Jean Baudrillard
philosopher, photographer, translator, sociologist, university teacher, literary critic, anthropologist
Read on Wikipedia1929 – 2007
All Quotes by Jean Baudrillard
“There is nothing funny about Halloween. This sarcastic festival reflects, rather, an infernal demand for revenge by children on the adult world.”
“The sad thing about artificial intelligence is that it lacks artifice and therefore intelligence.”
“Deep down, no one really believes they have a right to live. But this death sentence generally stays cosily tucked away, hidden beneath the difficulty of living. If that difficulty is removed from time to time, death is suddenly there, unintelligibly.”
“There is nothing funny about Halloween. This sarcastic festival reflects, rather, an infernal demand for revenge by children on the adult world.”
“The real is not only what can be reproduced, but that which is already reproduced, the hyper-real.”
“The Marxist critique is only a critique of capital, a critique coming from the heart of the middle and 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!”
“There are cultures that can only picture their origins and not their ends. Two other positions are possible: only picturing one's end - our own culture; picturing neither beginning nor end - the coming culture.”
“A series of accidents creates a positively lighthearted state.”
“One day, we shall stand up and our backsides will remain attached to our seats.”
“Dying is nothing. You have to know how to disappear. Dying comes down to a biological chance and that is of no consequence. Disappearing is of a far higher order of necessity. You must not leave it to biology to decide when you will disappear. To disappear is to pass into an enigmatic state which is neither life nor death. Some animals know how to do this, as do savages, who withdraw while still alive, from the sight of their own people.”
“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. (p. 30)”
“A negative judgment gives you more satisfaction than praise, provided it smacks of jealousy.”
“Picturing others and everything which brings you closer to them is futile from the instant that ‘communication’ can make their presence immediate. (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. (p. 43)”
“Challenge, and not desire, lies at the heart of seduction. (p. 57)”
“Seduction is the world’s elementary dynamic… All this has changed significantly for us, at least in appearance. For what has happened to good and evil? Seduction hurls them against one another, and unites them beyond meaning, in a paroxysm [sudden outbreak of emotion] of intensity and charm. (p. 59)”
“Distinctive signs, full signs, never seduce us. (p. 59)”
“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. (p. 65)”
“And so one can imagine that in amorous seduction the other is the locus of your secret — the other unknowingly holds that which you will never have the chance to know. (p. 65)”
“Take provocation, for instance, which is the opposite and the caricature of seduction. It says: "I know that you want to be seduced, and I will seduce you." Nothing could be worse than betraying this secret rule. Nothing could be less seductive than a provocative smile or inciteful behaviour, since both presuppose that one cannot be seduced naturally and that one needs to be blackmailed into it, or through a declaration of intent: "Let me seduce you" (p. 67)”
“The simulacrum is never what hides the truth — it is truth that hides the fact that there is none. The simulacrum is true. — Ecclesiastes”
“For it is with the same imperialism that present-day simulators try to make the real, all the real, coincide with their simulation models.”
“One has never said better how much "humanism", "normality", "quality of life" were nothing but the vicissitudes of profitability.”
“For nothing can be greater than seduction itself, not even the order that destroys it.”
“Nothing is wholly obvious without becoming enigmatic. Reality itself is too obvious to be true.”
“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.”
“One may dream of a culture where everyone bursts into laughter when someone says: this is true, this is real.”
“If the thought enunciates an object as a truth, it is only as a challenge to this object's own self-fulfillment.”
“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.”
“The simulacrum now hides, not the truth, but the fact that there is none, that is to say, the continuation of Nothingness.”
“Today's terrorism is not the product of a traditional history of anarchism, nihilism, or fanaticism. It is instead the contemporary partner of globalization.”
“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 are only a few images that are not forced to provide meaning, or have to go through the filter of a specific idea.”
“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.”
“It is perhaps not a surprise that photography developed as a technological medium in the industrial age, when reality started to disappear. It is even perhaps the disappearance of reality that triggered this technical form. Reality found a way to mutate into an image.”
“Like dreams, statistics are a form of wish fulfillment.”