Jean Baudrillard Quotes
Prophesying catastrophe is incredibly banal. The more original move is to assume that it has already happened.
Governing today means giving acceptable signs of credibility. It is like advertising and it is the same effect that is achieved - commitment to a scenario.
Postmodernity is the simultaneity of the destruction of earlier values and their reconstruction. It is renovation within ruination.
It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are no longer those of the Empire but our own: The desert of the real itself.
Boredom is like a pitiless zooming in on the epidermis of time. Every instant is dilated and magnified like the pores of the face.
It is the corpse of the bourgeoisie that separates us. With us, it is that class that is the carrier of the chromosome of banality.
In our culture, futility plays the role of transgression and fashion is condemned for having within it the force of the pure sign which signifies nothing.
What you have to do is enter the fiction of America, enter America as fiction. It is, indeed, on this fictive basis that it dominates the world.
I hesitate to deposit money in a bank. I am afraid I shall never dare to take it out again
The sad thing about artificial intelligence is that it lacks artifice and therefore intelligence.
Imagine the amazing good fortune of the generation that gets to see the end of the world. This is as marvelous as being there in the beginning.
Simulation is the situation created by any system of signs when it becomes sophisticated enough, autonomous enough, to abolish its own referent and to replace it with itself.
It is not enough for theory to describe and analyze, it must itself be an event in the universe it describes.
The abjection of our political situation is the only true challenge today. Only facing up to this situation in all its desperation can help us get out of it.
The world is not dialectical - it is sworn to extremes, not to equilibrium, sworn to radical antagonism, not to reconciliation or synthesis. This is also the principle of evil.
This is what terrorism is occupied with as well: making real, palpable violence surface in opposition to the invisible violence of security.
Power is only too happy to make football bear a diabolical responsibility for stupefying the masses.
So-called "realist" photography does not capture the "what is." Instead, it is preoccupied with what should not be, like the reality of suffering for example.
The order of the world is always right - such is the judgment of God. For God has departed, but he has left his judgment behind, the way the Cheshire Cat left his grin.
Animals have no unconscious, because they have a territory. Men have only had an unconscious since they lost a territory.
A series of accidents creates a positively light-hearted state, out of consideration for this strange power.
If you are prepared to accept the consequences of your dreams then you must still regard America today with the same naive enthusiasm as the generations that discovered the New World.
The confrontation between America and Europe reveals not so much a rapprochement as a distortion, an unbridgeable rift. There isn't just a gap between us, but a whole chasm of modernity.
the neighborhood is nothing but a protective zone- remodeling, disinfection, a snobbish and hygenic design- but above all in a figurative sense: it is a machine for making emptiness.
One has never said better how much "humanism", "normality", "quality of life" were nothing but the vicissitudes of profitability.
There is no human reason to be here, except for the sheer ecstasy of being crowded together.
The desert is no longer a landscape, it is a pure form produced by the abstraction of all others.
For the heavenly fire no longer strikes depraved cities, it is rather the lens which cuts through ordinary reality like a laser, putting it to death.
There are only a few images that are not forced to provide meaning, or have to go through the filter of a specific idea.
If you assume any rate of improvement at all then the games will become indistinguishable from reality. It would seem to follow that the odds that we are in base reality would be one in billions.
You think you photograph a particular scene for the pleasure it gives. In fact it's the scene that wants to be photographed. You're merely an extra in the production.
It is exciting to hear one of your fondest ideas formulated in one fell swoop, better than you could have done yourself.
Laughter on American television has taken the place of the chorus in Greek tragedy. It is unrelenting; the news, the stock-exchange reports, and the weather forecast are about the only things spared.
In its artless cruelty, Dallas is superior to any "intelligent" critique that can be made of it. That is why intellectual snobberymeets its match here.
Y a-t-il plus belle parodie de l'éthique de la valeur que de se soumettre avec toute l'intransigeance de la vertu aux données du hasard ou à l'absurdité d'une règle?
It is in love with its limitless horizontality, as New York may be with its verticality.
The sickly cultural pathos which the whole of France indulges in, that fetishism of the cultural heritage.
The real joy of writing lies in the opportunity of being able to sacrifice a whole chapter for a single sentence, a complete sentence for a single word...
What is man if the signs that predate him have such power? A human race has to invent sacrifices equal to the natural cataclysmic order that surrounds it.
