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Fragments

Book by Jean Baudrillard · 50 quotes · Wisdom, Heraclitus, Philosophy

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“This is free-market fanaticism, the fanaticism of indifference to its own values and, for that very reason, total intolerance towards those who differ by any passion whatsoever. The New World Order implies the extermination of everything different to integrate it into an indifferent world order. Is there still room between these two fanaticisms for a non-believer to exercise his liberty?”

IndifferenceIntegrationDifferenceNew World OrderExtermination
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“Originality is merely a minor, secondary bonus to the pleasure of thought. Individuality, too, is a secondary aspect of the will and desire. The will is never mine; desire is never mine. For them to be will and desire, they have to circulate and be exchanged as symbolic material. For want of this symbolic devolution, we operate a technical transfer of all these functions on to machines — a transference of the human on to the inhuman. Now, if some human being thinks for me, nothing is lost. He is not lost, neither am I. Whereas if a machine thinks in my stead, we are both lost. In fact, this stage of the transference on to the machine is past. Today, it is machines which transfer their functions on to man. Man's fetishization of the machine has been succeeded by the fetishization of man by the machine. Today, it is man who has become the object of the perverse desire of the machine, of its desire to function at all costs. The machine is no longer an excrescence or a protruberance of man – it is man who is now merely the sex organ of the machine (Burroughs). And this is still quite a large claim, for what sex is the machine? Man has, rather, become the inflatable prosthesis of a sexless machine – the phantom limb of a useless function. The infinite degree, the degree zero, degree Xerox of the libido. Among those devices whose virtual libido man stokes up, there is of course the computer, of which man is the unconscious masturbator and his brain a hyper-object of concupiscence, but there is also the spectacularized body of woman, become a bachelor machine, a promotional and pornographic hypostasis, of which man is merely the sexless operator, the slavish voyeur, the auto-decoder.”

DesireThoughtVirtual Sex
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“The cinema today: end or impossibility of ending? Most current films, through the bloody drift of their content, the weakness of their plots and their technological trumpery – useless high-tech – reveal an extraordinary contempt on the part of film-makers for the tools of their own trade, for their own profession: a supreme contempt for the image itself, which is prostituted to any special effect whatsoever; and, consequently, contempt for the viewer, who is called upon to figure as impotent voyeur of this prostitution of images, of this promiscuity of all forms beneath the alibi of violence. There is in fact no real violence in this, nothing of a theatre of cruelty, but merely a second-level irony, the knowing wink of quotation, which no longer has anything to do with cinematic culture, but derives from the resentment that culture feels towards itself, that culture which precisely cannot manage to come to an end and is becoming infinitely debased - a debasement being raised to the power of an aesthetic and spiritual commodity, bitter and obsolescent, which we consume as a 'work of art' with the same complicity with which we savour the debasement of the political class. The sabotaging of the image by the image professionals is akin to the sabotaging of the political by the politicians themselves.”

PoliticsCinemaPop CultureDebasement
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“1948: The Best Years of Our Lives. The characters in the film have retained a candour towards - and naive faith in - their feelings which we no longer possess. Our feelings, which we delightfully term emotions in order to salvage the fiction of an emotional life, are not affects any more, merely a psychological affectation, having lost all credence in our eyes. Or, alternatively, they are conversion emotions, betraying the melodrama going on in the body rather than the nuances of the soul. We do not even have this candour in our relations to our dreams, where we grapple with their interpretation, their splitting, their ironic reflexes. But the worst thing is that not just life, but cinema too, seems to have lost all simplicity since that period. But the worst thing is that not just life, but cinema too, seems to have lost all simplicity since that period. It knows only how to parody itself affectedly, and has veered towards psychodrama or visual melodrama. Retrospectively, these were then, also, the 'Best Years' of cinema.”

CinemaMelodramaPsychodrama
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“How can he describe such abominations ? And how come he doesn't collapse under the weight of the abominations he describes?' Well it takes exceptional fortitude - or, alternatively, a special form of cowardice. At all events, you have to be abominable to come to terms with abomination. A kind of moral law, of terroristic superstition, denies you the right to speak of anything whatsoever if you are not involved in it. [...]. Either 'You are in cahoots with the object you speak of' or 'You don't know what you are talking about. In fact, speaking of something and being part of it are two quite different things. The finest example is death: you have to be alive to talk about it. But this is true of anything - of politics, economics, art. You have to be a stranger to something to speak about it in a strange – that is to say, original – way.[...] In fact, you have absolutely to collude in what you are speaking about and at the same time to be somewhere else altogether. You have to love it and hate it. You have to be the thing you speak of and to be violently against it. This is the law of hospitality, and it is the law of hostility.”

Abomination
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“Socialism thought it had contracted a legitimate union with History. Without ever having courted it, it thought it was humanly possible to take history for its own. Hardly had it got into bed with it than it became the eternal cuckold. It must be said that history had whored around in lots of ways long before it met socialism, and all that remained was to enjoy the remnants of a corrupt history or the phantom of a vanished one. The last we heard, it had been kidnapped at this century’s end, and no one is willing pay the ransom.”

HistorySocialismCuckoldry
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