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Quote by Jean Baudrillard

“It is not a question of conferring some kind of positivity on thought, since its operation is precisely to detract from the truth and the legitimacy of existence. And radicality doubtless has no other function than to provide an added bonus of pleasure.”

Quote by Jean Baudrillard

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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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“There is no thinking the form of thought from outside of thought. This yields a very different understanding of why there is no position from which we can do something which can qualify as 'apprehending a logically alien thought ' - where this is supposed to qualify as doing something that is at the same time a case of apprehending that which we do in thinking and a case of apprehending a form of activity that is comprehensible to us, as such, only from outside (only from a position that cannot be available to us in and through engaging in that form of activity).”

“We shall never know whether thought is an imposture, and that is providential. 'The people is, in some cases, so enlightened that it is no longer indifferent to anything' (Montesquieu). That is indeed the end point: when there is no longer anything about which there is nothing to say. Verdict of a Chinese writer on a monstrous tree that is at once a blackberry and a bamboo: 'any disorder appearing in nature is the sign of a hidden disorder in the administration of the Empire ... Order restored in nature clearly indicates satisfaction in heaven.' Our current blossoming of monsters and clones, hybrids and chimeras, our systematic mixing of mores and cultures, sexes and genes, cannot but attest to an irremediable disorder in the highest spheres of the Empire.”

“Thinking takes on first a conceptual, metaphorical form. Then a subjective, affective form. Then an animal, instinctive form. Then a reflex, automatic form. At that point, it is simply a function equivalent to the circulation of the blood and artificial respiration. Writing is the living alternative to the worst of what it says . There was a dramaturgy of art and language: transfiguring the real into lyricism and violence, giving history a heroic, bloodstained ending. It seems today that art and language have the opposite function of making everything conform to ordinariness: without end and without resolution.”