Jean Baudrillard Quotes (64 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

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Simulacra and Simulation

Jean Baudrillard

Jean Baudrillard: 64 quotes 8 likes

Famous Jean Baudrillard Quotes

“There is no aphrodisiac like innocence.”

Jean Baudrillard

Source: 1980s, Cool Memories (1987, trans. 1990), Chapter 5

“Democracy is the menopause of Western society, the Grand Climacteric of the body social. Fascism is its middle-aged lust.”

Jean Baudrillard

“We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.”

Jean Baudrillard book Simulacra and Simulation

Source: Simulacra and Simulation

“the neighborhood is nothing but a protective zone- remodeling, disinfection, a snobbish and hygenic design- but above all in a figurative sense: it is a machine for making emptiness.”

Jean Baudrillard book Simulacra and Simulation

Source: Simulacra and Simulation

“Watergate was thus nothing but a lure held out by the system to catch its adversaries - a simulation of scandal for regenerative ends.”

Jean Baudrillard

"The Precession of Simulcra,MÖBIUS - SPIRALING NEGATIVETY
1980s, Simulacra and Simulation (1981)

“It is the saddest sight in the world. Sadder than destitution, sadder than the beggar is the man who eats alone in public. Nothing more contradicts the laws of man or beast, for animals always do each other the honour of sharing or disputing each other’s food. He who eats alone is dead”

Jean Baudrillard

New York (p. 15)
1980s, America (1986)
Context: Yet there is a certain solitude like no other - that of the man preparing his meal in public on a wall, or on the hood of his car, or along a fence, alone. You see that all the time here. It is the saddest sight in the world. Sadder than destitution, sadder than the beggar is the man who eats alone in public. Nothing more contradicts the laws of man or beast, for animals always do each other the honour of sharing or disputing each other’s food. He who eats alone is dead (but not he who drinks alone. Why is this?).

Jean Baudrillard Quotes about the world

“Everywhere one seeks to produce meaning, to make the world signify, to render it visible. We are not, however, in danger of lacking meaning; quite the contrary, we are gorged with meaning and it is killing us.”

Jean Baudrillard

“Imagine the amazing good fortune of the generation that gets to see the end of the world. This is as marvelous as being there in the beginning.”

Jean Baudrillard

“The world is not dialectical -- it is sworn to extremes, not to equilibrium, sworn to radical antagonism, not to reconciliation or synthesis. This is also the principle of evil.”

Jean Baudrillard

Jean Baudrillard in: Eldon Taylor What Does That Mean?: Exploring Mind, Meaning, and Mysteries http://books.google.co.in/books?id=pTAIRTJbENgC&pg=PA171, Hay House, Inc, 15 January 2010, p. 171
New millennium

“This world wants to be childish in order to make us believe that the adults are elsewhere, in the "real" world, and to conceal the fact that true childishness is everywhere - that it is that of the adults themselves who come here to act the child in order to foster illusions as to their real childishness.”

Jean Baudrillard

The Precession of Simulcra, The Hyperreal and the Imaginary
1980s, Simulacra and Simulation (1981)

“To challenge and to cope with this paradoxical state of things, we need a paradoxical way of thinking; since the world drifts into delirium, we must adopt a delirious point of view. We must no longer assume any principle of truth, of causality, or any discursive norm. Instead, we must grant both the poetic singularity of events and the radical uncertainty of events. It is not easy. We usually think that holding to the protocols of experimentation and verification is the most difficult thing. But in fact the most difficult thing is to renounce the truth and the possibility of verification, to remain as long as possible on the enigmatic, ambivalent, and reversible side of thought.”

Jean Baudrillard

The Vital Illusion (2000) "The Murder of the Real". Wellek Library Lectures given May 1999 at the University of California, Irvine
New millennium

“Seduction is the world’s elementary dynamic… All this has changed significantly for us, at least in appearance. For what has happened to good and evil? Seduction hurls them against one another, and unites them beyond meaning, in a paroxysm [sudden outbreak of emotion] of intensity and charm.”

Jean Baudrillard

Source: 1980s, The Ecstasy of Communication (1987), p. 59

Jean Baudrillard Quotes about the truth

“The secret of theory is that truth does not exist.”

Jean Baudrillard

Source: Fragments: Cool Memories III, 1990-1995

“The discourse of truth is quite simply impossible. It eludes itself. Everything eludes itself, everything scoffs at its own truth, seduction renders everything elusive. The fury to unveil the truth, to get at the naked truth, the one which haunts all discourses of interpretation, the obscene rage to uncover the secret, is proportionate to the impossibility of ever achieving this. …But this rage, this fury, only bears witness to the eternity of seduction and to the impossibility of mastering it.”

Jean Baudrillard

Source: 1980s, The Ecstasy of Communication (1987), p. 73

“The simulacrum is never what hides the truth — it is truth that hides the fact that there is none. The simulacrum is true.”

Jean Baudrillard

Ecclesiastes
1980s, Simulacra and Simulation (1981)

“If the thought enunciates an object as a truth, it is only as a challenge to this object's own self-fulfillment.”

Jean Baudrillard

1990s, Radical Thought (1994)

“The simulacrum now hides, not the truth, but the fact that there is none, that is to say, the continuation of Nothingness.”

Jean Baudrillard

1990s, Radical Thought (1994)

“If he is this good at acting crazy, it's because he is." Nor is military psychology mistaken in this regard: in this sense, all crazy people simulate, and this lack of distinction is the worst kind of subversion. It is against this lack of distinction that classical reason armed itself in all its categories. But it is what today again outflanks them, submerging the principle of truth.”

Jean Baudrillard

The Precession of Simulcra
1980s, Simulacra and Simulation (1981)

Jean Baudrillard: Trending quotes

“Forgetting extermination is part of extermination”

Jean Baudrillard

Holocaust
1980s, Simulacra and Simulation (1988)
Context: Forgetting extermination is part of extermination, because it is also the extermination of memory, of history, of the social, etc. This forgetting is as essential as the event in any case unlocatable by us, inaccessible to us itn its truth. This forgetting is still too dangerous, it must be effaced by an artificial memory (today, everywhere, it is artificial memories that effect the memory of man, that efface man in his own memory). This artificial memory will be the restaging of extermination - but late, much too late for it to be able to make real waves and profoundly disturb something, and especially, especially through medium that is itself cold, radiating forgetfulness, deterrence, and extermination in a still more systematic way, if that is possible, than the camps themselves.

Parting , Forgetting

“Nothing is wholly obvious without becoming enigmatic. Reality itself is too obvious to be true.”

Jean Baudrillard

1990s, The Perfect Crime (1993)

Reality

“Americans may have no identity, but they do have wonderful teeth.”

Jean Baudrillard

Jean Baudrillard Quotes

“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.”

Jean Baudrillard

Source: America

Dreams , Communication

“Philosophy leads to death, sociology leads to suicide.”

Jean Baudrillard

Death , Suicide

“Never resist a sentence you like, in which language takes its own pleasure and in which, after having abused it for so long, you are stupefied by its innocence.”

Jean Baudrillard

Source: Cool Memories

Pleasure

“All societies end up wearing masks.”

Jean Baudrillard

Source: America

“This is what terrorism is occupied with as well: making real, palpable violence surface in opposition to the invisible violence of security.”

Jean Baudrillard book Simulacra and Simulation

Source: Simulacra and Simulation

“Animals have no unconscious, because they have a territory. Men have only had an unconscious since they lost a territory.”

Jean Baudrillard book Simulacra and Simulation

Source: Simulacra and Simulation

Men , Animals

“One day, we shall stand up and our backsides will remain attached to our seats.”

Jean Baudrillard

1980s, Cool Memories (1987, trans. 1990)

“One may dream of a culture where everyone bursts into laughter when someone says: this is true, this is real.”

Jean Baudrillard

1990s, Radical Thought (1994)

Dreams , Laughter

“It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges persist here and there in the deserts that are no longer those of the Empire, but ours: The desert of the real itself.”

Jean Baudrillard

The Precession of Simulcra
1980s, Simulacra and Simulation (1981)

“So-called "realist" photography does not capture the "what is." Instead, it is preoccupied with what should not be, like the reality of suffering for example.”

Jean Baudrillard

New millennium, Photography, or the Writing of Light, (2000)

Reality , Suffering

“THERE IS NEVER ANYTHING TO PRO-DUCE. In spite of all its materialist efforts, production remains a utopia. We can wear ourselves out in materializing things, in rendering them visible, but we will never cancel the secret.”

Jean Baudrillard

Source: 1980s, The Ecstasy of Communication (1987), p. 65

Secret , Effort

“The Marxist critique is only a critique of capital, a critique coming from the heart of the middle and petit bourgeois classes, for which Marxism has served for a century as a latent ideology…. The Marxist seeks a good use of economy. Marxism is therefore only a limited petit bourgeois critique, one more step in the banalization of life toward the "good use" of the social!”

Jean Baudrillard

Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory 15 (1987) "When Bataille Attacked the Metaphysical Principle of Economy"
1980s

Life , Heart

“Driving is a spectacular form of amnesia. Everything is to be discovered, everything to be obliterated. Admittedly, there is the primal shock of the deserts and the dazzle of California, but when this is gone, the secondary brilliance of the journey begins, that of the excessive, pitiless distance, the infinity of anonymous faces and distances, or of certain miraculous geological formations, which ultimately testify to no human will, while keeping intact an image of upheaval. This form of travel admits of no exceptions: when it runs up against a known face, a familiar landscape, or some decipherable message, the spell is broken: the amnesic, ascetic, asymptotic charm of disappearance succumbs to affect and worldly semiology.”

Jean Baudrillard

Vanishing Point (pp. 9-10)
1980s, America (1986)

Travel

“When the real is no longer what it was, nostalgia assumes its full meaning.”

Jean Baudrillard

The Precession of Simulcra, The Divine Irreference Of Images
1980s, Simulacra and Simulation (1981)

Nostalgia

“Distinctive signs, full signs, never seduce us.”

Jean Baudrillard

Source: 1980s, The Ecstasy of Communication (1987), p. 59

“This realistic image, however, does not catch at all what really is, but what should not be - death and misery - what should not exist, from our moral and humanistic point of view. And at the same time making an aesthetic and commercial, perfectly immoral use and abuse of this misery. Images that actually testify, behind their pretended "objectivity", of a deep denial of the real, and of an equal denial of the image - assigned to present what does not even want to be represented, assigned to the rape of the real by burglary.”

Jean Baudrillard

New millennium

Death , Time

“…we are in a logic of simulation, which no longer has anything to do with a logic of facts and an order of reason. Simulation is characterized by a precession of the model, of all the models based on the merest fact - the models come first, their circulation, orbital like that of the bomb, constitutes the genuine magnetic field of the event. The facts no longer have a specific trajectory, they are born at the intersection of models, a single fact can be engendered by all the models at once.”

Jean Baudrillard

"The Precession of Simulcra,MÖBIUS - SPIRALING NEGATIVETY
1980s, Simulacra and Simulation (1981)

“Picturing others and everything which brings you closer to them is futile from the instant that ‘communication’ can make their presence immediate.”

Jean Baudrillard

Source: 1980s, The Ecstasy of Communication (1987), p. 42

Communication

“The close-up of a face is as obscene as a sexual organ seen from up close. It is a sexual organ. The promiscuity of the detail, the zoom-in, takes on a sexual value.”

Jean Baudrillard

Source: 1980s, The Ecstasy of Communication (1987), p. 43

“Today's terrorism is not the product of a traditional history of anarchism, nihilism, or fanaticism. It is instead the contemporary partner of globalization.”

Jean Baudrillard

The Spirit of Terrorism (2003) "The Violence of the Global"
New millennium

History

“For it is with the same imperialism that present-day simulators try to make the real, all the real, coincide with their simulation models.”

Jean Baudrillard

1980s, Simulacra and Simulation (1981)

“One has never said better how much "humanism", "normality", "quality of life" were nothing but the vicissitudes of profitability.”

Jean Baudrillard

1980s, Simulacra and Simulation (1981)

Life

“The need to speak, even if one has nothing to say, becomes more pressing when one has nothing to say, just as the will to live becomes more urgent when life has lost its meaning.”

Jean Baudrillard

Source: 1980s, The Ecstasy of Communication (1987), p. 30

Life

“We will never know if an advertisement or opinion poll has had a real influence on individual or collective wills, but we will never know either what would have happened if there had been no opinion poll or advertisement.”

Jean Baudrillard

1990s, The Perfect Crime (1993)

“Not only does reality resist those who still criticize it, but it also abandons those who defend it. Maybe it is a way for reality to get its revenge from those who claim to believe in it for the sole purpose of eventually transforming it: sending back its supporters to their own desires.”

Jean Baudrillard

1990s, Radical Thought (1994)

Way , Support , Revenge , Reality

“Take provocation, for instance, which is the opposite and the caricature of seduction. It says: "I know that you want to be seduced, and I will seduce you." Nothing could be worse than betraying this secret rule. Nothing could be less seductive than a provocative smile or inciteful behaviour, since both presuppose that one cannot be seduced naturally and that one needs to be blackmailed into it, or through a declaration of intent: "Let me seduce you"”

Jean Baudrillard

Source: 1980s, The Ecstasy of Communication (1987), p. 67

Secret , Smile , Nature

“For nothing can be greater than seduction itself, not even the order that destroys it.”

Jean Baudrillard

Seduction (1990)
1990s

“The apocalypse is finished, today it is the precession of the neutral, of forms of the neutral and of indifference. I will leave it to be considered whether there can be a romanticism, an aesthetic of the neutral therein. I don't think so — all that remains, is the fascination for desertlike and indifferent forms, for the very operation of the system that annihilates us. Now, fascination (in contrast to seduction, which was attached to appearances, and to dialectical reason, which was attached to meaning) is a nihilistic passion par excellence, it is the passion proper to the mode of disappearance. We are fascinated by all forms of disappearance, of our disappearance. Melancholic and fascinated, such is our general situation in an era of involuntary transparency.
I am a nihilist.
I observe, I accept, I assume the immense process of the destruction of appearances (and of the seduction of appearances) in the service of meaning (representation, history, criticism, etc.) that is the fundamental fact of the nineteenth century.”

Jean Baudrillard

Source: 1980s, Simulacra and Simulation (1988), Ch. 18 : On Nihilism, translation by Sheila Faria Glaser.

History , Thinking , Appearance , Passion

“The end of history is, alas, also the end of the dustbins of history. There are no longer any dustbins for disposing of old ideologies, old regimes, old values. Where are we going to throw Marxism, which actually invented the dustbins of history? (Yet there is some justice here since the very people who invented them have fallen in.) Conclusion: if there are no more dustbins of history, this is because History itself has become a dustbin. It has become its own dustbin, just as the planet itself is becoming its own dustbin.”

Jean Baudrillard

The Illusion of the End (1992) (L'Illision de la Fin) Tr. Chris Turner, 1994, Stanford University Press, ISBN 0804725012, p. 26, "The Event Strike"
1990s

People , Justice , History

“A series of accidents creates a positively lighthearted state.”

Jean Baudrillard

Source: 1980s, Cool Memories (1987, trans. 1990), Chapter 4

Light , Heart

“Challenge, and not desire, lies at the heart of seduction.”

Jean Baudrillard

Source: 1980s, The Ecstasy of Communication (1987), p. 57

Heart

“The real is not only what can be reproduced, but that which is already reproduced, the hyper-real.”

Jean Baudrillard

Simulations (1983), New York: Semiotext, p. 146
1980s