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Jean Baudrillard

Jean Baudrillard Quotes

Philosopher

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Famous Jean Baudrillard Quotes

“We criticize Americans for not being able either to analyse or conceptualize. But this is a wrong-headed critique. It is we who imagine that everything culminates in transcendence, and that nothing exists which has not been conceptualized. Not only do they care little for such a view, but their perspective is the very opposite: it is not conceptualizing reality, but realizing concepts and materializing ideas, that interests them. The ideas of the religion and enlightened morality of the eighteenth century certainly, but also dreams, scientific values, and sexual perversions. Materializing freedom, but also the unconscious. Our phantasies around space and fiction, but also our phantasies of sincerity and virtue, or our mad dreams of technicity. Everything that has been dreamt on this side of the Atlantic has a chance of being realized on the other. They build the real out of ideas. We transform the real into ideas, or into ideology.”

AmericaSociologyBaudrillard
Book:America
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“The United States is utopia embodied. You should not judge their crisis in the same way as we judge ours – the crisis of the old European countries. We have a crisis of historical ideals caused by the impossibility of realizing them. They have a crisis of a realized utopia as a consequence of its duration and continuity. The idyllic conviction of Americans that they are the center of the world, a higher power and an absolute role model is not such a delusion. It is based not so much on technological resources and military forces as on a miraculous belief in the existence of an embodied utopia – a society that, with what it may seem unbearable innocence, is based on the idea that it has achieved everything that others only dreamed of: justice, abundance, rights, wealth, freedom; America knows it, it believes it, and in the end, others also believe it.”

AmericaBaudrillard
Book:America
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“It is like truth according to Nietzsche: we no longer believe that the truth is true when all its veils have been removed. Similarly, we do not believe that war is war when all uncertainty is supposedly removed and it appears as a naked operation. The nudity of war is no less virtual than that of the erotic body in the apparatus of striptease.”

TruthIllusionNietzscheGulf WarBaudrillard
Book:The Gulf War Did Not Take Place
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“Brecht again: "As for the place not desired, there is something there and that's disorder. As for the desired place, there is nothing there and that's order." The New World Order is made up of all these compensations and the fact that there is nothing rather than something, on the ground, on the screens, in our heads: consensus by deterrence. At the desired place (the GuIf, nothing took place, non-war. At the desired place (TV, information), nothing took place, no images, nothing but filler. Not much took place in all our heads either, and that too is in order. The fact that there was nothing at this or that desired place was harmoniously compensated for by the fact that there was nothing elsewhere either. In this manner, the global order unifies all the partial orders.”

AmericaOrderUsaNew World OrderGulf WarBrechtBaudrillard
Book:The Gulf War Did Not Take Place
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“There is no reason to assume that the unceasing forward march of techne will not eventually achieve a mimesis which replaces a natural world with an intelligible artificial one. If the simulacrum is so well designed that it becomes an effective organizer of reality, then surely it is man, not the simulacrum, who is turned into an abstraction.”

PhilosophySemioticsBaudrillardSimulacraPost Structuralism
Book:The System of Objects
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“Michael Jackson is a solitary mutant, a precursor of a hybridization that is perfect because it is universal—the race to end all races. Today’s young people have no problem with a miscegenated society: they already inhabit such a universe, and Michael Jackson foreshadows what they see as an ideal future. Add to this the fact that Michael has had his face lifted, his hair straightened, his skin lightened—in short, he has been reconstructed with the greatest attention to detail...This is what makes him such an innocent and pure child—the artificial hermaphrodite of the fable, better able even than Christ to reign over the world and reconcile its contradictions; better than a child-god because he is child-prosthesis, an embryo of all those dreamt-of mutations that will deliver us from race and sex.” -Jean Baudrillard”

PostmodernismBaudrillardMichael Jackson
Book:The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena
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