French sociologist & philosopher (1929-2007)
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
It is like the expanding universe. The more our instruments penetrate it, the further the limits recede. We therefore have to assume that this expansion, this retreat, is directly proportional to the power of our instruments.
JEAN BAUDRILLARD
Cool Memories
You have to travel, keep on the move. You have to cross oceans, cities, continents, latitudes. Not to acquire a more informed vision of the world ... but in order to get as near as possible to the worldwide sphere of exchange, to enjoy ubiquity, cosmopolitan extraversion, to escape the illusion of intimacy.
JEAN BAUDRILLARD
Cool Memories
Everything that can be said on the nuclear threat has already been said. Nothing has ever happened.... Nothing will ever happen. It is a system of general terror. But we are as if turned to stone by this potential destruction.
JEAN BAUDRILLARD
Cool Memories
If you say, I love you, then you have already fallen in love with language, which is already a form of breakup and infidelity.
JEAN BAUDRILLARD
Cool Memories
One may dream of a culture where everyone bursts into laughter when someone says: this is true, this is real.
JEAN BAUDRILLARD
Radical Thought
Our entire linear and accumulative culture collapses if we cannot stockpile the past in plain view.
JEAN BAUDRILLARD
Simulacra and Simulation
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.
JEAN BAUDRILLARD
Cool Memories
Democracy is the menopause of Western society.
JEAN BAUDRILLARD
Cool Memories
We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.
JEAN BAUDRILLARD
Simulacra and Simulation
A series of accidents creates a positively lighthearted state.
JEAN BAUDRILLARD
Cool Memories
Today, every principle of identity is affected by fashion, precisely because of its potential to revert all forms to non-origin and recurrence. Fashion is always retro, but always on the basis of the abolition of the passé (the past): the spectral death and resurrection of forms. Its proper actuality (its 'up-to-dateness', its 'relevance') is not a reference to the present, but an immediate and total recycling.
JEAN BAUDRILLARD
Symbolic Exchange and Death
Sadder than destitution, sadder than the beggar is the man who eats alone in public. Nothing more contradicts the laws of man or beast, for animals always do each other the honour of sharing or disputing each other's food.
JEAN BAUDRILLARD
America
Catholocism was founded on the symbolic obligation placed upon the Pope that he remain at the centre of the world -- in the days when there was one. Today he jets off to its four corners, like a professional: apostolate by jet.
JEAN BAUDRILLARD
Cool Memories
There is nothing funny about Halloween. This sarcastic festival reflects, rather, an infernal demand for revenge by children on the adult world.
JEAN BAUDRILLARD
"Astral America", America
Dying is nothing. You have to know how to disappear.
JEAN BAUDRILLARD
Cool Memories
For nothing can be greater than seduction itself, not even the order that destroys it.
JEAN BAUDRILLARD
Seduction
All societies end up wearing masks.
JEAN BAUDRILLARD
America
Not only does reality resist those who still criticize it, but it also abandons those who defend it. Maybe it is a way for reality to get its revenge from those who claim to believe in it for the sole purpose of eventually transforming it: sending back its supporters to their own desires.
JEAN BAUDRILLARD
Radical Thought
The most difficult thing is to renounce the truth and the possibility of verification, to remain as long as possible on the enigmatic, ambivalent, and reversible side of thought.
JEAN BAUDRILLARD
The Vital Illusion