Quotes from baudrillard jean iv

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).

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.

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.

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.

He was so thin, so translucent, that he had to pass through the same place twice to leave a shadow.

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.