Quotes from baudrillard jean iii

Our entire linear and accumulative culture collapses if we cannot stockpile the past in plain view.

The futility of everything that comes to us from the media is the inescapable consequence of the absolute inability of that particular stage to remain silent. Music, commercial breaks, news flashes, adverts, news broadcasts, movies, presenters--there is no alternative but to fill the screen; otherwise there would be an irremediable void.

A series of accidents creates a positively lighthearted state.

Catholocism was founded on the symbolic obligation placed upon the Pope that he remain at the centre of the world -- in the days when there was one. Today he jets off to its four corners, like a professional: apostolate by jet.

Everything that can be said on the nuclear threat has already been said. Nothing has ever happened.... Nothing will ever happen. It is a system of general terror. But we are as if turned to stone by this potential destruction.

It is like the expanding universe. The more our instruments penetrate it, the further the limits recede. We therefore have to assume that this expansion, this retreat, is directly proportional to the power of our instruments.

The most difficult thing is to renounce the truth and the possibility of verification, to remain as long as possible on the enigmatic, ambivalent, and reversible side of thought.

You have to travel, keep on the move. You have to cross oceans, cities, continents, latitudes. Not to acquire a more informed vision of the world ... but in order to get as near as possible to the worldwide sphere of exchange, to enjoy ubiquity, cosmopolitan extraversion, to escape the illusion of intimacy.

Dying is nothing. You have to know how to disappear.

Sadder than destitution, sadder than the beggar is the man who eats alone in public. Nothing more contradicts the laws of man or beast, for animals always do each other the honour of sharing or disputing each other's food.

For nothing can be greater than seduction itself, not even the order that destroys it.

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.

Dead periods have to be left to take their chances. This goes for the present too, which we should not try to disturb in its melancholy deliquescence.