"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"
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Love, in Baudrillard's hands, stops being a warm, humanist virtue and turns into a high-tech form of possession: not a bond but an extraction. The violence here is deliberate and diagnostic. "Isolate him from the world" names what romance often pretends not to do: privatize a person, pull them out of circulation, make them legible only inside the couple. The cruelty escalates with "wipe out every trace" and "dispossess him of his shadow" - imagery that treats identity as something with depth, residue, ambiguity. To lose your shadow is to lose your unaccountable parts, the bits that don't fit the lover's narrative. Love becomes a totalizing edit.
Baudrillard's sociological subtext is the logic of modern consumption: we don't merely desire; we appropriate. In a culture built on images, profiles, and curated selves, the beloved becomes an object to be completed, managed, and secured against the world's noise. That's the "murderous future": the relationship's forward motion as destiny, a timeline that cancels alternative lives. Even devotion can behave like a contract with a deadline.
The cosmic metaphor - "dead star", "black light" - is peak Baudrillard: seduction as gravitational, impersonal, almost astrophysical. A dead star still pulls; it dazzles by absence. "Black light" suggests illumination that doesn't reveal but erases, a glow that consumes detail. He's not arguing that love is always evil; he's exposing how easily intimacy mirrors the era's dominant system: absorb, reduce, and call it connection.
Baudrillard's sociological subtext is the logic of modern consumption: we don't merely desire; we appropriate. In a culture built on images, profiles, and curated selves, the beloved becomes an object to be completed, managed, and secured against the world's noise. That's the "murderous future": the relationship's forward motion as destiny, a timeline that cancels alternative lives. Even devotion can behave like a contract with a deadline.
The cosmic metaphor - "dead star", "black light" - is peak Baudrillard: seduction as gravitational, impersonal, almost astrophysical. A dead star still pulls; it dazzles by absence. "Black light" suggests illumination that doesn't reveal but erases, a glow that consumes detail. He's not arguing that love is always evil; he's exposing how easily intimacy mirrors the era's dominant system: absorb, reduce, and call it connection.
Quote Details
| Topic | Love |
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