Quotes from Jean Baudrillard

This is doubtless the true Oedipal problem for everyone. Not so much to free yourself from the parental triangle as from your virtual double, from that umbilical alter ego who, for each individual, is like a congenital figure of death. It is doubtless with this hidden twin, this virtual twin whom we all carry within us at birth, that we have the greatest difficulty breaking.

Olumsuzlama dünyan?n en basit ÅŸeyidir. Bu yüzden hedefte anlaÅŸamayan büyük kitleler burda buluÅŸur.

But the object cannot be allowed to escape from ephemerality or from fashion.

American campuses. Like Disneyland, they are an ideal micro-city, the artificial ideal type of an intellectual biosphere. Like any realization of an ideal, they end up secreting a fierce coercion ('political correctness') and an internal intoxication, with its poisons and endorphins.

It is to the unknown one yields most impulsively; it is toward the unknown that one feels the most total, the most instinctive obligation.

Any gloss on authors, their character traits or biographies, hides the fact that only bad writing has an author, good writing does not.

Çepeçevre, binalar?n füme camdan cepheleri insan yüzlerine benziyorlar. DonuklaÅŸm?? yüzler bunlar. Sanki içeride hiç kimse yokmuÅŸ gibi, sanki yüzlerin gerisinde hiç kimse yokmuÅŸ gibi. Gerçekten de kimse yok. Ä°ÅŸte, ideal kent dedjÄŸin böyle olur.

We mustn't believe we are living the realization of some evil utopia - we are living the realization of utopia, period. That is to say, its collapse into the real.

One thing protects us from change: exile. In unreality or at the other end of the world, in melancholy or the South, exile is a marvellous and comfortable structure. Only the exiled have a land. I know some people who are only close to their country when they are 10,000 kilometres away, driven out by their own brothers. The others are nomads chasing their shadows in the deserts of culture.

If you say, I love you, then you have already fallen in love with language, which is already a form of break up and infidelity.

It is in the sphere of the media that we most clearly see the event short-circuited by its immediate image-feedback. Information, news coverage, is always already there. When there are catastrophes, the reporters and photojournalists are there before the emergency services. If they could be, they would be there before the catastrophe, the best thing being to invent or cause the event so as to be first with the news.

But neither art nor aesthetics is alone in being doomed to this melancholy destiny of living not beyond their means, but beyond their ends.

There is no longer any difference between the economic and the political, because the same language reigns in both, from one end to the other; a society therefore where the political economy, literally speaking, is finally fully realized.

If truth and reality can clearly come only from the subject and his consciousness, then illusion, which is the opposite of these, must necessarily come from elsewhere. From the world of the object, from some other thing than the subject. Illusion, like profusion, comes to us from the world.

The only benefit of a Campbell's soup can by Andy Warhol (and it is an immense benefit) is that it releases us from the need to decide between beautiful and ugly, between real and unreal, between transcendence and immanence.

But this aura of an artificial menace was still necessary to conceal that they [Presidents] were no longer anything but the mannequins of power. Formerly, the king (also the god) had to die, therein lay his power. Today, he is miserably forced to feign death, in order to preserve the blessing of power. But it is lost.

The repentant, run-to-seed ultra-Leftists who have converted to humanitarianism, artificial inseminators of the widow and the orphan, themselves orphans of reality and malades imaginaires of politcs, premature ejaculators of posthistory and hypochondriacs from the dead body of ideology and morality.

Only metaphysical passion can compete with seduction. The one fights against the illusion of an objective reality, the other against the subjective illusion of desire. The worst thing being to turn desire into a reality. To consider everything from its dead angle, its blind spot: the place accidents come from.

These old Australians or Californians who spend all their days staring at the ocean without leaving their limousines, which they have turned into their panoramic childhood sites and their coffins, and who dream there, while awaiting the last wave, the one that will come from the depths of the ocean to engulf them.

What one exorcises in this [imagery] way at little cost, and for the price of a few tears, will never in effect be reproduced

Everything is competing to show its good will. Things tend irresistibly towards perfection, effusiveness, reconciliation. Fortunately, nothing is ever perfect, thanks to Dostoevsky's 'unspeakable little demon ... that evil spirit that prompts to murder and scorn.' Everything tends irresistibly towards transparency. However, there remains a glimmer of secrecy - a clandestine dust-breeding that is mostly useless, an umbilical mirage, insider trading, but secret all the same.

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

The anxiety specific to leisure and the Coast. Too many forms of natural beauty artificially brought together. Too many villas, too many flowers. Villegiatura, nomenklatura: the same struggle. The same artificial privilege, whether it be that of the political bureaucracy or the luxuriance of lifestyle. Nature putrefied by leisure, purged of all barbarity, sickeningly comfortable - one day perhaps this dream climate, this heatwave of luxury will explode into one last forest fire.

Nada llegó ni llegará ahora al término de su historia.