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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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“The automatic carriage-return on the typewriter, electronic central locking of cars: these are the things that count. The rest is just theory and literature. Space is what prevents everything from being in the same place. Language is what prevents everything from meaning the same thing. My hand, separated from me, dreams it is holding a breast. Nothing fills a hand better than a breast. Stereotype of a sadistic tenderness. This journal develops, as its title indicates, over the course of time. However it is haunted by something which preceded it, the secret underlying event.”

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“No one recognizes their faults or their virtues when these are stated by another, any more than they recognize their own voices on a tape recorder. The world transmits back to us only the asymmetric form of our vices, as a mirror reflects back the asymmetric form of our faces. There is a pact of pride in a couple's love, a pact of glory, which is at least as fundamental as sexual feelings. These latter peter out silently in the two bodies, but the pact can only be broken by the spoken word. If you say, I love you, then you have already fallen in love with language, which is already a form of breakup and infidelity.”

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“If we consider the superiority of the human species, the size of its brain, its powers of thinking, language and organization, we can say this: were there the slightest possibility that another rival or superior species might appear, on earth or elsewhere, man would use every means at his disposal to destroy it.”

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Book:Selected Writings
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