The futility of everything that comes to us from the media is the inescapable consequence of the absolute inability of that particular stage to remain silent. Music, commercial breaks, news flashes, adverts, news broadcasts, movies, presentersโthere is no alternative but to fill the screen; otherwise there would be an irremediable void.... Thatโs why the slightest technical hitch, the slightest slip on the part of the presenter becomes so exciting, for it reveals the depth of the emptiness squinting out at us through this little window.
Jean BaudrillardWe 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.
Jean BaudrillardThe multiplication of individual sects should not fool us: the important point is that the whole of America is preoccupied with the sect as a moral institution, with its immediate demand for beatification, its material efficacity, its compulsion for justification, and doubtless also with its madness and frenzy.
Jean BaudrillardIf you say, I love you, then you have already fallen in love with language, which is already a form of break up and infidelity.
Jean BaudrillardThe 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.
Jean BaudrillardFiction is not imagination. It is what anticipates imagination by giving it the form of reality.
Jean BaudrillardIf 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.
Jean Baudrillard