Jean Baudrillard Quotes
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[I]nside every computer, there is a hidden man being bored.
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Genius is childhood recaptured.
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The image is not a medium for which we have to find the proper use. It is what it is and it is beyond all our moral considerations. It is by its essence immoral, and the world's becoming-image is an immoral process.
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The very definition of the real becomes: that of which it is possible to give an equivalent reproduction. The real is not only what can be reproduced, but that which is always already reproduced. The hyper real.
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Freud thought he was bringing the plague to the U.S.A., but the U.S.A. has victoriously resisted the psychoanalytical frost by real deep freezing, by mental and sexual refrigeration. They have countered the black magic of the Unconscious with the white magic of "doing your own thing," air conditioning, sterilization, mental frigidity and the cold media of information.
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Mistakes, scandals, and failures no longer signal catastrophe. The crucial thing is that they be made credible, and that the public be made aware of the efforts being expended in that direction. The marketing immunity of governments is similar to that of the major brands of washing powder.
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The desert is a natural extension of the inner silence of the body. If humanity's language, technology, and buildings are an extension of its constructive faculties, the desert alone is an extension of its capacity for absence, the ideal schema of humanity's disappearance.
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We shall never resolve the enigma of the relation between the negative foundations of greatness and that greatness itself.
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Postmodernity is said to be a culture of fragmentary sensations, eclectic nostalgia, disposable simulacra, and promiscuous superficiality, in which the traditionally valued qualities of depth, coherence, meaning, originality, and authenticity are evacuated or dissolved amid the random swirl of empty signals.
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We are no longer in a state of growth; we are in a state of excess. We are living in a society of excrescence. The boil is growing out of control, recklessly at cross purposes with itself, its impacts multiplying as the causes disintegrate.
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Television knows no night. It is perpetual day. TV embodies our fear of the dark, of night, of the other side of things.
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The era of the political was one of anomie: crisis, violence, madness and revolution. The era of the trans-political is that of anomaly: an aberration of no consequence, contemporaneous with the event of no consequence.
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Deep down, no one really believes they have a right to live. But this death sentence generally stays tucked away, hidden beneath the difficulty of living. If that difficulty is removed from time to time, death is suddenly there, unintelligibly.
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The desert is a natural extension of the inner silence of the body.
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If there is a species which is more maltreated than children, then it must be their toys, which they handle in an incredibly off-hand manner. Toys are thus the end point in that long chain in which all the conditions of despotic high-handedness are in play which enchain beings one to another, from one species to another --cruel divinities to their sacrificial victims, from masters to slaves, from adults to children, and from children to their objects.
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The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth--it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true.
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Art is no longer anything more than a kind of meta-language for banality.
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Today, every principle of identity is affected by fashion, precisely because of its potential to revert all forms to non-origin and recurrence. Fashion is always retro, but always on the basis of the abolition of the passé (the past): the spectral death and resurrection of forms. Its proper actuality (its 'up-to-dateness', its 'relevance') is not a reference to the present, but an immediate and total recycling.
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A successful object is one which exists beyond its own reality, which creates a dual (and not merely interactlve) relation (with its users also), a relation of contradiction, misappropriation and destablilisation.
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Laughter on American television has taken the place of the chorus in Greek tragedy. It is unrelenting; the news, the stock-exchange reports, and the weather forecast are about the only things spared.
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The obese is in a total delirium. For he is not only large, of a size opposed to normal morphology: he is larger than large. He no longer makes sense in some distinctive opposition, but in his excess, his redundancy.
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Driving is a spectacular form of amnesia. Everything is to be discovered, everything to be obliterated.
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Sadder than the beggar is the man who eats alone in public.
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At male strip shows, it is still the women that we watch, the audience of women and their eager faces. They are more obscene than if they were dancing naked themselves.
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It only takes a politician believing in what he says for the others to stop believing him.
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There is nothing more mysterious than a TV set left on in an empty room. It is even stranger than a man talking to himself or a woman standing dreaming at her stove. It is as if another planet is communicating with you.
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Illusion is no longer possible, because the real is no longer possible.
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With the truth, you need to get rid of it as soon as possible and pass it on to someone else. As with illness, this is the only way to be cured of it. The person who keeps truth in his hands has lost.
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I hesitate to deposit money in a bank. I am afraid I shall never dare to take it out again
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The secret of theory is that truth does not exist.
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Related Authors
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Pierre Bourdieu Sociologist -
Theodor Adorno Sociologist -
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Walter Benjamin Literary critic -
Slavoj Žižek Philosopher -
Friedrich Nietzsche Philologist -
Roland Barthes Philosopher -
Guy Debord Writer -
Karl Marx Philosopher -
Jean-Francois Lyotard Philosopher -
Jacques Lacan Psychoanalyst -
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Zygmunt Bauman Sociologist -
Jurgen Habermas Philosopher -
Jacques Derrida Philosopher -
Marshall McLuhan Philosopher -
Michel Foucault Philosopher -
Edgar Morin Philosopher -
Georges Bataille Author -
Gilles Deleuze Philosopher