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[doolhoofd]

There is no evil, no good, except what men identify.

yeah yeah, I know that

This is just a platitude based on undefined and dubious metaphysical concepts.

I found it very inspiring.

[doolhoofd]

So what is that about?

you don't get it?

[chaz wyman]

Radical Thought
http://www.egs.edu/faculty/jean-baudril ... l-thought/

The radical prediction is always that of a non-reality of the facts, of an illusion of the factual. [...] While being a transporter of meaning, language is at the same time a supra-conductor of illusion and of the absence of meaning. [...] By its very force, it calls for the spiritual imagination of sounds and rhythms, for the dispersion of meaning in the event of language, similar to the role of the muscles in dance, similar to the role of reproduction in erotic games. [...] if language wants to "speak the language" of illusion, it must become a seduction. [...] Ciphering, not deciphering. Operating illusions. Being illusion to be event. Turning into an enigma what is clear. Making unintelligible what is far too intelligible. Rendering unreadable the event itself. Working all the events to make them unintelligible. Accentuating the fake transparency of the world to spread a terroristic confusion, to spread the germs or viruses of a radical illusion, that is to say operating a radical disillusion of the real.

If all you can do is cut and paste I submit that you do not actually know what he is trying to say, and that what you have done is cherry picked some text which you think is most recognisable to yourself. So rather than sticking his neck on the loine and actually venturing to say something, he is doing exactly what I said he does and writes in an obscure way to catch the unwary in a snare of their own making.
It is clever and might be entertaining but it is not philosophy.
Do you get my drift, or just take it as an insult?

[chaz wyman]

So what is that about?

you don't get it?

No, you haven't said anything.

[chaz wyman]

There is no evil, no good, except what men identify.

yeah yeah, I know that

I am seriously puzzled that you say that
If you accept that is true, then you are either swallowing JB's idea of good and evil or failing to recognise that you cannot make statements about good and evil as if they were forces of nature with their own volition as, you claim, he has suggested.

This is just a platitude based on undefined and dubious metaphysical concepts.

I found it very inspiring.

[doolhoofd]

If all you can do is cut and paste I submit that you do not actually know what he is trying to say, and that what you have done is cherry picked some text which you think is most recognisable to yourself. So rather than sticking his neck on the loine and actually venturing to say something, he is doing exactly what I said he does and writes in an obscure way to catch the unwary in a snare of their own making.
It is clever and might be entertaining but it is not philosophy.
Do you get my drift, or just take it as an insult?

Think of me what you will. It might not be philosophy but it inspired me, made me realise some things.

[doolhoofd]

There is no evil, no good, except what men identify.

I wrote that in my text too, but as a question

How inevitable is the intolerable, how intolerable is Evil? Evil exists. - or does it only exist in the mind?

[doolhoofd]

"To think like a woman undresses," Bataille used to say. Perhaps, but Catherine Millet's naivete is to think that people undress in order to get naked, to reach the naked truth about sex and about the world. People take off their clothes to be revealed (pour apparaître). But not to be revealed in their nakedness like truth (can anyone still believe that truth remains when its veil of secrecy is lifted?) but to join the realm of appearances, of seduction. That's totally different.

one possible interpretation could be
"Truth (meaning) is less powerful than illusion and spectacle (seduction)"

Why not suggest [...] that there is nothing to see [...]?

The ultimate cynicism in spectacle society...

[doolhoofd]

Illusion/désillusion esthétique
http://mapageweb.umontreal.ca/scarfond/ ... illard.pdf

did a little translating here

Against all the modern superstition of a "liberation", it must be said that one does not liberate forms, one does not liberate figures. One connects them on the contrary, and the only way to liberate them is by "chaining them together" [enchaîner]. [...] We need illusionists who know that art, and painting, are illusions [...] who know that art is above all a trompe l'oeil, a trompe-la-vie, like all theory is a trompe-le-sens [sens = meaning], who know that art actually consists of laying traps [dresser des leurres] into which reality will be naive enough to fall.

[doolhoofd]

...which actually comes quite close to what you said about JB laying snares for the unwary

[doolhoofd]

Simulacra & Simulations
http://www.egs.edu/faculty/jean-baudril ... mulations/

The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth — it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true.
- Ecclesiastes

Representation starts from the principle that the sign and the real are equivalent (even if this equivalence is Utopian, it is a fundamental axiom). Conversely, simulation starts from the Utopia of this principle of equivalence, from the radical negation of the sign as value, from the sign as reversion and death sentence of every reference. Whereas representation tries to absorb simulation by interpreting it as false representation, simulation envelops the whole edifice of representation as itself a simulacrum.

These would be the successive phases of the image:

1.It is the reflection of a basic reality.
2.It masks and perverts a basic reality.
3.It masks the absence of a basic reality.
4.It bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum.

about the transition from images which reflect reality to pure simulacra

[doolhoofd]

the undeniable röntgenesque charm of the hyperspectacular

the new Mortal Kombat, for example, has a special set of x-ray moves

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIRSoIaIbfE

[doolhoofd]

another excerpt taken from Baudrillard's Simulacra & Simulations
http://www.egs.edu/faculty/jean-baudril ... mulations/

Thus perhaps at stake has always been the murderous capacity of images, murderers of the real; murderers of their own model as the Byzantine icons could murder the divine identity. [...] what becomes of the divinity when it reveals itself in icons, when it is multiplied in simulacra? Does it remain the supreme authority, simply incarnated in images as a visible theology? Or is it volatilized into simulacra which alone deploy their pomp and power of fascination - the visible machinery of icons being substituted for the pure and intelligible Idea of God? This is precisely what was feared by the Iconoclasts, whose millennial quarrel is still with us today. Their rage to destroy images rose precisely because they sensed this omnipotence of simulacra, this facility they have of erasing God from the consciousnesses of people, and the overwhelming, destructive truth which they suggest: that ultimately there has never been any God; that only simulacra exist; indeed that God himself has only ever been his own simulacrum. Had they been able to believe that images only occulted or masked the Platonic idea of God, there would have been no reason to destroy them. One can live with the idea of a distorted truth. But their metaphysical despair came from the idea that the images concealed nothing at all, and that in fact they were not images, such as the original model would have made them, but actually perfect simulacra forever radiant with their own fascination.

[doolhoofd]

a fragment from Fatal Strategies. personal translation

The further one goes, from one figure to the next, from seduction to love, then to desire and sexuality, and finally to pornography pure and simple, the more scant the secret and the mystery become, the closer one gets to the confession, the expression, the revelation, the venting - in short to the truth which in the obscenity of our culture soon becomes the forced expression of the truth, the forced confession, the forced revelation . . . of what? Of nothing. There is nothing to reveal.
Whence the foolish idea that you can give away the secret, show the naked substance, reach radical obscenity? This is nothing but a utopia - there is no reality, there has never been a reality - seduction knows this and protects this secret.

[doolhoofd]

also from Fatal Strategies. personal translation

The only sovereignity is the mastery of appearances [..] What fascinates everyone is the debauchery of signs, that reality is always and everywhere debauched by the signs. [..] This distortion wherein things exhaust themselves in their spectacle, in their magical and artificial fetish-effect, will always be fought by those serious minds who cherish the utopia of purifying the world in order to deliver it exactly and authentically on Judgement Day. [..] The drive to spectacle is more powerful than the instinct to self-preservation, it is her one must count on. [..] There is no principle of reality nor of lust. There is only a final principle of Reconciliation and an infinite principle of Evil and Seduction.