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Jean Baudrillard

Jean Baudrillard Quotes

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“THE GREAT DISAPPEARANCE IS NOT, then, simply that of the virtual transmutation of things, of the mise en abyme of reality, but that of the diversion of the subject to infinity, of a serial pulverization of consciousness into all the interstices of reality. We might say, at a pinch, that consciousness (the will, freedom) is everywhere; it merges with the course of things and, as a result, becomes superfluous. This is the analysis Cardinal Ratzinger (the Pope) himself made of religion: a religion which accommodates to the world, which attunes itself to the (politcal, social) world, becomes superfluous. It is for the same reason — because it became increasingly merged with objective banality — that art, ceasing to be different from life, has become superfluous.”

ArtRealityReligionSimulacrumMise En Abyme
Book:Why Hasn't Everything Already Disappeared?
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“The immateriality of signs is alien to me, as it is to a race of peasants with whom I share an obsessional morality, a sluggishness, a stupid, ancestral belief in the real. In reality, I am one of them. The simulation hypothesis is merely a maximalist position. The seduction hypothesis is merely a formal abstraction. It is the phantom of seduction which obsesses me—as for the rest, I have never managed anything other than to let myself be seduced. And this is quite alright: all the rest is merely destructive, moral passion. The seducing monk dreams of Manichean tension between the sign and the real as the most sublime form of morality. Only from time to time, the earth-shattering, hypothetical union of the two… Even then, the beauty of the violent resolution eludes him. Faith and fury first attack the impossibility of believing; they attack signs. Annihilating the world as sign, in order to make it an object of belief.”

RealitySimulationSignsLalo Cura
Book:Cool memories
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“The sumptuous age of stars and images is reduced to a few artificial tornado effects, pathetic fake buildings, and childish tricks which the crowd pretends to be taken in by to avoid feeling too disappointed. Ghost towns, ghost people. The whole place has the same air of obsolescence about it as Sunset or Hollywood Boulevard.”

PeopleWholeFeelingsAgeStarsTakenAirEffectsBuildingHollywoodTownsCrowdsTricksGhostFakeSunsetDisappointedArtificialPatheticTornadoesBoulevardObsolescenceSumptuousGhost Town
Book:Mass Identity Architecture: Architectural Writings of Jean Baudrillard
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“Today, every principle of identity is affected by fashion, precisely because of its potential to revert all forms to non-origin and recurrence. Fashion is always retro, but always on the basis of the abolition of the passé (the past): the spectral death and resurrection of forms. Its proper actuality (its 'up-to-dateness', its 'relevance') is not a reference to the present, but an immediate and total recycling.”

TodayPastFormPrinciplesFashionIdentityBasesAffectedResurrectionRelevanceAbolitionRecyclingActualityRetroRecurrence
Book:Symbolic Exchange and Death
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“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!”

HeartUseSocialStepsClassEconomyMiddleCenturyIdeologyMarxismCritiqueBourgeoisMarxistLatent
Author:Jean Baudrillard
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“Freud thought he was bringing the plague to the U.S.A., but the U.S.A. has victoriously resisted the psychoanalytical frost by real deep freezing, by mental and sexual refrigeration. They have countered the black magic of the Unconscious with the white magic of "doing your own thing," air conditioning, sterilization, mental frigidity and the cold media of information.”

RealBlackWhiteMagicAirMediaInformationColdUnconsciousPlagueConditioningPsychoanalysisFrostFreezingBlack MagicAir ConditioningSterilizationFrigidityReal DeepDoing Your Own Thing
Book:Cool memories
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“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.”

WayHomeAmericaFunctionStructureIncomeContactOperationsVisibleMassiveIngredientsConcreteElectricPersuasionTelephonesDoseExhibitionsInhibitionsObscenityMultiplicationBodily Functions
Author:Jean Baudrillard
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“Large department stores, with their luxuriant abundance of canned goods, foods, and clothing, are like the primary landscape and the geometrical locus of affluence. Streets with overcrowded and glittering store windowsthe displays of delicacies, and all the scenes of alimentary and vestimentary festivity, stimulate a magical salivation. Accumulation is more than the sum of its products: the conspicuousness of surplus, the final and magical negation of scarcitymimic a new-found nature of prodigious fecundity.”

FoundStreetsProductsSceneFinalsStoresPrimariesLandscapeAbundanceDepartmentGoodsClothingsDisplayAccumulationDelicacySurplusAffluenceNegationProdigiousDepartment StoresFestivities
Author:Jean Baudrillard
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“The 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.”

ShouldImportantWholeAmericaIndividualMoralMaterialsFoolDemandMadnessInstitutionsJustificationCompulsionSectsFrenzyMultiplication
Book:America
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“Kitschis one of the major categories of the modern object. Knick-knacks, rustic odds-and-ends, souvenirs, lampshades, and African masks: the kitsch-object is collectively this whole plethora of "trashy," sham or faked objects, this whole museum of junk which proliferates everywhere.... Kitsch is the equivalent to the "cliché" in discourse.”

EndsWholeModernObjectsMajorsMaskMuseumsCategoriesOddsDiscourseJunkKnackKitschSouvenirsRusticKnicksOdds And Ends
Author:Jean Baudrillard
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“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.”

HumansCountryCharacterBodyPastFacesEmotionCitiesArchitectureAbsenceAuthenticityArtificialPerpetualFoundingWithout HopeArresting
Author:Jean Baudrillard
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