Arbitrariness Quote by Jean Baudrillard

““The rich never give you anything (dixit A.). Wealth is unrelenting; it always screws you. Those who are rich in intelligence, power and beauty don't give much away either. They make you pay all the more for the fact that their capital is symbolic. Comparing that unrelenting face of wealth with Countess Bathory who tortured young peasant girls. She at least was tortured herself, walled up in total darkness, in absolute silence and her own excrement, with a hole in the wall for food to be passed through. The bloodbaths she had taken gave her the savage energy to hold out for two years in the dark. Thinking of those happy days while walking around in the backstreets of Rome. Here everything is deeply incestuous, though in a different way from Elisabeth Bathory for whom all those peasant girls were her daughters whose incest was to be sealed with blood. But that was a sadistic and violent incest, whereas the whole Roman culture practises a gentle, spiritual incest. Akin to fetishism: that of the mamma, the sister, the young adolescent, the Virgin and the Saints, all swirling about in the same incestuous spiral. The carnal perfection of the detail, the carnal softness of the marble, the lewd transparency of the fountains - little navels of the squares set deep in the backstreets - and the water which streams down from them. The miracle of a faultless urbanity, a total civility - even the ruins share in this. However far back you go in Italy, there has never been any nature. There has only ever been a baroque figuration.””

— Jean Baudrillard