Quotes from Jean Baudrillard

Freud thought he was bringing the plague to the U.S.A., but the U.S.A. has victoriously resisted the psychoanalytical frost by real deep freezing, by mental and sexual refrigeration. They have countered the black magic of the Unconscious with the white magic of doing your own thing, air conditioning, sterilization, mental frigidity and the cold media of information.

All these old ultra-Leftists thwarted (by History), unclear where they are on the Left–Right spectrum, and ending up writing with both hands – from left to right, of course - in the hope of one day painting spaces of freedom for themselves with their toes.

Every year, I verify here, alongside the intelligence of the mineral world and the animal kingdom, the proportional stupidity of the human race - the deculturated peasants and acculturated tourists, arrogant adults and children with their pretentious technical gadgetry and senseless chatter. All the other species are more docile and spiritual in their silence than this one.

In the classical imagination, Evil was still a mythical power. There was still a Mephisto or a Frankenstein to embody the principle of Evil. Our evil is faceless and without imagination. We no longer need the Devil to steal our shadows. There are no powers doing battle above our heads, fighting over our souls. No longer any need for the lubricious agency of capital to extort our labour-power from us. We no longer have any shadows, any souls, and we are stakeholders in our own lives.

Fortunately, there are other, more poetic ways of ridding oneself of freedom - that of gaming, for example, where what is at stake is not a freedom subject to the law, but a sovereignty subject to rules. A more subtle and paradoxical freedom which consists in a rigorous observance, an enchanted form of voluntary servitude that is, as it were, the miraculous combination of master and slave: in gaming no one is free, everyone is both the master and the slave of the game.

The universe is mystagogic. It talks without knowing it, and without anything meaningful in its speech. Pedagogues speak in full knowledge of what they are saying, but they treat us like children.

The old form of voluntary servitude was that of free men using that freedom paradoxically to turn themselves into serfs. The new voluntary servitude is that of men obeying the demand that they be free.

Freedom is not as free as is generally thought: it produces antibodies which rebel against it. Truth, too, is threatened from within, like a state battling with its own police force. If values enjoyed total immunity, they would be as lethal as a scientific truth.

The almost timeless curvature of the space of ideas obeys neither chronology nor history. So the thoughts of Sade and Fourier are like anticipated repercussions of the theories of Marx and Freud, of which they are a much more radical critique avant la lettre than any that were to follow, exerting their effects only posthumously. To reread the world of ideas against the grain of the ideology of the Enlightenment, the ideology of a chronological order of events.

The only impossible revolution, says Ceronetti in substance, one that is even inconceivable to reason, would be the revolution against machines- and this impossibility turns all other revolutions into a schizophrenic farce.

They say there is always a photographic moment to be seized where the most banal of beings yield up their secret identity. But what is interesting is their secret alterity, and rather than looking for the identity beneath the appearances, we should look for the mask beneath the identity, the figure which haunts us and diverts us from our identities -- the masked divinity which, in effect, haunts each of us for a moment, one day or another.

As flat as the earth before they noticed it was round. As ambiguous as the truth before they noticed it was true. As real as reality before they noticed it didn't exist. As beautiful as a woman before they noticed she wasn't one. And is the earth really round? It is when seen from another world. Just as the real is real only from our phenomenal point of view. Or, rather, from the viewpoint of the unverifiable hypothesis of its non- existence.

Just as medieval society was balanced on God and the Devil, so ours is balanced on consumption and its denunciation.

Tukenmeye baslayan bir politika dunyasiyla birlikte Cumhurbaskanlari, ilkel toplumlarda bir iktidar kuklasindan baska bir sey olmayan kabile seflerine benzemektedirler.

Psychoanalysis overturned. Instead of the dream being the fulfilment of desires unsatisfied in real life, real life would be the site where desires born of dreams were fulfilled. Instead of being the dumping-ground of the unconscious, dreams would be the matrices of real events - thus becoming like the 'dream' of the Aborigines, for whom a child has to be dreamt before he can be begotten, 'real' paternity being merely the fulfilment of the dream.

Patlama hep bir vaat, bir umut ????? olmuÅŸtur. ÖrneÄŸin Harrisburg'de herkes filmdeki gibi nükleer patlaman?n gerçekleÅŸeceÄŸi ân? beklemekte ve patlasa da biz de ÅŸu ne idüÄŸü belirsiz panik duygusuyla cayd?rma amaçl? nükleer patlama düÅŸüncesinden kurtulsak diyecek hâle gelmektedir.

Paradoks yani bombalar tertemiz nesnelerdir. Sahip olduklar? tek kirletici özellik patlamad?klar? zaman çevreye saçt?klar? bir güvenlik ve denetleme sistemidir.

The balance of terror is the terror of balance.

Let us turn our gaze towards the Southern lands, where only the melancholy light of origins shines.

Action or exaction? Voting, petitions, solidarity, information, human rights: all these things are gently extorted from you in the form of personal or promotional blackmail.

The West, having destroyed its own values, finds itself back at the zero degree of symbolic power, and in a turnabout, it wants to impose the zero degree on everyone. It challenges the rest of the world to annihilate itself symbolically as well. It demands that the rest of the world enter into its game, participate in the generalised, planetary exchange and fall into its trap…There is a moral and philosophical confrontation, almost a metaphysical one, beyond Good and Evil.

When one looks at the emptiness of current art, the only question is how such a machine can continue to function in the absence of any new energy, in an atmosphere of critical disillusionment and commercial frenzy, and with all the players totally indifferent? If it can continue, how long will this illusion last? A hundred years, two hundred? This society is like a vessel whose edges move ever wider apart, and in which the water never comes to a boil.

Against the advice of doctors, the governor refuses to allow an incurably ill man to be put out of his misery. This is the other face of capital punishment. One day we shall have to fight for the abolition of the life penalty, as we did in the past for the abolition of the death penalty. Shadows have always preceded us, and they will outlive us. We were dead before we were alive, and we shall be again.

What happens on the other side of the truth, not in what would be false, but in what is more true than the true, more real than the real? Bizarre effects, certainly, and sacrileges, much more destructive of the order of truth than its pure negation. Singular and murderous power of the potentialization of the truth, of the potentialization of the real.