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Jean Baudrillard: 128 quotes8 likes

“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)

“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

“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

“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)

“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)

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

Jean Baudrillard

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

“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)

“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

“…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

“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

“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)

“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

“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)

“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 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

“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)