French sociologist & philosopher (1929-2007)
We will never know if an advertisement or opinion poll has had a real influence on individual or collective wills, but we will never know either what would have happened if there had been no opinion poll or advertisement.
JEAN BAUDRILLARD
The Perfect Crime
Power floats like money, like language, like theory.
JEAN BAUDRILLARD
Simulacra and Simulation
Travel was once a means of being elsewhere, or of being nowhere. Today it is the only way we have of feeling that we are somewhere. At home, surrounded by information, by screens, I am no longer anywhere, but rather everywhere in the world at once, in the midst of a universal banality -- a banality that is the same in every country. To arrive in a new city, or in a new language, is suddenly to find oneself here and nowhere else. The body rediscovers how to look.
JEAN BAUDRILLARD
The Transparency of Evil
Against all our historically-minded culture (out of compassion for our present state), the only excitement is to be found in anticipation (out of impertinence towards our future state).
JEAN BAUDRILLARD
Cool Memories
There is nothing more mysterious than a TV set left on in an empty room. It is even stranger than a man talking to himself or a woman standing dreaming at her stove. It is as if another planet is communicating with you.
JEAN BAUDRILLARD
America
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.
JEAN BAUDRILLARD
attributed, What Does That Mean?: Exploring Mind, Meaning, and Mysteries
We will live in this world, which for us has all the disquieting strangeness of the desert and of the simulacrum, with all the veracity of living phantoms, of wandering and simulating animals that capital, that the death of capital has made of us--because the desert of cities is equal to the desert of sand--the jungle of signs is equal to that of the forests--the vertigo of simulacra is equal to that of nature--only the vertiginous seduction of a dying system remains, in which work buries work, in which value buries value--leaving a virgin, sacred space without pathways, continuous as Bataille wished it, where only the wind lifts the sand, where only the wind watches over the sand.
JEAN BAUDRILLARD
Simulacra and Simulation
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.
JEAN BAUDRILLARD
Simulacra and Simulation
He was so thin, so translucent, that he had to pass through the same place twice to leave a shadow.
JEAN BAUDRILLARD
Cool Memories
There is something of both childishness and sorcery in a woman making up. The event keeps the world in suspense by the simple interaction between a mirror and a face. It is the reconciliation of technique and guile. It has no equivalent in the universe of thought except perhaps when suffering is dressed up in ascetic garb. It is, moreover, each day (and several times a day) the sacrificial moment of a woman's life.
JEAN BAUDRILLARD
Cool Memories