Quotes from Jean Baudrillard

All our current media concerns have in French the suffix '-aire': identitaire (issues of identity), sanitaire (health concerns), securitaire ('law and order'), humanitaire (humanitarianism). The whole lot being publicitaire (promotional). There is in this suffix something which quite aptly characterizes our culture as funerarium of received ideas and single-track thinking.

Le monde nous a été donné comme énigmatique et inintelligible, et la tâche de la pensée est de le rendre, si possible, encore plus énigmatique et encore plus inintelligible.

Beyond the end: the only unrestricted view. Running after your shadow: the only way out from perpetual motion. Dispersing the viewpoints: the only solution to the squaring of the circle. His hypocritical air derived from the fact that he suffered simultaneously from an inferiority and a superiority complex towards himself. The principle of insufficient reason: the only things that really take place are those which do not have sufficient reason to do so.

The child that slumbers within us has become a confirmed insomniac. What is the point of growing up? Some like to let their slips and parapraxes show through, to revel in their strange behaviour: they are absolutely set on having an Unconscious.

Each segment of the worm is directly reproduced as a whole worm, just as each cell of the American CEO can produce a new CEO.

The heroes of humanitarian action are applauded: a good thing they're there to rescue our honour! If you denounce this shroud-waving, again there is applause: thank goodness you're there to say these things! It is often the same people who applaud. Sycophants, catechumens, proselytes, acolytes - to arms, all of you!

Secondary-school pupils are demanding more school, more funding, more staff, more security. Nineteenth-century demands. School is finished. All we can do is transform it into a gigantic Web cafe. In their own heads, the school students have already moved over into multimedia and the twenty-first century, as is attested by the incongruity of the demonstrations, including the incongruity of the anachronistic violence of the hooligan element.

When God created man, He saw that he couldn't survive in that solitude and gave him a shadow. But since then man has never stopped selling it to the devil. I knew him in all conditions. Moist in sacrifice, hostile or welcoming, voracious or retractile, excited or indifferent, impulsive and without qualms, dreamy on his best day. That people who share the same genes should be separated by a moral chasm helps us to reassess the values in the name of which they are killing each other.

The Stockholm Syndrome, the Theatre of Cruelty, voluntary servitude, living coin, the ready made, the accursed share, the total social fact, dust-breeding, the perfect crime - we find all these figures in the reality-TV cocktail, in that potlatch of vacuousness. It even drags the judgement that condemns it into its vacuousness.

Gut reaction against yobbery, the masses and solid Frenchness. But an equally visceral distaste for the elite, for castes, culture and the nomenklatura. Do we have to choose between the moronic masses and the arrogant privileged classes (particularly when they have an odour of demagogic humility about them)? No solution.

But against the acceleration of networks and circuits, we will also look for slowness—not the nostalgic slowness of the mind, but insoluble immobility, the slower than slow: inertia and silence, inertia insoluble by effort, silence insoluble by dialogue. There is a secret here too.

Amerikan metropolünde arabadan inip de yürümeye baÅŸlad???n?zda kamu düzeni için tehlike oluÅŸturursunuz, yollardaki ba??boÅŸ köpekler gibi. Yaln?zca üçüncü dünya ülkelerinden göç edenlerin yürümeye hakk?na sahip.

We are simplified by technical manipulation

Twins were deified, and sacrificed, in a more savage culture: hypersimilitude was equivalent to the murder of the original, and thus to a pure non-meaning.

What is one to do against an enemy whose weapons are conformism and stupidity? Should one make oneself more conformist and more stupid? If his strategy lies in cunning and achievement, should one make oneself more cunning, more of an achiever? Should one make oneself more mediatic than the media?

To turn yourself into an image is to expose your daily life, your misfortunes, your desires and your possibilities. It is to have no secrets left. Never to tire of expressing yourself, speaking, communicating. To be readable at every moment, overexposed to the glare of the information media (like the woman who appears live twenty-four hours a day on the Internet, showing the tiniest details of her life).

We are simplified by technical manipulation. And this manipulation goes off on a crazy course when we reach digital manipulation

In the beginning was the word. It was only afterwards that the Silence came. The end itself has disappeared...

Our entire reality has become experimental. In the absence of any stable destiny, modern man has reached the point of unlimited experimentation on himself.

Strictly speaking, we no longer know what to do with them, since, today, it is not normal to be dead, and this is new. To be dead is an unthinkable anomaly; nothing else is as offensive as this. Death is a delinquency, and an incurable deviancy. The dead are no longer inflicted on any place or space-time, they can find no resting place; they are thrown into a radical utopia.

Nothing distinguishes a natural intelligence from something that can give off all the outward signs of it, and this includes faltering before the test of truth. So one can give off all the outward signs of power, and this includes faltering before the test of strength. A simulation which produces, with just the requisite degree of derision, the image of an illusory normality.

The fragment is like a broken mirror - ideas don't have the time to reflect themselves in it or, as a result, to feel sorry for themselves. They run ahead of their shadows or their reflections. To run ahead is to move towards an unforeseeable outcome, but one whose path is made for it in advance. Birds too run ahead of those who see them. The event also runs ahead of history. It is what opens up untimely perspectives in a world brought totally up to date.

In the face of extreme reality we are defenceless. But this is only a beginning. We are the aborigines, the anthropoids of the Virtual. In terms of world history, we are barely at the stage of the invention of fire and walking upright. Logically, it remains for us to be exploited and colonized by an even greater power.

This is the reappearance of the principle of Evil in a new guise. No morality or guilt is implied, however: the principle of Evil is simply synonymous with the principle of reversal, with the turns of fate. In systems undergoing total positivization - and hence desymbolization - evil is equivalent, in all its forms, to the fundamental rule of reversibility.