You have to know how to disappear. Jean Baudrillard More Quotes by Jean Baudrillard More Quotes From Jean Baudrillard Depression moods lead, almost invariably, to accidents. But, when they occur, our mood changes again, since the accident shows we can draw the world in our wake, and that we still retain some degree of power even when our spirits are low. A series of accidents creates a positively light-hearted state, out of consideration for this strange power. Jean Baudrillard lightpowerdepression 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 fashionidentitypast The day the world ends, no one will be there, just as no one was there when it began. This is a scandal. Such a scandal for the human race that it is indeed capable collectively, out of spite, of hastening the end of the world by all means just so it can enjoy the show. Jean Baudrillard scandalracemean 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. Jean Baudrillard empireshere-and-therereal Neither dead nor alive, the hostage is suspended by an incalculable outcome. It is not his destiny that awaits for him, nor his own death, but anonymous chance, which can only seem to him something absolutely arbitrary. He is in a state of radical emergency, of virtual extermination. Jean Baudrillard arbitrarydestinyalive The liberated man is not the one who is freed in his ideal reality, his inner truth, or his transparency; he is the man who changes spaces, who circulates, who changes sex, clothes, and habits according to fashion, rather than morality, and who changes opinions not as his conscience dictates but in response to opinion polls. Jean Baudrillard fashionfunnysex Photography is our exorcism. Primitive society had its masks, bourgeois society its mirrors. We have our images. Jean Baudrillard exorcismmirrorsphotography Information can tell us everything. It has all the answers. But they are answers to questions we have not asked, and which doubtless don't even arise. Jean Baudrillard technologydecisionscience For me, the photography, in its purest form, is a variant of the fable. Another way of saving the appearances - a way of signifying, through this fabulous capture, that this supposed real world is always about to lose its meaning and its reality. Jean Baudrillard fablesphotographyreal 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 - not unreal, but simulacrum, that is to say never exchanged for the real, but exchanged for itself, in an uninterrupted circuit without reference or circumference. Jean Baudrillard simulacrumwhat-ifreal 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. Jean Baudrillard politicspoliticalchallenges The great person is ahead of their time, the smart make something out of it, and the blockhead, sets themselves against it. Jean Baudrillard great-personsmartchange Driving is a spectacular form of amnesia. Everything is to be discovered, everything to be obliterated. Jean Baudrillard genocidedrivingform The only thing worse than being bored is being boring. Jean Baudrillard boresboredboring 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. Jean Baudrillard simulationsophisticatedenough Large department stores, with their luxuriant abundance of canned goods, foods, and clothing, are like the primary landscape and the geometrical locus of affluence. Streets with overcrowded and glittering store windowsthe displays of delicacies, and all the scenes of alimentary and vestimentary festivity, stimulate a magical salivation. Accumulation is more than the sum of its products: the conspicuousness of surplus, the final and magical negation of scarcitymimic a new-found nature of prodigious fecundity. Jean Baudrillard delicacylandscapeaffluence We are all hostages, and we are all terrorists. This circuit has replaced that other one of masters and slaves, the dominating and the dominated, the exploiters and the exploited. It is worse than the one it replaces, but at least it liberates us from liberal nostalgia and the ruses of history. Jean Baudrillard slaveterrorismnostalgia Fiction is not imagination. It is what anticipates imagination by giving it the form of reality. This is quite opposite to our own natural tendency which is to anticipate reality by imagining it, or to flee from it by idealizing it. That is why we [Europeans] shall never inhabit true fiction; we are condemned to the imaginary and nostalgia for the future. Jean Baudrillard oppositesgivingreality Pornography is the quadraphonics of sex. It adds a third and fourth track to the sexual act. It is the hallucination of detail that rules. Science has already habituated us to this microscopics, this excess of the real in its microscopic detail, this voyeurism of exactitude. Jean Baudrillard trackrealsex It only takes a politician believing in what he says for the others to stop believing him. Jean Baudrillard fake-peoplebirthdaybelieve
