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Book by Jean Baudrillard · 4 quotes · Fate, Ifs, Technology

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“Terror is as much a part of the concept of truth as runniness is of the concept of j am. We wouldn't like jam if it didn't, by its very nature, ooze. We wouldn't like truth if it wasn't sticky, if, from time to time, it didn't ooze blood. Verifying to the point of dizziness the useless objectivity of things: science. Verifying to the point of dizziness the useless subjectivity of desire: sexual libera tion. An object in which there is nothing to see. A body in which there is nothing to desire. There is a particular grace in indifference to one's own life and the admission of that indifference is touching, just so long as you are told with tenderness: I am incapable of loving you, rather than being told 'I love you', with all the affectation appropriate to such a statement. There are indeed certain women who can only love in proportion to the degree of boredom they feel with themselves: with them, above all you must not bring them out of their boredom. There is, however, a great difference between real and affected indifference: only the former touches us. But it is very rare, almost as rare as beauty or madness.”

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“I arrive, by a snow-covered path, at a kind of chateau. The room I enter by is covered all over with several inches of snow - even on the furniture and the ceiling. Shining in through the window are fierce, fluorescent advertisements in blue and red. I walk through the huge rooms secretively. I once lived here. Voices come near. I feel worried, since these are important men and I have no right to be here. But their voices change, their eyes change too, and suddenly they become mental defectives. The mansion is an asylum and indeed a nurse is stretched out on a long table in the peristyle. I wake up, retaining an exact impression of having once been mad myself in this very place, in a previous life.”

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“Melrose Avenue, Santa Monica - Dialogue on a terrace. SHE: You are jealous ? Are you jealous ? You are fucking jealous! . . . Let me say . . . You 're twenty and I am forty-two, and I'll give my fucking ass to fucking anybody . . . Do you know that? * He gets up, crosses Melrose for no reason, comes back, kneels down in front of her (younger, but as theatrical). HE: Do you love me? Do you love me? SHE: Yes . . . Yes, I love you . . . The Italian kneads his meatballs. An Indian is playing a video game and its shrill soundtrack provides a backing to the conversation. The woman herself speaks in a shrill, hysterical voice. It is pleasant in Los Angeles in November, on the Melrose terrace, around the middle of the night. Everyone is smiling somewhere. No passion. A scene American-style. The waiter takes the car keys and drags off the woman, who shows off her black-stockinged legs and pretends to be mad. A black man gets up and, as he passes, says to me: ' Too much love! ' Gliding along the road that runs beside the coast in a black Porsche is like penetrating slowly into the inside of your own body.”

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“Cancer: the code breaks down, becomes disorganized, lets cells proliferate indiscriminately. A disease of information. AIDS: the immune system (the secret defences of the body) is suppressed. Obsessive fear of contiguity, of flows (sperm, blood, saliva), of contact. A disease of communication. What if all this reflected a brute, instinctive refusal of the flows of communic ation, of sperm, of sex, of words? If there were in all this an 'instinctive', vital resistance to the extension of flows and circuits - at the cost of a new mortal pathology, AIDS and cancer, which would ultimately be protecting us from something even more serious, or would at least be serving as an alarm signal? After all, neurosis is what man invents to protect him from madness.”

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