There is a science-fiction story in which a number of very rich people wake up one morning in their luxury villas in the mountains to find that they are encircled by a transparent and insuperable obstacle, a wall of glass that has appeared in the night. From the depths of their vitrified luxury they can still discern the outside world, the real universe from which they are cut off, which has suddenly become the ideal world. But it is too late. These rich people will die slowly in their aquarium like a goldfish. Some of the university campuses here remind me of this.

-Jean Baudrillard

appearing in America

By breaking up time, our 'habitual' patterns dispel the anxiety-provoking aspect of the temporal continuum and of the absolute singularity of events. Similarly, it is thanks to their discontinuous integration into series that we put objects at our sole disposition, that we own them. This is the discourse of subjectivity itself, and objects are a privileged register of that discourse. Between the world's irreversible evolution and ourselves, objects interpose a discontinuous, classifiable, reversible screen which can be reconstituted at will, a segment of the world which belongs to us, responding to out hands and minds and delivering us from anxiety. Objects do not merely help us to master the world by virtue of their integration into our instrumental series, they also help us, by virtue of their integration into mental series, to master time, rendering it discontinuous and classifying it, after the fashion of habits, and subjecting it to the same associational constraints as those which govern the arrangement of things in space.

-Jean Baudrillard

appearing in Le Système des objets

Let us look each other in the face. We are Hyperboreans--we know well enough how remote our place is. "Neither by land nor by water will you find the road to the Hyperboreans": even Pindar,[1] in his day, knew that much about us. Beyond the North, beyond the ice, beyond death--our life, our happiness.... We have discovered that happiness; we know the way; we got our knowledge of it from thousands of years in the labyrinth. Who else has found it?--The man of today?--"I don't know either the way out or the way in; I am whatever doesn't know either the way out or the way in"--so sighs the man of today.... This is the sort of modernity that made us ill,--we sickened on lazy peace, cowardly compromise, the whole virtuous dirtiness of the modern Yea and Nay.

-Friedrich Nietzsche

appearing in Der Antichrist

Empires - even those which seem impregnable - can suffer from a convergence of ills, financial, military, environmental and otherwise, and crack like an egg.

That's history's lesson - no Empire lasts forever.

-Mumia Abu-Jamal

appearing in When Empires End

Indeed, the process of fixing stories of past violent encounters plays a role in shaping the spaces and events that constitute the basis for being a “people.” Those histories that manage to attain a level of dominance and stability create the imaginative boundaries that contain a people; they exert an influence on the self-interpretations and models of inclusion and exclusion of the people who embrace them.

-Michael J. Shapiro

appearing in Violent Cartographies: Mapping Cultures of War

The painter is looking, his face turned slightly and his head leaning towards one shoulder. He is staring at a point to which, even though it is invisible, we, the spectators, can easily assign an object, since it is we, ourselves, who are that point: our bodies, our faces, our eyes. The spectacle he is observing is thus doubly invisible: first, because it is not represented within the space of the painting, and, second, because it is situated precisely in that blind point, in that essential hiding-place into which our gaze disappears from ourselves at the moment of our actual looking. And yet, how could we fail to see that invisibility, there in front of our eyes, since it has its own perceptible equivalent, its sealed-in figure, in the painting itself?

-Michel Foucault

appearing in The Order of Things

In short, in America the arrival of night-time or periods of rest cannot be accepted, nor can the Americans bear to see the technological process halted. Everything has to be working all the time, there has to be no let-up in man’s artificial power, and the intermittent character of natural cycles (the seasons, day and night, heat and cold) has to be replaced by a functional continuum that is sometimes absurd (deep down, there is the same refusal of the intermittent nature of true and false: everything is true; and of good and evil: everything is good). You may seek to explain this in terms of fear, perhaps obsessional fear, or say that this unproductive expenditure is an act of mourning. But what is absurd is also admirable. The skylines lit up at dead of night, the air-conditioning systems cooling empty hotels in the desert and artificial light in the middle of the day all have something both demented and admirable about them.

-Jean Baudrillard

appearing in America

Then there is nothing to rule out the paradoxical hypothesis that it is indeed our thought which governs the world, on condition that we first think that it is the world which thinks us.

'It isn't the man who drinks the tea, it's the tea which drinks the man.'

It isn't you who smoke the pipe, it's the pipe which smokes you.

It's the book which reads me.

It's the TV which watches you.

It's the object which thinks us.

It's the lens which focuses on us.

It's the effect which causes us.

It's language which speaks us.

It's time which waste us.

It's money which earns us.

It's death which lies in wait for us.

-Jean Baudrillard

appearing in The Impossible Exchange

Within psychoanalysis, this knowledge of drive which can never be subjectivized assumes the form of knowledge of the subject's "fundamental fantasy," the specific formula which regulates his or her access to jouissance. That is to say, desire and jouissance are inherently antagonistic, exclusive even: desire's raison d'etre (or "utility function," to use Richard Dawkins's term) is not to realize its goal, to find full satisfaction, but to reproduce itself as desire.

-Slavoj Žižek

appearing in UMBR(A)

In delineating the notion of "nuclear war," both of these discourses shape an intriguing leap: from the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to the "possible" nuclear explosions in the indefinite-yet-ever-closer-to-the-present future. Thus any nuclear explosions after World War II do not quality as nuclear war in the cognitive grid of conventional nuclear discourse. Significantly, most nuclear explosions after World War II took place in the sovereign territories of the Fourth World and Indigenous Nations. This critical historical fact has been contained in the domain of nuclear testing. Such obliteration of the history of undeclared nuclear warfare by nuclear discourse does not merely posit by the deficiency of the discourse. Rather, what it does to reveal the late capitalist form of domination, whereby an ongoing extermination process of the periphery is blocked from constituting itself as a historical fact.

-Masahide T. Kato

appearing in Nuclear Globalism: Traversing Rockets, Satellites and Nuclear War via the Strategic Gaze