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Jean Baudrillard

Jean Baudrillard Quotes

Philosopher

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Famous Jean Baudrillard Quotes

“The simulation of Western values is universal once one gets beyond the boundaries of our culture. Is it not true, though, that in our heart of hearts we ourselves, who are neither Alakaluf nor Aboriginal, neither Dogon nor Arab, fail signally to take our own values seriously? Do we not embrace them with the same affectation and inner unconcern - and are we not ourselves equally unimpressed by all our shows of force, all our technological and ideological pretensions? Nevertheless, it will be a long time before the utopian abstraction of our universal vision of differences is demolished in our own eyes, whereas all other cultures have already given their own response - namely, universal indifference.”

ValuesIndifferenceSimulation
Book:The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena
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“These, too [ideologies], have disappeared. And we survive only by a reflex action of collective credulity, which consists not only in absorbing everything put about under the heading of news or information, but in believing in the principle and transcendence of information. While, at the same time, remaining deeply incredulous and resistant to that kind of knee-jerk consensus. We no more believe in information by divine right than serfs ever believed they were serfs by divine right, but we act as though we do. Behind this façade, a gigantic principle of incredulity is growing up, a principle of secret disaffection and the denial of any social bond. There is a considerable danger of the inertia threshold being crossed, danger of a potential gravitational collapse by an exceeding of the critical mass, thanks to the absorption by the system of all negative elements: crashes, errors, scandals, conflicts -- everything is absorbed back into it as though by evaporation. All the wastes and disorders are digested and recycled. Maddening metastability which gives rise to a whole range of violent, virulent, destabilizing abreactions, which are the symptom of that collapse. All our contemporary passions arise from this: objectless, negative passions, all born of indifference, all built (in the absence of a real object) on a virtual other, and thus doomed to crystallize for preference on any old thing at all.”

NostalgiaIdeologyIndifferenceNihilismSimulationInsustainability
Book:The Perfect Crime
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“Thought, too, while scattering its traces, leaves the literalness of the world intact, leaves intact the pure literalness of objects, though it sends their meaning up in smoke. Shadowing the world - following the word like its shadow to cover up its tracks and to show that, behind its supposed ends, it is going nowhere. It is in this way that thought connects up with the event of the world - not with the occurrence of a totality that is nowhere to be found, but with the occurrence of the world as it is, in its unpredictable coming-to-pass. It is in this way that we attain to the literalness, the material imagining, of the world, by the elimination of whatever obstacle may be between the image and the gaze.”

ImaginationShadowThoughtMaterialismSimulationAbra Los Ojos
Book:The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact
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“He suddenly felt a pain that was as violent as if it were real. Existence, similar to the stucco angel whose extremities meet in a curved mirror, comes back, almost by necessity, to a state of radicality and silence. The ideal existence is the one that lasts long enough to come back to this point of origin. Those who forge straight ahead will never know where they have come from.”

ExistenceSilenceSimulationRadicality
Book:Cool Memories V: 2000 - 2004
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“Melrose Avenue, Santa Monica - Dialogue on a terrace. SHE: You are jealous ? Are you jealous ? You are fucking jealous! . . . Let me say . . . You 're twenty and I am forty-two, and I'll give my fucking ass to fucking anybody . . . Do you know that? * He gets up, crosses Melrose for no reason, comes back, kneels down in front of her (younger, but as theatrical). HE: Do you love me? Do you love me? SHE: Yes . . . Yes, I love you . . . The Italian kneads his meatballs. An Indian is playing a video game and its shrill soundtrack provides a backing to the conversation. The woman herself speaks in a shrill, hysterical voice. It is pleasant in Los Angeles in November, on the Melrose terrace, around the middle of the night. Everyone is smiling somewhere. No passion. A scene American-style. The waiter takes the car keys and drags off the woman, who shows off her black-stockinged legs and pretends to be mad. A black man gets up and, as he passes, says to me: ' Too much love! ' Gliding along the road that runs beside the coast in a black Porsche is like penetrating slowly into the inside of your own body.”

AmericaGamesMadnessCaliforniaSimulationPostmodernity
Book:Cool memories
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“Seduction is the direct and murderous irradiation of the object, the end of metaphor, the strategy of an enchanted world, the triumphant resurrection of an illusion which puts an end to the dialectical swoonings of sense and the all too naïve ruses of history. If you wish to speak of fiction, the text must obliterate all reference. If you are speaking of simulation, the text must scoff at meaning, while at the same time being completely true. If you are speaking of seduction, language has to pervert something or other in elliptical ways. Otherwise, what would language be there for? Language is a woman: it seduces you by metamorphosing into what it says. It is a woman also in that it will never stop taking its revenge if it does not succeed in seducing you. It will avenge itself by saying only what you make it say, like a woman who only satisfies what you ask of her.”

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Book:Cool memories
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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.”

AmericaLiteratureLanguageSpaceTechnologyTheoryHauntingSimulation
Book:Cool memories
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“After the sacrifice of value, after the sacrifice of representation, after the sacrifice of reality, the West is now characterized by the deliberate sacrifice of everything through which a human being keeps some value in his or her own eyes. The terrorists' potlatch against the West is their own death. Our potlatch is indignity, immodesty, obscenity, degradation and abjection. This is the movement of our culture - where the stakes keep rising. Our truth is always on the side of unveiling, desublimation, reductive analysis - the truth of the repressed -- exhibition, avowal, nudity - nothing is true unless it is desecrated, objectified, stripped of its aura, or dragged onstage.”

SacrificeSimulationAbu Ghraib
Book:The Agony of Power
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“The media represents world that is more real than reality that we can experience. People lose the ability to distinguish between reality and fantasy. They also begin to engage with the fantasy without realizing what it really is. They seek happiness and fulfilment through the simulacra of reality, e.g. media and avoid the contact/interaction with the real world. (Note: This quote is fake and does not appear in Simulacra and Simulation. I tried to delete it, but the system doesn't allow that because this quote has "too many fans" lol.)”

RealityHappinessFantasyMediaWantsSimulationMisattributed
Book:Simulacra and Simulation
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“Lichtenberg speaks somewhere of the 'freedom to think, without danger, for the truth'. By this he doubtless understands the right of speaking the truth without the danger of being thrown into prison by the monarch. But if, by removing a comma, we read, instead, the freedom to think 'without danger for the truth', things become much more interesting. For then it becomes a question of the capacity to think without imperilling truth (without risk of unveiling it). It is no longer the freedom of thought at odds with power, but the truth itself at odds with the freedom to think. The whole relationship between thought and truth is at issue. There is a profound difference between the thought that wants to make truth shine out and the thought that wants to keep it secret. But you can also wish for both at the same time.”

TruthThoughtSimulation
Book:Cool Memories V: 2000 - 2004
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“Somewhere, we all mourn this stripped reality, this residual existence, this total disillusion. And there is, within this entire story of the Loft, a collective work of mourning. But a mourning which is part of the solidarity between the criminals themselves that we all are - the murderers of this crime perpetrated against real life, and the wallowing confession made to the screen, which in some ways becomes our literal confessional (the confessional is one of the key sites of Loft Story). Here we see our true mental corruption - in the consumption of this deception and mourning which becomes a contradictory source of pleasure. In any case, nevertheless, the disavowal of this experimental masquerade is reflected in the deadly boredom that emanates from it.”

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Book:Telemorphosis
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“However, there are other, more political forms for these tendencies hostile to Western models. All of these countries that we want to acculturate by force with the principles of political and economic rationality, with the global market and democracy, with a universal principle and a history that is not their own, of which they have neither the ends nor the means - all of these countries which make up the rest of the world - they give us the impression (in Brazil for example) that they will never be accultured to this exogenous model of calculation and growth, that they are deeply allergic to it. And in fact do we, Westerners, masters of the world, still have its ends and means? Do we still measure up to this universal undertaking of mastery that now seems to surpass us in every domain and function like a trap of which we are the first victims?”

FailureBrazilDecadenceSimulation
Book:The Agony of Power
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“Whence the possibility of an ideological analysis of Disneyland (L. Marin did it very well in Utopiques, jeux d'espace [Utopias, play of space]): digest of the American way of life, panegyric of American values, idealized transposition of a contradictory reality. Certainly. But this masks something else and this "ideological" blanket functions as a cover for a simulation of the third order: Disneyland exists in order to hide that it is the "real" country, all of "real" America that is Disneyland (a bit like prisons are there to hide that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, that is carceral). Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, whereas all of Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it are no longer real, but belong to the hyperreal order and to the order of simulation. It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology) but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle.”

AmericaDisneylandSimulationSimulacra
Book:Simulacra and Simulation
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“In this manner, the artificial microcosm of Loft Story [french version of Big Brother] is identical to Disneyland, which provides the illusion of the real external world, while if one looks deeper, one realizes they are one and the same. The entire United States is Disneyland and we are all on Loft Story. No need to enter into the idea of the virtual double of reality, we are already there - the televisual universe is nothing more than a holographic detail of global reality. All the way up to, and including, the most daily parts of our existence, we are already within a situation of experimental reality. And it is precisely from this that we have the fascination, by immersion, of spontaneous interactivity.[...]”

DisneylandReality TvSimulationSurveillance Society
Book:Telemorphosis
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“The high point of the struggle against domination was the historic movement of liberation, be it political, sexual or otherwise - a continuous movement, with guiding ideas and visible actors. But liberation also occurred with exchanges and markets, which brings us to this terrifying paradox: all of the liberation fights against domination only paved the way for hegemony, the reign of general exchange -against which there is no possible revolution, since everything is already liberated.”

Black Lives MatterSimulationHegemonyBlmBlack PanthersMe Too MovementRevolution Is Out Of Fashion
Book:The Agony of Power
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“The more intense this hegemonic process of forced integration and integral reality is, the more singularities will rise against it. There will be more "rogue states" - states (like Iran, Palestine) that deliberately exclude themselves from the international community without waiting to be excluded, that exclude themselves from the universal and play their own game, at their own risk and peril. There will be more "rogue events" and more refusal of society by individuals. One could say, inverting Holderlin, that "Where Good grows, there grows the Genie of Evil," ("Da, wo des Gute wiichst, wiichst auch der Genius des Bosen"). This more or less clandestine insurrection of antagonistic forces against the integrist violence of the system is less an effect of the mind, the will or even the desire of human beings than the evil genius of the world itself in refusing globalization. To find the only adversary who will face this allpowerful hegemony, we must look for those beings that are strangers to will, exiled from dialogue and representation, exiled from knowledge and history.”

IranSyriaIsisSimulationBlmMaga
Book:The Agony of Power
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“4. Which gives rise to the truly mysterious question: how does this irresistible global power succeed in undifferentiating the world, in wiping out its extreme singularity? And how can the world be so vulnerable to this liquidation, this dictatorship of integral reality, and how can it be fascinated by it - not exactly fascinated by the real but by the disappearance of reality? There is, however, a corollary to this: what is the source of the fragility of this global power, of its vulnera-bility to minor events, to events that are insignificant in themselves ('rogue events', terrorism, but also the pictures from Abu Ghraib, etc.)?”

AmericaFutureTerrorismFragilitySimulationAbu Ghraib
Book:Why Hasn't Everything Already Disappeared?
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“Socialization itself is in question. The present crisis, of which the disintegration of the banlieues is only the spectacular form, is the crisis of general disintegration in the face of the ideal demands of sociality. The disturbances in the margins conceal the fact that society as a whole is resisting the systematic colonization of socialization. The bar of total investment in life through society and economics has been set too high. When did we discover that the deepest demands were social and economic, that the only horizon was the horizon of integration and calculation? Capital's coup de force is to make everything dependant on the economic order, to subject all minds to a single mental dimension. Every other issue becomes unintelligible. The displacement of all problems into economic and performance terms is a trap: the belief that everything is granted us virtually, or will be, by the grace of continual growth and acceleration - including, by extension, a universal lifting of prohibitions, the availability of all information and, of course, the obligation to experience jouissance.”

SimulationSocialization
Book:The Agony of Power
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“I no longer even need a window to follow the journey. I can narrate it to myself hour by hour, live it from memory, all of it - canyons, towns, the reflection of the clouds in the rivers. Memory has taken on wings and speed has become an inner quality. A pity. No doubt it was better that this purely fornicatory and imaginary relationship, with her sexual voracity and her ankle bracelets, which we carried on all over the place - in the Badlands, in the Chelsea Hotel, in motels, in the sand, between the sheets - and which always meant immediate lovemaking in the minutes that followed, never satisfied, but just as sweet, and flexible and blonde, her eyes raised like a slavegirl's and her hand outstretched towards her sex, she free and servile, feminine and muscled, laughing and admiring, animal blood and metallic eyes - it was natural that this relationship should finish with a pathetic fellatio on a motel balcony, in the morning mist and a hypothetical child which no doubt was not mine and which I shall never see. I have even forgotten her name, but I have not forgotten the straw scent of her sex, nor the twenty-dollar bet on salt or snow, nor the sudden menstrual nosebleed I had one morning when I saw her arriving at my place in all her Californian splendour.”

Life ExperienceSimulationVirtual Sex
Book:Cool memories
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“This hegemonic simulation, a configuration that seems triumphant and unyielding, has its reverse, its revulsive effects. By virtually yielding to this global dynamic and exaggerating it in several ways, all of these would-be emerging countries gradually become submerging instead. They slowly invade the Western sphere, not on a competitive level, but like a ground swell. This invasion occurs in many ways, like a viral infiltration. It is the problem of global, more or less clandestine immigration (Hispanics are literally cannibalizing the United States). But also in the contemporary forms of terror, a true filterable virus, made up of terrorism and counterterrorism, and which is a violent abreaction to global domination, destabilizing it from the inside. The global order is cannibalized by terror.”

TerrorEpidemicsSimulationPandemia
Book:The Agony of Power
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“Perhaps the agnostic even prefers signs to reality. Perhaps he prefers this undecidable situation, since you can play with these floating signs and that is not possible with so-called 'objective' reality. The move from the real to the sign opens up an enormous field of play and uncertainty. Particularly where the reality of power is concerned. For if there is, indeed,a risk of anaesthesia and manipulation by signs and images that is to power's advantage, there is the risk that power itself may find itself reduced merely to the signs of power. This profusion of signs and of what is manifested does, moreover, effect a profound change in the symbolic relation to power. That relation is based on the unilateral gift (of laws, institutions, work, security, etc.). It is not so much by violence and constraint, but only by this symbolic obligation that power exists. Now, from the point when all that it gives us is signs, our debt to it is infinitely less great. With power distributing nothing but signs to us, we merely give back signs in return, and our servitude is the lighter for it. Admittedly, the enjoyment of immaterial goods is not so great, but this also means we owe little in return and we respond to the airiness of signs with an equal indifference. We can deny power and set it aside by mere incredulity, simply responding to the signs of power with the signs of servitude. This is perhaps what is meant by 'weak thought' (pensiero debole). With Virtual Reality, this process of disinvestment becomes even more radical, and we enter upon a phase of unbinding [deliaison], of quasi-total disobligation.”

SimulationTranspolitics
Book:The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact
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“Nothing distinguishes a natural intelligence from something that can give off all the outward signs of it, and this includes faltering before the test of truth. So one can give off all the outward signs of power, and this includes faltering before the test of strength. A simulation which produces, with just the requisite degree of derision, the image of an illusory normality.”

Artificial IntelligenceSimulationNatural Intelligence
Book:Cool Memories V: 2000 - 2004
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“The little orange, trapezoidal, translucent sail on the river, the boatmen keeping their balance. Further on, the bride in her palanquin, and the husband on horseback ahead of her. A whole parade of luminous figures. In fact, what we have here is a fake traditional Korean wedding and a TV shoot. But whether or not the ritual is authentic, there is the same racial beauty in all the faces. The Diagonal of the Madman, The Parallax of Evil, The Ecliptic of Sex, The Hypotenuse of Death. Given the low likelihood of a meeting in this life or a future existence, the only hope is for a meeting in a previous life.”

SimulationMulti CulturalismTestamento Geometrico
Book:Cool Memories V: 2000 - 2004
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“The revolutionary idea of contemporary art was that any object, any detail or fragment of the material world, could exert the same strange attraction and pose the same insoluble questions as were reserved in the past for a few rare aristocratic forms known as works of art. That is where true democracy lay: not in the accession of everyone to aesthetic enjoyment, but in the transaesthetic advent of a world in which every object would, without distinction, have its fifteen minutes of fame (particularly objects without distinction). All objects are equivalent, everything is a work of genius. With, as a corollary, the transformation of art and of the work itself into an object, without illusion or transcendence, a purely conceptual acting-out, generative of deconstructed objects which deconstruct us in their turn. No longer any face, any gaze, any human countenance or body in all this - organs without bodies, flows, molecules, the fractal. The relation to the 'artwork' is of the order of contamination, of contagion: you hook up to it, absorb or immerse yourself in it, exactly as in flows and networks. Metonymic sequence, chain reaction. No longer any real object in all this: in the ready-made it is no longer the object that's there, but the idea of the object, and we no longer find pleasure here in art, but in the idea of art. We are wholly in ideology. And, ultimately, the twofold curse of modem and contemporary art is summed up in the 'ready-made': the curse of an immersion in the real and banality, and that of a conceptual absorption in the idea of art.”

AddictionIdeologyAbstractionPop CultureSimulationBanalityContemporary ArtPandemicsDemocratization
Book:The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact
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“This is merely one of the sides of the conspiracy. The other side is that of the spectator who, for want of understanding anything whatever most of the time, consumes his own culture at one remove. He literally consumes the fact that he understands nothing and that there is no necessity in all this except the imperative of culture, of being a part of the integrated circuit of culture. But culture is itself merely an epiphenomenon of global circulation. The idea of art has become rarefied and minimal, leading ultimately to conceptual art, where it ends in the non-exhibition of non-works in non-galleries - the apotheosis of art as non-event. As a corollary, the consumer circulates in all this in order to experience his non- enjoyment of the works.”

ArtConspiracyPop CultureSimulationNonevent
Book:The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact
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“It seems nothing can counteract the proliferation of this Artificial Intelligence based on the zero degree of thought. Nothing, that is, except this reversibility of intelligence and stupidity - the latter representing a renewed challenge to victorious intelligence. There is something here too like a revenge of evil. Something to which the tyranny of reality leads equally well - to appreciating any old form of madness and illusion.”

RealityStupidityRevengeArtificial IntelligenceSimulationDelusions Of Intelligence
Book:The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact
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“The immateriality of signs is alien to me, as it is to a race of peasants with whom I share an obsessional morality, a sluggishness, a stupid, ancestral belief in the real. In reality, I am one of them. The simulation hypothesis is merely a maximalist position. The seduction hypothesis is merely a formal abstraction. It is the phantom of seduction which obsesses me—as for the rest, I have never managed anything other than to let myself be seduced. And this is quite alright: all the rest is merely destructive, moral passion. The seducing monk dreams of Manichean tension between the sign and the real as the most sublime form of morality. Only from time to time, the earth-shattering, hypothetical union of the two… Even then, the beauty of the violent resolution eludes him. Faith and fury first attack the impossibility of believing; they attack signs. Annihilating the world as sign, in order to make it an object of belief.”

RealitySimulationSignsLalo Cura
Book:Cool memories
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