Jean Baudrillard: Trending quotes

“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

World

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

Jean Baudrillard

Age , Democracy

“There is no aphrodisiac like innocence.”

Jean Baudrillard

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

“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?).

World , Law , Food , Animals

“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)

“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

Sense

“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

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

Jean Baudrillard

Source: Fragments: Cool Memories III, 1990-1995

Truth , Secret

“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.”