Here too Munch’s painting [The Scream] stands as a complex reflection on this complicated situation: it shows us that expression requires the category of the individual monad, but it also shows us the heavy price to be paid for that precondition, dramatizing the unhappy paradox that when you constitute your individual subjectivity as a self-sufficient field and a closed realm, you therebv shut yourself off from everything else and condemn yourself to the mindless solitude of the monad, buried alive and condemned to a prison cell without egress.

Postmodernism presumably signals the end of this dilemma, which it replaces with a new one. The end of the bourgeois ego, or monad, no doubt brings with it the end of the psychopathologies of that ego – what I have been calling the waning of affect. [...] As for expression and feelings or emotions, the liberation, in contemporary society, from the older anomie of the centered subject may also mean not merely a liberation from anxiety but a liberation from every other kind of feeling as well, since there is no longer a self present to do the feeling.

Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Duke University Press, 1991) p. 15

To work out a relationship to the modern which neither amounts to a nostalgic call to return to it nor an oedipal denunciation of its repressive insufficiencies – this is a rich mission for our historicity, and success in it might help us to recover some sense of the future as well as of the possibilities of genuine change.

Fredric Jameson, The Cultural Turn (Verso, 1998) p. 90

When we speak of the 'end of history', the 'end of the political', the 'end of the social', the 'end of ideologies', none of this is true. The worst of it all is precisely that there will be no end to anything, and all these things will continue to unfold slowly, tediously, recurrently, in that hysteresis of everything which, like nails and hair, continues to grow after death. Because, at bottom, all these things are already dead and, rather than have a happy or tragic resolution, a destiny, we shall have a thwarted end, a homeopathic end, an end distilled into all the various metastases of the refusal of death.

Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End (Polity Press, 1994) p. 116

The whole problem of speaking about the end (particularly the end of history) is that you have to speak of what lies beyond the end and also, at the same time, of the impossibility of ending. This paradox is produced by the fact that in a non-linear, non-Euclidean space of history the end cannot be located. The end is, in fact, only conceivable in a logical order of causality and continuity. Now, it is events themselves which, by their artificial production, their programmed occurrence or the anticipation of their effects – not to mention their transfiguration in the media – are suppressing the cause-effect relation and hence all historical continuity.

Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End (Polity Press, 1994) p. 110

One of the aspects of this mania for accomplishment is the elevation to the universal, which is commonly regarded as progress, as constituting in a way the extensional equivalent of immortality. This extension actually amounts to a dilution and extenuation of values in the universal. The same goes for events: it is when they are disseminated worldwide that their intensity is at its weakest and they are most rapidly obsolescent. The universalization of facts, data, knowledge, information is a precondition of their disappearance. Every idea and culture becomes universalized before it disappears. As with stars: their maximum expansion comes at the point of death, their transformation into red giants and then black dwarfs. The death agony of concentrated solutions in high dilution, the death agony of forms and images in high definition.

Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End (Polity Press, 1994) p. 104

In the past, man thought himself immortal, but he was not. Or rather he secretly doubted that he was not. Otherwise, he would not have needed to believe it. Today, we no longer believe we are immortal, yet it is precisely now that we are becoming so, becoming quietly immortal without knowing it, without wishing it, without believing it, by the mere fact of the confusion of the limits of life and death. No longer immortal in terms of the soul, which has disappeared, nor even in terms of the body, which is disappearing, but in terms of the formula, immortal in terms of the code. That is, we are beings for whom there will soon no longer be death, nor representation of death, nor even – and this is the worst – illusion of death.

Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End (Polity Press, 1994) p. 99

A contradictory dual operation: man, alone of all species, is seeking to construct his immortal double, an unprecedented artificial species. He caps natural selection with an artificial super-selection, claiming the sole possession of a soul and a consciousness and, at the same time, he is putting an end to natural selection which entailed the death of each species in accordance with the law of evolution. In ending evolution (of all species including his own), he is contravening the symbolic rule and hence truly deserves to disappear. And this is without doubt the destiny he is preparing for himself, in a roundabout way, in that, in his arrogant desire to end evolution, man is ushering in involution and the revival of inhuman, biogenetic forms.

Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End (Polity Press, 1994) p. 84

Capital has cannibalized all negativity, that of history and that of work in a – literally – sarcastic fashion: devouring the very substance of the human being to transform it into its essence as productive being. It has unceremoniously devoured the dialectic by parodistically taking the opposing terms upon itself, by parodistically going beyond its own contradictions.

Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End (Polity Press, 1994) p. 52

There is in fact no insoluble waste problem. The problem is resolved by the post-modern invention of recycling and the incinerator. The Great Incinerators of history, from whose ashes the Phoenix of post-modernity is resuscitated! We have to come to terms with the idea that everything that was not degradable or exterminable is today recyclable, and hence that there is no final solution. We shall not be spared the worst – that is, History will not come to an end – since the leftovers, all the leftovers – the Church, communism, ethnic groups, conflicts, ideologies – are indefinitely recyclable. What is stupendous is that nothing one thought superseded by history has really disappeared. All the archaic, anachronistic forms are there ready to re-emerge, intact and timeless, like the viruses deep in the body. History has only wrenched itself form cyclical time to fall into the order of the recyclable.

Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End (Polity Press, 1994) p. 27

In the Euclidean space of history, the shortest path between two points is the straight line, the line of Progress and Democracy. But this is only true of the linear space of the Enlightenment. In our non-Euclidean fin de siècle space, a baleful curvature unfailingly deflects all trajectories. This is doubtless linked to the sphericity of time (visible on the horizon of the end of the century, just as the earth's sphericity is visible on the horizon at the end of the day) or the subtle distortion of the gravitational field.

Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End (Polity Press, 1994) p. 10

The fact that we are leaving history to move into the realm of simulation is merely a consequence of the fact that history itself has always, deep down, been an immense simulation model. Not in the sense that it could be said only to have existed in the narrative made of it or the interpretation given, but with regard to the time in which it unfolds – that linear time which is at once the time of an ending and of the unlimited suspending of the end. The only kind of time in which a history can take place, if, by history, we understand a succession of non-meaningless facts, each engendering he other by cause and effect, but doing so without any absolute necessity and all standing open to the future, unevenly poised. So different from time in ritual societies where the end of everything is in its beginning and ceremony retraces the perfection of that original event. In contrast to this fulfilled order of time, the liberation of the 'real' time of history, the production of a linear, deferred time may seem a purely artificial process.

Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End (Polity Press, 1994) p. 7

We have paid a high enough price for the nostalgia of the whole and the one, for the reconciliation of the concept and the sensible, of the transparent and the communicable experience. Under the general demand for slackening and for appeasement, we can hear the mutterings of the desire for a return of terror, for the realization of the fantasy to seize reality. The answer is: Let us wage a war on totality; let us be witnesses to the unpresentable; let us activate the differences and save the honor of the name.

Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report On Knowledge (Manchester University Press, 1984) p. 82

Consensus has become an outmoded and suspect value. But justice as a value is neither outmoded nor suspect. We must thus arrive at an idea and practice of justice that is not linked to that of consensus.

Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report On Knowledge (Manchester University Press, 1984) p. 66

Postmodern science – by concerning itself with such things as undecidables, the limits of precise control, conflicts characterized by incomplete information, "fracta", catastrophes, and pragmatic paradoxes – is theorizing its own evolution as discontinuous, catastrophic, nonrectifiable, and paradoxical. It is changing the meaning of the word knowledge, while expressing how such a change can take place. it is producing not the known, but the unknown. And it suggests a model of legitimation that has nothing to do with maximized performance, but has as its basis difference understood as paralogy.

Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report On Knowledge (Manchester University Press, 1984) p. 60

But Man cannot really become immortal. It is the being of what is negated that passes into the negation and realizes its result. Thus, by (actively) negating the real natural World, Man can create a historical or human ("technical") World, which is just as real, although real in a different way. But death is pure Nothingness, and it subsists only as concept of death (= presence of the absence of life). Now, by negating a concept, one only manages to create another concept. Hence Man who negates his death can only "imagine" himself immortal: he can only believe in his "eternal" life or his "resurrection," but he cannot really live his imaginary "afterlife." But this faith, whose counterpart and origin are the faculty of freely bringing about one's death, also distinguishes Man from animal. Man is not only the sole living being which knows that it must die and which can freely bring about its death: he is also the only one which can aspire to immortality and believe in it more or less firmly.

Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (Cornell University Press, 1980) p. 256

If, then, death is a manifestation of Negativity in Men (or more exactly, a manifestation of Man's Negativity), it is a transformation of his real being into ideal concept. It is because he is mortal that Man can conceive (begreifen) of himself as he is in reality – that is, precisely as mortal: in contradistinction to animals, he thinks of himself as mortal, and therefore he thinks of his own death. Hence he can "transcend" it, if you please, and situate himself somehow beyond it; but he does this in the only way in which one can "go beyond" given-Being without sinking into pure Nothingness, namely in and by thought.

Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (Cornell University Press, 1980) p. 254

For History to exist, there must be not only a given reality, but also a negation of that reality and at the same time a ("sublimated") preservation of what has been negated. For only then is evolution creative; only then do a true continuity and a real progress exist in it. And this is precisely what distinguishes human History from a simple biological or "natural" evolution. Now, to preserv oneself as negated is to remember what one has been even while one is becoming radically other. It is by historical memory that Man's identity preserves itself throughout History, in spite of the auto-negations which are accomplished in it, so that he can realize himself by means of History as the integration of his contradictory past or as totality, or, better, as dialectical entity. Hence history is always a conscious and willed tradition, and all real history also manifests itself as a historiography: there is no History without conscious, lived historical memory.

Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (Cornell University Press, 1980) p. 232

The Concept is Time. Time in the full sense of the term – that is, a Time in which there is a Future also in the full sense – that is, a Future that will never become either present or past. Man is the empirical existence of the concept in the world. Therefore, he is the empirical existence in the world of a Future that will never become present. Now, this Future, for Man, is his death, that Future of his which will never become his present; and the only reality or real presence of this Future is the knowledge that Man has in the present of his future death. Therefore, if Man is Concept and if the Concept is Time (that is, if Man is an essentially temporal being), Man is essentially mortal; and he is Concept, that is, absolute Knowledge or Wisdom incarnate, only if he knows this. Logos becomes flesh, becomes Man, only on the condition of being willing and able to die.

Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (Cornell University Press, 1980) pp. 147-148

Hegel says, then, that Time is something, an X, that exists empirically. Now, this assertion can be deduced from the very analysis of the Hegelian notion of (historical) Time. Time in which the Future takes primacy can be realized, can exist, only provided that it negates or annihilates. In order that Time may exist, therefore, there must also be something other than Time. This other thing is first of all Space (as it were, the place where things are stopped). Therefore: no Time without Space; Time is something that is in Space. Time is the negation of Space (of diversity); but if it is something and not nothingness, it is because it is the negation of Space. Now, only that which really exists – that is, which resists – can be really negated. But space that resists is full: it is extended matter, it is real Space – that is, the natural World. Therefore, Time must exist in a World: it is indeed, then, something which "ist da,"as Hegel says, which is there in a Space, and which is there in empirical Space – that is, in a sensible Space or a natural World. Time annihilates this world by causing it at every instant to sink into the nothingness of the past. But Time is nothing but this nihilation of the World; and if there were no real World that was annihilated, Time would only be pure nothingness: there would be no Time. Hence Time that is, therefore, is indeed something that "exists empirically" – i.e., exists in a real Space or a spatial World.

Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (Cornell University Press, 1980) pp. 136-137

It may be that the Time in which the Present takes primacy is cosmic or physical Time, whereas biological Time would be characterized by the primacy of the Past. It does seem that the physical or cosmic object is but a simple presence (Gegenwart), whereas the fundamental biological phenomenon is probably Memory in the broad sense, and the specifically human phenomenon is without a doubt the Project. Moreover, it could be that the cosmic and biological forms of Time exist as Time only in relation to Man – that is, in relation to historical Time.

Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (Cornell University Press, 1980) p. 134

In the Phenomenology, Hegel is very radical. As a matter of fact, he says that Nature is Space, whereas Time is History. In other words: there is no natural, cosmic Time; there is Time only to the extent that there is History, that is, human existence – that is, speaking existence. Man who, in the course of History, reveals Being by his Discourse, is the "empirically existing Concept" (der daseiende Begriff), and Time is nothing other than this Concept. Without Man, Nature would be Space, and only Space. Only Man is in Time, and Time does not exist outside of Man; therefore, Man is Time, and Time is Man – that is, the "Concept which is there in the [spatial] empirical existence" of Nature (der Begriff der da ist).

Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (Cornell University Press, 1980) p. 133

The bourgeois Worker presupposes – and conditions an Entsagung, an Abnegation of human existence. Man transcends himself, surpasses himself, projects himself far away from himself by projecting himself onto the idea of private property, of Capital, which – while being the Property-owner's own product – becomes independent of him and enslaves him just as the Master enslaved the Slave; with this difference, however, that the enslavement is now conscious and freely accepted by the Worker. (We see, by the way, that for Hegel, as for Marx, the central phenomenon of the bourgeois World is not the enslavement of the working man, of the poor bourgeois, by the rich bourgeois, but the enslavement of both by Capital.)

Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (Cornell University Press, 1980) p. 68

Now, to attribute an absolute value to a being not in relation to what he does, to his acts, but simply because he is, beceuse of the simple fact of his Sein, his Being – is to love him. Hence we can also say that Love is what is realized in and by the ancient Family. And since Love does not depend on the acts, on the activity of the loved one, it cannot be ended by his very death. By loving man in his inaction, one considers him as if he were dead. Hence death can change nothing in the Love, in the value attributed in and by the Family. And that is why Love and the worship of the dead have their place within the pagan Family.

Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (Cornell University Press, 1980) p. 61

Man is what he is only to the extent that he becomes what he is; his true Being (Sein) is Becoming (Werden), Time, History; and he becomes, he is History only in and by Action that negates the given.

Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (Cornell University Press, 1980) p. 38

Only after producing an artificial object is man himself really and objectively more than and different from a natural being; and only in this real and objective product does he become truly conscious of his subjective human reality. Therefore, it is only by work that man is a supernatural being that is conscious of its reality; by working, he is "incarnated" Spirit, he is historical "World", he is "objectivized" History.

Friedrich Hegel, "Autonomy and Dependence of Selfconsciousness: Mastery and Slavery" in Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (Cornell University Press, 1980) p. 25

Thus, in the relationship between man and women, for example, Desire is human only if the one desires, not the body, but the Desire of the other; if he wants "to possess" or "to assimilate" the Desire taken as Desire – that is to say, if he wants to be "desired" or "loved," or, rather, "recognized" in his human value, in his reality as a human individual. Likewise, Desire directed toward a natural obiect is human only to the extent that it is "mediated" by the Desire of another directed toward the same obiect: it is human to desire what others desire, because they desire it. Thus, an object perfectly useless from the biological point of view (such as a medal, or the enemy's flag) can be desired because it is the object of other desires. Such a Desire can only be a human Desire, and human reality, as distinguished from animal reality, is created only by action that satisfies such Desires: human history is the history of desired Desires.

Friedrich Hegel, "Autonomy and Dependence of Selfconsciousness: Mastery and Slavery" in Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (Cornell University Press, 1980) p. 6