With truth, you need to get rid of it as soon as possible and pass it on to someone else. As with illness, this is the only way to be cured of it. The person who keeps truth in his hands has lost.
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Jean Baudrillard
Jean Baudrillard (/ˌboʊdriːˈɑːr/; French: [ʒɑ̃ bodʁijaʁ]; 27 July 1929 – 6 March 2007) was a French sociologist, philosopher, cultural theorist, political commentator, and photographer. He is best known for his analyses of media, contemporary culture, and technological communication, as well as his formulation of concepts such as simulation and hyperreality. He wrote about diverse subjects, including consumerism, gender relations, economics, social history, art, Western foreign policy, and popular culture. Among his best known works are Simulacra and Simulation (1981), America (1986), and The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (1991). His work is frequently associated with postmodernism and specifically post-structuralism. 2Life Baudrillard was born in Reims, northeastern France, on 27 July 1929. His grandparents were peasant farm workers and his father a policeman. During high school (at the Lycée at Reims), he became aware of pataphysics (via philosophy professor Emmanuel Peillet), which is said to be crucial for understanding Baudrillard's later thought. He became the first of his family to attend university when he moved to Paris to attend the Sorbonne. There he studied German language and literature, which led him to begin teaching the subject at several different lycées, both Parisian and provincial, from 1960 until 196
The indifference of trees to the historical moment. The indifference of dreams to interpretation. The indifference of the people to its own triumph. The indifference of the body to the revolution. The dazzling metaphysical spectacle of the sameness of faces the morning after revolution.
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.
As for freedom, it will soon cease to exist in any shape or form. Living will depend upon absolute obedience to a strict set of arrangements, which it will no longer be possible to transgress. The air traveller is not free. In the future, life's passengers will be even less so: they will travel…
It is exciting to hear one of your fondest ideas formulated in one fell swoop, better than you could have done it yourself. You feel no intellectual jealously at seeing yourself outstripped in this way.
It is impossible to point out stupidity without it pointing back at you.
There is no poverty and no wealth. There is merely an impoverished definition of wealth — in terms of economics and calculation. Unfortunately, the entire world’s poor have signed up to this definition which makes them poor to the second degree.
The perfect criminal is the one who lays claim to the crime he has not committed. Who conceals his innocence behind the mask of crime. He is much harder to unmask.
Our task is clear: we must make that world even more unintelligible, even more enigmatic.
Events, real events, will not even have time to take place. Everything will be preceded by its virtual realization.
If we discover that not everything can be cloned, simulated, programmed, genetically and neurologically managed, then whatever survives could truly be called 'human': some inalienable and indestructible human quality could finally be identified. Of course, there is always the risk, in this…
Everyone knows that the light of the stars needs a very long time to reach us; sometimes we perceive it after the star itself has disappeared. This gap between the star as a virtual source and its perception by us, this non-simultaneity, is an inescapable part of the illusion of the world, the…
Critical consciousness, thought in general, perhaps, always comes after the fact, a day too late, like Kafka’s Messiah—or it comes at the close of the day, like Hegel’s owl. It is nothing but retrospective prophecy, or some platonic shadow dancing on the wall of events, in the cavern of history. 'If…
How a woman can once again become violently desirable after you have broken up remains a mystery. Some, perhaps, have the same sense of retrospective admiration of their own bodies at the moment of leaving them.
Two precious moments. In the vague anticipation of a woman, of possessing her — the illusion of pleasure — and in the freshly felt resentment at her loss, when you are still under the spell, in the illusion of loss. Between the two, you get the feeling nothing happens.
Debt and drugs: new balance of terror. Will the debt be balanced out, the drugs cleaned up? No way. Vicious circle of soft wars, viral forms of finance and morphine.
The Iron Curtain has been supplanted by a mental glass curtain. The Berlin wall has been supplanted by the invisible wall, the unrelenting wall of the interface and transparency which, unlike the other, lets everything through, transfuses all light, relentlessly illuminates every nook and cranny,…
Beware of the treacheries of language. Stereotyped political language generally says the opposite of what it is thinking.
Communism had succeeded in wresting entire generations away from the work ethic, in killing in them the slightest desire to produce, in making them lazy. This historical scandal is coming to an end. The whole of Europe is going to work in concert. But the question still remains: shouldn't we have…
Communicate? Communicate? Only doors communicate.