French sociologist & philosopher (1929-2007)
The sad thing about artificial intelligence is that it lacks artifice and therefore intelligence.
JEAN BAUDRILLARD
Cool Memories
There is no aphrodisiac like innocence.
JEAN BAUDRILLARD
Cool Memories
There is no more hope for meaning. And without a doubt this is a good thing: meaning is mortal.
JEAN BAUDRILLARD
Simulacra and Simulation
When the snow falls with that supernatural slowness it has, it seems that the reasons for dying are more subtle than the reasons for living. But perhaps these latter are more numerous.
JEAN BAUDRILLARD
Cool Memories
The need to speak, even if one has nothing to say, becomes more pressing when one has nothing to say, just as the will to live becomes more urgent when life has lost its meaning.
JEAN BAUDRILLARD
The Ecstasy of Communication
Our societies are changing. It is no longer an atmosphere of repression that weighs upon us, that haunts our streets and our minds. It is the glossy, efficiency-minded atmosphere which is knocking the wind out of us. Literally, euphoria, dumping and acceleration are absorbing all the oxygen from the atmosphere and leaving us like washed-up fish. It is no longer light we are short of, nor cash, but air.
JEAN BAUDRILLARD
Cool Memories
You can only go into mourning by transfiguration or disfigurement. There is no rational form of the absorption of death.
JEAN BAUDRILLARD
Cool Memories
For it is with the same imperialism that present-day simulators try to make the real, all the real, coincide with their simulation models.
JEAN BAUDRILLARD
Simulacra and Simulation
In spite of all its materialist efforts, production remains a utopia. We can wear ourselves out in materializing things, in rendering them visible, but we will never cancel the secret.
JEAN BAUDRILLARD
The Ecstasy of Communication
Challenge, and not desire, lies at the heart of seduction.
JEAN BAUDRILLARD
The Ecstasy of Communication
The simulacrum now hides, not the truth, but the fact that there is none, that is to say, the continuation of Nothingness.
JEAN BAUDRILLARD
Radical Thought
One has never said better how much "humanism", "normality", "quality of life" were nothing but the vicissitudes of profitability.
JEAN BAUDRILLARD
Simulacra and Simulation
The shores run together, the waters are parallel. The waters run together, the shores are parallel. A single leaf rustles, the others are silent. Who knows how this dream ends.
JEAN BAUDRILLARD
Cool Memories
Philosophy has never been anything but a disavowal of the reality principle.
JEAN BAUDRILLARD
Cool Memories
America is the original version of modernity. We are the dubbed or subtitled version. America ducks the question of origins; it cultivates no origin or mythical authenticity; it has no past and no founding truth. Having known no primitive accumulation of time, it lives in a perpetual present.
JEAN BAUDRILLARD
America
Driving is a spectacular form of amnesia. Everything is to be discovered, everything to be obliterated. Admittedly, there is the primal shock of the deserts and the dazzle of California, but when this is gone, the secondary brilliance of the journey begins, that of the excessive, pitiless distance, the infinity of anonymous faces and distances, or of certain miraculous geological formations, which ultimately testify to no human will, while keeping intact an image of upheaval. This form of travel admits of no exceptions: when it runs up against a known face, a familiar landscape, or some decipherable message, the spell is broken: the amnesic, ascetic, asymptotic charm of disappearance succumbs to affect and worldly semiology.
JEAN BAUDRILLARD
America
Postmodernity is the simultaneity of the destruction of earlier values and their reconstruction. It is renovation without ruination.
JEAN BAUDRILLARD
Cool Memories
Never resist a sentence you like, in which language takes its own pleasure and in which, after having abused it for so long, you are stupefied by its innocence.
JEAN BAUDRILLARD
Cool Memories
The futility of everything that comes to us from the media is the inescapable consequence of the absolute inability of that particular stage to remain silent. Music, commercial breaks, news flashes, adverts, news broadcasts, movies, presenters--there is no alternative but to fill the screen; otherwise there would be an irremediable void.
JEAN BAUDRILLARD
Cool Memories
Since the world drifts into delirium, we must adopt a delirious point of view. We must no longer assume any principle of truth, of causality, or any discursive norm. Instead, we must grant both the poetic singularity of events and the radical uncertainty of events.
JEAN BAUDRILLARD
The Vital Illusion