their ambiguous, terrifying form, there would doubtless no longer be any history ~ Jean Baudrillard