French sociologist & philosopher (1929-2007)
It is dangerous to unmask images, since they dissimulate the fact that there is nothing behind them.
JEAN BAUDRILLARD
Simulacra and Simulation
Boredom is like a pitiless zooming in on the epidermis of time. Every instant is dilated and magnified like the pores of the face.
JEAN BAUDRILLARD
Cool Memories
Every woman is like a time-zone. She is a nocturnal fragment of your journey. She brings you unflaggingly closer to the next night.
JEAN BAUDRILLARD
Cool Memories
If there is a species which is more maltreated than children, then it must be their toys, which they handle in an incredibly off-hand manner.... Toys are thus the end point in that long chain in which all the conditions of despotic high-handedness are in play which enchain beings one to another, from one species to another--cruel divinities to their sacrificial victims, from masters to slaves, from adults to children, and from children to their objects.
JEAN BAUDRILLARD
Cool Memories
Terrorism, like viruses, is everywhere. There is a global perfusion of terrorism, which accompanies any system of domination as though it were its shadow, ready to activate itself anywhere, like a double agent.
JEAN BAUDRILLARD
The Spirit of Terrorism and Other Essays
It is a world completely rotten with wealth, power, senility, indifference, puritanism and mental hygiene, poverty and waste, technological futility and aimless violence, and yet I cannot help but feel it has about it something of the dawning of the universe.
JEAN BAUDRILLARD
America
But what if God himself can be simulated, that is to say can be reduced to signs that constitute faith? Then the whole system becomes weightless, it is no longer anything but a gigantic simulacrum ... an uninterrupted circuit without reference or circumference.
JEAN BAUDRILLARD
Simulacra and Simulation
Everywhere there is pleasure you will find a woman in disguise.
JEAN BAUDRILLARD
Cool Memories
The fury to unveil the truth, to get at the naked truth, the one which haunts all discourses of interpretation, the obscene rage to uncover the secret, is proportionate to the impossibility of ever achieving this.
JEAN BAUDRILLARD
The Ecstasy of Communication
If he is this good at acting crazy, it's because he is.
JEAN BAUDRILLARD
Simulacra and Simulation
Smile and others will smile back. Smile to show how transparent, how candid you are. Smile if you have nothing to say. Most of all, do not hide the fact you have nothing to say nor your total indifference to others. Let this emptiness, this profound indifference shine out spontaneously in your smile... Americans may have no identity, but they do have wonderful teeth.
JEAN BAUDRILLARD
America
Reality itself is too obvious to be true.
JEAN BAUDRILLARD
The Perfect Crime
It is not enough for theory to describe and analyse, it must itself be an event in the universe it describes. In order to do this theory must partake of and become the acceleration of this logic. It must tear itself from all referents and take pride only in the future. Theory must operate on time at the cost of a deliberate distortion of present reality.
JEAN BAUDRILLARD
"Why Theory?", The Ecstasy of Communication
There are cultures that can only picture their origins and not their ends.
JEAN BAUDRILLARD
Cool Memories
There is a pact of pride in a couple's love, a pact of glory, which is at least as fundamental as sexual feelings. These latter peter out silently in the two bodies, but the pact can only be broken by the spoken word.
JEAN BAUDRILLARD
Cool Memories
All we have left of liberty is an ad-man's illusion.
JEAN BAUDRILLARD
The Illusion of the End
When the real is no longer what it was, nostalgia assumes its full meaning.
JEAN BAUDRILLARD
Simulacra and Simulation
If it has been possible to suggest that no event could have a final meaning before history had come to an end one way or another, then any way of giving any kind of sense to an event is a way of putting an end to history.
JEAN BAUDRILLARD
Cool Memories
The secret of theory is that truth does not exist.
JEAN BAUDRILLARD
Fragments
Growing old is not the approach of a biological term. It is the ever lengthening spiral which distances you from the physical and intellectual openness of your youth. Eventually, the spiral becomes so long that all chance of return is lost. The parabola becomes eccentric, and the peak of one's life-curve gets lost in space. Simultaneously the echo of pleasure in time becomes shorter. One ceases to find pleasure in pleasure. Things live on in nostalgia, and their echo becomes that of a previous life.
JEAN BAUDRILLARD
Cool Memories