Quotes from Jean Baudrillard

In order for ethnology to live, its object must die; by dying, the object takes its revenge for being 'discovered' and with its death defies the science that wants to grasp it.

The city was here before the freeway system, no doubt, but it no looks as though the metropolis was built around this arterial network. It is the same with American reality. It was there before the screen was invented, but everything about the way it is today suggests hit was invented with the screen in mind.

Gizlemek (dissimuler), sahip olunan ÅŸeye sahip deÄŸilmiÅŸ gibi yapmak; simüle etmek ise sahip olunmayan ÅŸeye sahipmiÅŸ gibi yapmakt?r.

Estamos portanto no ponto paradoxal em que as massas se recusam ao batismo do social, que é ao mesmo tempo o do sentido e da liberdade. Não fazemos delas uma nova e gloriosa referência. Porque elas não existem.

Böyle bir skandal?n ifÅŸâ edilmesi yasalara sayg? duyulduÄŸunu göstermektedir. Belki de Watergate'in baÅŸarabildiÄŸi tek ÅŸey herkesi Watergate'in bir skandal olduÄŸuna inand?rmakt?r.

if you approach this society with the nuances of moral, aesthetic, or critical judgment , you will miss its originality, which comes from its defying judgment ...

Dart a very fine reed into the victim's heart. He will be left with a lethal stupefaction, but will not die of it. Dart a very fine glance into the eye of the torturer. He will be left with eternal remorse, without even remembering it.

It is by no means clear that the other exists for everyone. Does the other exist for the Savage or the Primitive? Some relationships are asymmetrical: the one may be the other for the other without this implying that the other is the other for the one. I may be other for him even though he is not the other for me.

Simulating enzymes. They create false biological events. They simulate a virus, a viral attack, thus triggering a reaction from antibodies, though since these have no target, there being no virus to destroy, they turn back against their own source. Let us celebrate this irruption of simulation within biology and wait to see where it will lead.

Doesn't everyone have in them this potential change and becoming? This absolute singularity which demands only to occur effortlessly, an inspired form freed from the straitjacket of our individual being? We have this becoming within us, and we lack nothing, since we are rid of truth. The world too lacks nothing as it is; it opposes any attempt to make it signify anything whatever. To inflict truth on it is like explaining a joke or a funny story.

Thought is that invisible blade that determines the separation of bodies. The truth that sees itself as such becomes a lie and a deception, but language, which never lies, wins out over both.

Todos os grandes esquemas da razão sofreram o mesmo destino. Eles só descreveram sua trajetória, só seguiram o curso de sua história no diminuto topo da camada social detentora do sentido (e em particular do sentido social), mas no essencial somente penetraram nas massas ao preço de um desvio, de uma distorção radical.

Thought too must fragment and scatter. Thought is a spectrum, and truth, if it exists, can only show through anagrammatically in the spectrum of thought.

Cloning must be sacrilege to the doctrines of metempsychosis, as it interrupts the sequence of reincarnations and the migration of souls. But it is also sacrilegious where the laws of evolution are concerned, since it is tantamount to an unlimited perpetuation of the species. In the body, a will to help begins to form. It is the body that chooses, among the innumerable pathogenic elements at its disposal, the illness that will purify you by diet and fever.

Technology evolves, language changes, the voice breaks, fate overtakes us. Naming things is never innocent. It is to precipitate them beyond their own existence into the ecstasy of language which is already the ecstasy of their end. We have no more reasons to exist than stones and if one part of our life is in the sun, then, necessarily, the other is in the cold of hell.

The corruption of power is to inscribe into the real everything which is found in dreams….

The historic time of the event, the psychological time of affects, the subjective time of judgement and will, the objective time of reality - these are all simultaneously thrown into question by real time. If there were a subject of history, a subject of knowledge, a subject of power, these have all disappeared in the obliteration by real time of distance, of the pathos of distance, in the integral realization of the world by information.

The cultural greenhouse effect: the toxic cloud caused by emissions from millions of museums, galleries, festivals, conferences and symposiums is much more catastrophic than the disappearance of the ozone layer. The asphyxia caused by the activity of thousands of creative brains damages the quality of life more certainly than all the world's industrial pollution. And if no Tokyo Congress has yet managed to control technological pollution, what body could put a brake on cultural nuisance?

Never lose sight of the fact that writing is a strange, inhuman function, a reflection of the inhumanity of language itself. Through writing, language, which is a domestic species, becomes a wild one again.

Boredom is out of luck: it is itself being discussed in crashingly boring terms.

Memory is a dangerous function. It retrospectively gives meaning to that which did not have any. It retrospectively cancels out the internal illusoriness of events, which was their originality. But if events retained their original, enigmatic form, their ambiguous, terrifying form, there would doubtless no longer be any history.

You can talk of things so much that they end up materializing in your life: simulation, seduction, reversibility, indifference. Gradually, life comes to resemble a montage of all these things, in a floating circulation of women, concepts, dreams and journeys. In this way, writing ends up preceding life, determining it. And life ends up conforming to a sign which was initially quite cavalier. This is no doubt why so many are afraid to write.

Amid the luxurious freshness of Ipanema each building has its own secret police.

You must not believe that truth remains truth when you take its veil away.' So, truth has no naked existence. You must not believe that the real remains the real after you have dispelled the illusion of the real. So, the real has no objective truth.