Jean Baudrillard Quotes

There are only a few images that are not forced to provide meaning, or have to go through the filter of a specific idea.

One may dream of a culture where everyone bursts into laughter when someone says: this is true, this is real.

There is no aphrodisiac like innocence.

The simulacrum is never what hides the truth—it is truth that hides the fact that there is none. The simulacrum is true. — Ecclesiastes

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.

Meaning, truth, the real cannot appear except locally, in a restricted horizon, they are partial objects, partial effects of the mirror and of equivalence. All doubling, all generalization, all passage to the limit, all holographic extension (the fancy of exhaustively taking account of this universe) makes them surface in their mockery.
Viewed at this angle, even the exact sciences come dangerously close to pataphysics. Because they depend in some way on the hologram and on the objectivist whim of the deconstruction and exact reconstruction of the world (in its smallest terms) founded on a tenacious and naive faith in a pact of the similitude of things to themselves. The real, the real object is supposed to be equal to itself, it is supposed to resemble itself like a face in a mirror—and this virtual similitude is in effect the only definition of the real—and any attempt, including the holographic one, that rests on it, will inevitably miss its object, because it does not take its shadow into account (precisely the reason why it does not resemble itself)—this hidden face where the object crumbles, its secret. The holographic attempt literally jumps over its shadow, and plunges into transparency, to lose itself there.

One has never said better how much "humanism", "normality", "quality of life" were nothing but the vicissitudes of profitability.

To dissimulate is to pretend not to have what one has. To simulate is to feign to have what one doesn't have. One implies a presence, the other an absence. But it is more complicated than that because simulating is not pretending: "Whoever fakes an illness can simply stay in bed and make everyone believe he is ill. Whoever simulates an illness produces in himself some of the symptoms" (Littré). Therefore, pretending, or dissimulating, leaves the principle of reality intact: the difference is always clear, it is simply masked, whereas simulation threatens the difference between the "true" and the "false," the "real" and the "imaginary."

For it is with the same imperialism that present-day simulators try to make the real, all of the real, coincide with their simulation models.

The very ideology of "cultural production" is antithetical to all culture, as is that of visibility and of the polyvalent space: culture is a site of the secret, of seduction, of initiation, of a restrained and highly ritualized symbolic exchange.

Take provocation, for instance, which is the opposite and the caricature of seduction. It says: "I know that you want to be seduced, and I will seduce you." Nothing could be worse than betraying this secret rule. Nothing could be less seductive than a provocative smile or inciteful behaviour, since both presuppose that one cannot be seduced naturally and that one needs to be blackmailed into it, or through a declaration of intent: "Let me seduce you" (p. 67)

Boredom is like a pitiless zooming in on the epidermis of time. Every instant is dilated and magnified like the pores of the face.

We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.

There are cultures that can only picture their origins and not their ends. Some are obsessed by both. Two other positions are possible: only picturing one's end - our own culture; picturing neither beginning nor end - the coming culture.

Here begins my delirious self-criticism (all self-criticism is delirious, the worst form of the critical spirit being that which claims to be directed against itself). Nonetheless, I accuse myself of: