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Quote by Jean Baudrillard

“In New York, madmen are free. Put out on the streets, they’re not all that different from the punks, junk, junkies, alcoholics, beggars who fill it. It is unclear why a city, just as mad, would suddenly keep its madmen locked up, why should he deprive the movement of these samples of madness, if it, in one form or another, has already captured the entire city”

Quote by Jean Baudrillard

Book:America

Work

America

This book offers an in-depth look at the diverse aspects of America, including its historical development, cultural influences, and societal structures. It examines the country's origins, its growth, and the various factors that have shaped its identity. more

Author

Jean Baudrillard
Jean Baudrillard

Jean Baudrillard was a French philosopher known for his critical studies on consumerism, media, and semiotics. His theories have had a profound impact on postmodernism and cultural studies. more

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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.”

“Baudrillard argues that there used to be a time when the role of objects was primarily to signify rather than to function. Thus, the symbolic structure of the traditional domestic ambience reflected the rituals and traditions of the socio-political order, arranged according to prescriptive and unchanging rules based on, and extracted from, ‘tradition and authority, and whose heart is the complex affective relationship that binds all the family members together […] Hence, the fixed and immovable meanings with which these objects were endowed: if mirrors and family portraits symbolized a particular sense of introspection and enclosure, the clock crowning the marble mantelpiece symbolized both the hierarchical structure of the family and the permanence of time. Linked to one meaning and one meaning only, every object of the traditional domestic interior can thus be understood as theatrical and ceremonial, thus occupying a specific place within the domestic interior exactly as family members occupy a specific position in their corresponding family tree.”

“Symbolically meaningful (and symbolically insignificant), glass intensifies all the contradictions at play in contemporary furniture: the inability of people to determine their own condition and destiny (Baudrillard, 2005: 42). By promising proximity, intimacy and transition (while at the same time promoting distance, detachment and immobility), glass reproduces in the microcosm of the domestic ambience the inequalities at work within the macrocosm of contemporary society. The happy ending embedded in its discourse is thus retracted by its ‘see- but- don’t- touch’ aesthetic quality.”