Jean Baudrillard Quotes

There is no human reason to be here, except for the sheer ecstasy of being crowded together.

Cowardice and courage are never without a measure of affectation. Nor is love. Feelings are never true. They play with their mirrors.

Perhaps our eyes are merely a blank film which is taken from us after our deaths to be developed elsewhere and screened as our life story in some infernal cinema or dispatched as microfilm into the sidereal void.

There exists, between people in love, a kind of capital held by each. This is not just a stock of affects or pleasure, but also the possibility of playing double or quits with the share you hold in the other's heart.

What I am, I don't know. I am the simulacrum of myself.

The repentant, run-to-seed ultra-Leftists who have converted to humanitarianism, artificial inseminators of the widow and the orphan, themselves orphans of reality and malades imaginaires of politics, premature ejaculators of posthistory and hyperchondriacs of the dead body of ideology and morality.

There is no aphrodisiac like innocence.

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.

Photography is our exorcism. Primitive society had its masks, bourgeois society its mirrors. We have our images.

[I]nside every computer, there is a hidden man being bored.

The US ... cultivates no origin or mythical authenticity; it has no past and no founding truth ... it lives in a perpetual present. in the US everything human is artificial. The country is without hope. What is arresting here is ... both the absence of architecture in the cities and the dizzying absence of emotion and character in the faces and bodies.

What is a society without a heroic dimension?

It is the task of radical thought, since the world is given to us unintelligibly, to make it more unintelligible, more enigmatic, more fabulous.

Seduction is always more singular and sublime than sex and it commands the higher price.

You have to know how to disappear.

The new shopping malls make possible the synthesis of all consumer activities, not least of which are shopping, flirting with objects, idle wandering, and all the permutations of these.

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.

Neither dead nor alive, the hostage is suspended by an incalculable outcome. It is not his destiny that awaits for him, nor his own death, but anonymous chance, which can only seem to him something absolutely arbitrary. He is in a state of radical emergency, of virtual extermination.

It is the corpse of the bourgeoisie that separates us. With us, it is that class that is the carrier of the chromosome of banality.

The day the world ends, no one will be there, just as no one was there when it began. This is a scandal. Such a scandal for the human race that it is indeed capable collectively, out of spite, of hastening the end of the world by all means just so it can enjoy the show.

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.

We are no longer dealing with historical events, but with places of collapse.

Images have become our true sex objects. It is this promiscuity and the ubiquity of images, this viral contamination of images which are the fatal characteristics of our culture.

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.

For the heavenly fire no longer strikes depraved cities, it is rather the lens which cuts through ordinary reality like a laser, putting it to death.

As the end of the century approaches, all our culture is like the culture of flies at the beginning of winter. Having lost their agility, dreamy and demented, they turn slowly about the window in the first icy mists of morning. They give themselves a last wash and brush-up, their oscillated eyes roll, and they fall down the curtains.

A woman spent all Christmas Day in a telephone box without ringing anyone. If someone comes to phone, she leaves the box, then resumes her place afterwards. No one calls her either, but from a window in the street, someone watched her all day, no doubt since they had nothing better to do. The Christmas syndrome.

The sickly cultural pathos which the whole of France indulges in, that fetishism of the cultural heritage.

The war was won on both sides: by the Vietnamese on the ground, by the Americans in the electronic mental space. And if the one side won an ideological and political victory, the other made Apocalypse Now and that has gone right around the world.

The secret of theory is that truth does not exist.

Man has lost the basic skill of the ape, the ability to scratch its back. Which gave it extraordinary independence, and the liberty to associate for reasons other than the need for mutual back-scratching.

A sociosphere of contact, control, persuasion and dissuasion, of exhibitions of inhibitions in massive or homeopathic doses...: this is obscenity. All structures turned inside out and exhibited, all operations rendered visible. In America this goes all the way from the bewildering network of aerial telephone and electric wiresto the concrete multiplication of all the bodily functions in the home, the litany of ingredients on the tiniest can of food, the exhibition of income or IQ.

As for freedom, it will soon cease to exist in any shape or form. Living will depend upon absolute obedience to a strict set of arrangements, which it will no longer be possible to transgress. The air traveler is not free. In the future, life's passengers will be even less so: they will travel through their lives fastened to their (corporate) seats.

For me, the photography, in its purest form, is a variant of the fable. Another way of saving the appearances - a way of signifying, through this fabulous capture, that this supposed real world is always about to lose its meaning and its reality.

It is not enough for theory to describe and analyze, it must itself be an event in the universe it describes. In order to do this theory must partake of and become the acceleration of this logic. It must tear itself from all referents and take pride only in the future. Theory must operate on time at the cost of a deliberate distortion of present reality.

You need an infinite stretch of time ahead of you to start to think, infinite energy to make the smallest decision. The world is getting denser. The immense number of useless projects is bewildering. Too many things have to be put in to balance up an uncertain scale. You can't disappear anymore. You die in a state of total indecision.

The most embarrassing part of the film is that the new problem posed by simulation is confused with its classical, Platonic treatment ... The Matrix is surely the kind of film about the matrix that the matrix would have been able to produce.

Protect everything, detect everything, contain everything - obsessional society. Save time. Save money. Save our souls - phobic society. Low tar. Low energy. Low calories. Low sex. Low speed - anorexic society.

Politicians - power itself - are abject because they merely embody the profound contempt people have for their own lives. One should be grateful to the politicians for accepting the abstractness of power, and ridding others of its burden. This inevitably kills them but they get their revenge by passing onto others the corpse of power.

All of [the] activities here have a surreptitious end-of-the-world feel to them:... these joggers sleepwalking in the mist like shadow's who have escaped from Plato's cave

The opposite of knowledge is not ignorance, but deceit and fraud.

In years to come cities will stretch out horizontally and will be non-urban (Los Angeles). After that, they will bury themselves in the ground and will no longer have names. Everything will become infrastructure bathed in artificial light and energy. The brilliant superstructure, the crazy verticality will have disappeared. New York is the final fling of this baroque verticality, this centrifugal excentricity, before the horizontal dismantling arrives, and the subterranean implosion that will follow.

Information can tell us everything. It has all the answers. But they are answers to questions we have not asked, and which doubtless don't even arise.

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.

It is a world completely rotten with wealth, power, senility, indifference, puritanism and mental hygiene, poverty and waste, technological futility and aimless violence, and yet I cannot help but feel it has about it something of the dawning of the universe. Perhaps because the entire world continues to dream of New York, even as New York dominates and exploits it.

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

Prophesying catastrophe is incredibly banal. The more original move is to assume that it has already happened.

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