Have we not always had the deep-seated phantasy of a world that would go on without us? The poetic temptation to see the world in our absence, free of any human, all-too-human will? The intense pleasure of poetic language lies in seeing language operating on its own, in its materiality and literality, without transiting through meaning – this is what fascinates us. It is the same with anagrams or anamorphoses, with the 'figure in the carpet'. The Vanishing Point of Language.

Jean Baudrillard, Why Hasn't Everything Already Disappeared? (Seagull Books, 2009) p. 52

Art itself in the modern period exists only on the basis of its disappearance – not just the art of making the real disappear and supplanting it with another scene, but the art of abolishing itself in the course of its practice (Hegel). It was by doing this that it constituted an event, that it was of decisive importance. I say 'was' advisedly, for art today, though it has disappeared, doesn't know it has disappeared and – this is the worst of it – continues on its trajectory in a vegetative state.

Jean Baudrillard, Why Hasn't Everything Already Disappeared? (Seagull Books, 2009) p. 22

Thus, the modern world foreseen by Marx, driven on by the work of the negative, by the engine of contradiction, became, by the very excess of its fulfilment, another world in which things no longer even need their opposites to exist, in which light no longer needs shade, the feminine no longer needs the masculine (or vice versa?), good no longer needs evil – and the world no longer needs us.

It is here we see that the mode of disappearance of the human [...] is precisely the product of an internal logic, of a built-in obsolescence, of the human race's fulfilment of its most grandiose project, the Promethean project of mastering the universe, of acquiring exhaustive knowledge. We see, too, that is this which precipitates it towards its disappearance, much more quickly than animal species, by the acceleration it imparts to an evolution that no longer has anything natural about it.

Doing so not out of some death drive or some involutive, regressive disposition toward undifferentiated forms, but from an impulse to go as far as possible in the expression of all its power, all its faculties – to the point even of dreaming of abolishing death.

Jean Baudrillard, Why Hasn't Everything Already Disappeared? (Seagull Books, 2009) pp. 16-19