Jean Baudrillard
Birthdate: July 27, 1929
Birthplace: Reims, France
Date of Death: March 6, 2007
Occupation: Author, Philosopher, and Theorist
Profile: Best known for
Simulacra and Simulation.
Website: https://baudrillardstudies.com/
Number of Quotes: 60
A negative judgment gives you more satisfaction than praise, provided it smacks of jealousy.
Abstraction today is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept.
Simulation is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal.
Simulacra and Simulation (1981).
Advertising is the simplest form of propaganda.
The Consumer Society (1970).
America is a giant hologram, in the sense that information concerning the whole is contained in each of its elements.
America (1986).
America is the original version of modernity. We are the dubbed or subtitled version.
Americans may have no identity, but they do have wonderful teeth.
At male strip shows, it is still the women that we watch, the audience of women and
their eager faces. They are more obscene than if they were dancing naked themselves.
Cowardice and courage are never without a measure of affectation. Nor is love. Feelings are never true. They play with their mirrors.
Deep down, no one really believes they have a right to live. But this death sentence generally stays tucked away, hidden
beneath the difficulty of living. If that difficulty is removed from time to time, death is suddenly there, unintelligibly.
Deep down, the US, with its space, its technological refinement, its bluff good conscience,
even in those spaces which it opens up for simulation, is the only remaining primitive society.
Democracy is the menopause of Western society, the Grand Climacteric of the body social. Fascism is its middle-aged lust.
Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of
Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and simulation.
Simulacra and Simulation (1981).
Driving is a spectacular form of amnesia. Everything is to be discovered, everything to be obliterated.
Executives are like joggers. If you stop a jogger, he goes on running on the spot. If you drag an
executive away from his business, he goes on running on the spot, pawing the ground, talking business.
Fashion is the pure speculative stage of the aesthetic, where forms are pushed to their limit and beyond.
The System of Objects (1968).
Forget Foucault. Forget Baudrillard.
Forget all of us. If you haven't understood by now, you never will.
Forget Foucault (1977).
Governing today means giving acceptable signs of credibility. It is like advertising and it is the same effect that is achieved - commitment to a scenario.
History is our lost referential, that is to say our myth.
The Illusion of the End (1992).
History that repeats itself turns to farce. Farce that repeats itself turns to history.
I hesitate to deposit money in a bank. I am afraid I shall never dare to take it out again. When you go
to confession and entrust your sins to the safe-keeping of the priest, do you ever come back for them?
If you say, I love you, then you have already fallen in love with language, which is already a form of break up and infidelity.
In the absence of God, everything is permitted.
In the end, the Gulf War did not take place.
The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (1991).
In the same way that we need statesmen to spare us the abjection of exercising power, we need scholars to spare us the abjection of learning.
It is always the same: once you are liberated, you are forced to ask who you are.
It is always there, that violence, that intensity, that evil religion which is the consumer society.
The Consumer Society (1970).
It only takes a politician believing in what he says for the others to stop believing him.
Like dreams, statistics are a form of wish fulfillment.
Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable.
Cool Memories (1987).
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.
Nothing is wholly obvious without becoming enigmatic. Reality itself is too obvious to be true.
Objects are a reflection of the soul. They speak. They are a mirror.
The System of Objects (1968).
Perhaps the world's second worst crime is boredom. The first is being a bore.
Reality itself founders in hyperrealism, the meticulous reduplication of the real, preferably through another, reproductive medium, such as photography.
Simulacra and Simulation (1981).
Santa Barbara is a paradise; Disneyland is a paradise; the U.S. is a paradise. Paradise is just
paradise. Mournful, monotonous, and superficial though it may be, it is paradise. There is no other.
Seduction is always more singular and sublime than sex and it commands the higher price.
Seduction is stronger than power because it is reversible and mortal, while power seeks to be irreversible and immortal.
Seduction (1979).
Television knows no night. It is perpetual day. TV embodies our fear of the dark, of night, of the other side of things.
The abjection of our political situation is the only true challenge today. Only
facing up to this situation in all its desperation can help us get out of it.
The consumer society is a society of excess. But it is also a society of exhaustion.
The Transparency of Evil (1990).
The great person is ahead of their time, the smart make something out of it, and the blockhead, sets themselves against it.
The mass is a matrix. Every particle of it is pregnant with the entire structure.
In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities (1978).
The order of the world is always right - such is the judgment of God.
For God has departed, but he has left his judgment behind, the way the Cheshire
Cat left his grin.
The sad thing about artificial intelligence is that it lacks artifice and therefore intelligence.
The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth—it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true.
Simulacra and Simulation (1981).
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.
Simulacra and Simulation (1981).
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.
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.
There is no aphrodisiac like innocence.
There is nothing funny about Halloween. This sarcastic festival reflects, rather, an infernal demand for revenge by children on the adult world.
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.
To love someone is to isolate him from the world, wipe out every trace of him, dispossess him of his shadow, drag
him into a murderous future. It is to circle around the other like a dead star and absorb him into a black light.
We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.
Simulacra and Simulation (1981).
We shall never resolve the enigma of the relation between the negative foundations of greatness and that greatness itself.
Welcome to the desert of the real.
What is a society without a heroic dimension?
What you have to do is enter the fiction of America, enter America as fiction. It is, indeed, on this fictive basis that it dominates the world.
When the real is no longer what it used to be, nostalgia assumes its full meaning.
Simulacra and Simulation (1981).
You are born modern, you do not become so.
You are information, a message, a signal, a noise, a disturbance, a scandal.
The Ecstasy of Communication (1987).
Last on Earth
