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Life & Mortality Quote by Jean Baudrillard

"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"

About this Quote

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.

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TopicLove
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APA Style (7th ed.)
Baudrillard, Jean. (2026, January 15). 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. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/to-love-someone-is-to-isolate-him-from-the-world-35814/

Chicago Style
Baudrillard, Jean. "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." FixQuotes. January 15, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/to-love-someone-is-to-isolate-him-from-the-world-35814/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"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." FixQuotes, 15 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/to-love-someone-is-to-isolate-him-from-the-world-35814/. Accessed 4 Feb. 2026.

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Jean Baudrillard (July 29, 1929 - March 6, 2007) was a Sociologist from France.

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