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Jean Baudrillard

Jean Baudrillard Quotes

Philosopher

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Famous Jean Baudrillard Quotes

“John grows up normally, but doesn't talk, and this drives his parents to distraction. When he is about 16, at last, one teatime, he says: 'I'd like a little sugar. ' His mother is staggered and asks, 'But John, why have you never said anything up to now?' 'Up to now, everything was perfect.' If everything is perfect, language is useless. This is true for animals. If animals don't speak, it's because everything's perfect for them. If one day they start to speak, it will be because the world has lost a certain sort of perfection. 'I desire you' is obscene. 'You make me feel very good' is more subtle - the other is here the subject of pleasure, not the object of desire. Desire wants only orgasm; pleasure seeks to please. There can't be any desire to please - 'pleasing' is implacable. In days gone by, pleasing occupied the place of desire - today, desire discharges us from the need to please. Even age may function as a 'natural' perversion. Women are not so much in search of their fathers as of the simple mystery of another generation, closer to death, but also to a previous life. B.B. - My understudy has had an operation for appendicitis. - You're not going to sleep with the whole world. That's impossible, it's rape. - I have a real understanding for wild animals who are hunted, by camera lenses, by machine-guns. - A white Rolls and a black chauffeur. Woman to the power of woman.”

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Book:Cool memories
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“By contrast, the constellations of unwillingness, of repulsion and disgust, are more solid than ever. It seems that this has generated a new energy, a counterenergy, a force that has taken the place of desire in us, a viral abreaction in response to whatever has replaced the world, the body and sex for us. Today only distaste is determined - tastes are determinate no longer. Only rejections are violent - projects are violent no longer. Our actions, our undertakings, our sicknesses have less and less in the way of 'objective' motives: they arise for the most part from a concealed self-disgust, an unacknowledged empty legacy which causes us to try to get rid of our energy by whatever means. A kind of exorcism, then, rather than a will to action. Could this be the principle of Evil in a new form, one not far removed from magic - whose epicentre, as we know, is, precisely, exorcism?”

DesireDisgust
Book:The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena
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“The only deep desire is not for what I lack, nor even for the person who lacks me (though that is, itself, more subtle), but for the person who does not lack me, for what is perfectly capable of existing without me. Someone who does not lack me -- that is radical otherness. Desire is always the desire for that alien perfection, at the same time as it is the desire perhaps to shatter it, to break it down. You get aroused only for things whose perfection and impunity you want both to share and to shatter.”

DesirePerfectionAmbiguityDistant Star
Book:The Perfect Crime
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“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.”

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Book:Cool memories
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“The temptation to fulfil all desires was, in the past, that of evil; temptation by the devil. Today it is good which presides over that fulfilment, but it is no longer the fulfilment of a desire or an impulse of our own. We no longer aspire to anything; we are aspirated, sucked up, by the void. The logic of distinction is, ultimately, a precious vestige of the bygone time of signs and sign-value, the loss of which, though imperceptible in the equivalence of images, is even more serious than the loss of the real. Prestige, challenge, rivalry, privileges - it was, at bottom, the golden age of symbolic violence, the only antidote to democratic erosion and the great game of equality of opportunity. It is doubtless as absurd to wish to eliminate that violence as any other. Is it better to stop the haemorrhage and live in a state of perpetual transfusion?”

DesireViolenceMeaningDistinctionVoidFufillment
Book:Cool Memories V: 2000 - 2004
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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
Book:Fragments
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“What we seek in travel is neither discovery nor trade but rather a gentle deterritorialization: we want to be taken over by the journey - in other words, by absence. As our metal vectors transcend meridians, oceans and poles, absence takes on a fleshy quality. The clandestineness of the depths of private life gives way to annihilation by longitude and latitude. But in the end the body tires of not knowing where it is, even if the mind finds this absence exalting, as if it were a quality proper to itself. Perhaps, after all, what we seek in others is the same gentle deterritorialization that we seek in travel. Instead of one's own desire, instead of discovery, we are tempted by exile in the desire of the other, or by the desire of the other as an ocean to cross. The looks and gestures of lovers already have the distance of exile about them; the language of lovers is an expatriation in words that are afraid to signify; and the bodies of lovers are a tender hologram to eye and hand, offering no resistance and hence susceptible of being crisscrossed, like airspace, by desire. We move around with circumspection on a mental planet of circumvolutions, and from our excesses and passions we bring back the same transparent memories as we do from our travels.”

DesireLoversTravel
Author:Jean Baudrillard
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