Quotessence
Home / Books / Cool memories

Cool memories

Book by Jean Baudrillard · 5 quotes · Fate, Ifs, Technology

Filter quotes by topic

AllFateIfsTechnologyLanguageLoveSimulationWomenWorld1968CultureDeathJealousyLostMadnessPleasurePowerSeductionTransmigration Of The SoulAmericaCowardice

Cool memories Quotes

“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.”

WomenMadnessIndifference
Book:Cool memories
Create image

“Waiting is an anticipated expiation. Every pleasure is surrounded by a waiting area which expresses the fact that millions of people desire the same thing at the same time. Waiting is the neutralization of the respective desires which bear upon the same object. Even perhaps upon suffering and death. If death were a public service, there would be waiting lists. Impatience finds its justification as a refusal of this void, this abeyance of time which has no justification in any other world and which is produced by the overcrowding, the overpopulation of all desires. Certain women dream only of winning a man. Others, though they are rarer, dream only of losing men. They have expiated their femininity in advance and the pleasure it can give them. If they have some sensual disposition, this disappears to be replaced by a more subtle game-plan. Just as thought reserves itself a sort of mental domination, with no concern to change the world, but the sole aim of abolishing it, certain women devote themselves to a sort of mental prostitution in which men, weary of tame pleasures, may play at their own ruin.”

PhilosophyDesireWaitingWomenGame
Book:Cool memories
Create image

“There is no sense in refusing honours. That is in fact to do them too much honour. The only strategy is to act so that they never weigh upon you. Your delicious (and malicious) certainty that you are a beautiful woman only subjugates yourself. How is one to approach her to be subjugated oneself? It seems difficult to meet the woman of your life when you have several (lives). In fact, as soon as you have a double life . . . Popular fame is what we should aspire to. Nothing will ever match the distracted gaze of the woman serving in the butcher's who has seen you on television. With their feet caught in the ice like the pink flamingos, they still thought they were God's gift to mankind.”

WomenFameDistractionPopularityPretensionBeautiful PeopleTransmigration Of The SoulHonours And Prizes
Book:Cool memories
Create image

“With certain women, we do not love them as we would wish or as they would wish. We prefer to violate them and lose them. The surprises of thought are like those of love: they wear out. But here too you can carry on for a long time doing your conjugal duty. Rome, Berlin, Sydney, New York, Rio. My secretarial staff is expanding. My rainbow too. The night which would fall simultaneously on all the cities of the world has not yet occurred. The sun which would illuminate all the cities of the world at once has not yet risen. Every woman is like a timezone. She is a nocturnal fragment of your journey. She brings you unflaggingly closer to the next night. Some women have disguised themselves as Congolese dugouts or Aleutian pearls. Why shouldn't they disguise themselves as a timezone, or even as the ecstasy of the journey? Everywhere there is pleasure you will find a woman in disguise, her features lost or metamorphosed into the ecstacy of things. Everywhere there is a woman dying.”

WomenFateMetamorphosis
Book:Cool memories
Create image