Quotes from Jean Baudrillard

The idea that an idea can be stolen from you is meaningless. If it can be stolen from you that is because it is unimportant. If it can be stolen from you, the fact is that it is not yours.

Perhaps the desire to take photographs arises from the observation that on the broadest view, from the standpoint of reason, the world is a great disappointment. In its details, however, and caught by surprise, the world always has a stunning clarity. The secret form of the Other is what has to be reconstituted, as in anamorphosis, starting with the fragments and tracing its broken lines, its lines of fracture.

One can imagine a high-definition democracy, in which they would show the human rights chart every day, in real time on the screens, in the way they do now for the weather. They would show the observance and violation of those rights over the whole planet, possibly with immediate penalties (which would obviously produce a constant worsening of the situation).

A generation has disappeared or changed direction. A backfire against theoretical radicalism – and one in which socialism has played its part. The symbolic murder of the intellectual class, not at all unlike the symbolic murder of the political class by the silent majorities.

We can bear ideas and events only when laundered by commentary, like the dirty money concealed by banking secrecy. 'In the heart and the belly it continues to sing its poisonous song - Better to kill a child than to harbour unsatisfied desires within oneself' (Kenzaburo Oe). Ressentiment is an empty, useless passion only if it assumes a sentimental form.

Men escape from female sexual demands into androgyny or transvestism - women hide from male demands in modesty or sorcery.

The stupidity of all commercial or cultural anti- Americanism. As if Americanism did not run through every society, every nation, and every individual today, like modernity itself.

le monde est cruel parce qu'il est illusion.

Performance. Divestiture of humans and their freedom. Disqualification of humans in favor of automatism, a massive transfer of decision-making to computerized devices. A symbolic capitulation, a defeat of the will much more serious than any physical impairment. Sacrifizio dell'intelletto, della volunta, dell'immaginazione.

nós somos apenas episodicamente condutores de sentido, no essencial e em profundidade nós nos comportamos como massa, vivendo a maior parte do tempo num modo pânico ou aleatório, aquém ou além do sentido.

Il Nuovo Ordine Mondiale è disneico.

meaning is born out of the erosion of words, significations are born out of the erosion of signs

what if God himself can be simulated, that is to say can be reduced to the signs that constitute faith? Then the whole system becomes weightless, it is no longer itself anything but a gigantic simulacrum - not unreal, but a simulacrum, that is to say never exchanged for the real, but exchanged for itself, in an uninterrupted circuit without reference or circumference.

Not only can there be no seduction, but there can be no rape either without a minimal signal. A being capable of truly extinguishing all signals and emitting no anticipated response would be protected even from violence. This is indeed the attitude we instinctively take when faced with physical aggression or aggressive demands – suppression of the signals of fear or desire.

There is no self-portrait. It is the world which, through the image, produces its own self-portrait and we are allowed there only out of kindness (but the pleasure is shared). Conversely, every image should be looked at with the same intensity as our images in the mirror.

In dealing with the epidemic of visibility menacing our entire culture today, we must, as Nietzsche quite correctly said, cultivate mendacious and deceptive clear-sightedness.

Against the hypothesis of uncertainty: the illusion of truth and reality. Against the hypothesis of destiny: the illusion of freedom. Against the hypothesis of evil [Mal]: the illusion of misfortune [malheur]. Against the hypothesis of thought, the illusion of Artificial Intelligence. Against the hypothesis of the event: the illusion of information. Against the hypothesis of becoming: the illusion of change.

science never sacrifices itself, it is always murderous)

The greater the tendency to integrate man into mechanical and systemic effects, the more you have to swim against the tide, towards the hypothesis of the illogical sovereignty and material intelligence of things. This is not a mystical hypothesis. It is the only funny one.

All these dreams of helplessness, distress, of forking paths, of being locked up miles from anywhere, all these confused, indescribable episodes, are expressions of the fact that one is coming close to a secret zone, an impassable line - not at all, as the conventional interpretation has it, the bar of repression, but something more subtle of which we are the repressed.

The most perfect synthesis of theory and practice is the vanishing of thought into the actual course of the world.

It is thus always by virtue of a declination of meaning, or of non-meaning, that existence takes on form - by virtue, that is, of the deflection of something else. We have no will of our own, and the other is never what we would, of our own volition, choose to confront. Rather, the other is an invasion by something from elsewhere, priority given to what comes from elsewhere, seduction by foreignness and the transmission of foreignness.

He suddenly felt a pain that was as violent as if it were real. Existence, similar to the stucco angel whose extremities meet in a curved mirror, comes back, almost by necessity, to a state of radicality and silence. The ideal existence is the one that lasts long enough to come back to this point of origin. Those who forge straight ahead will never know where they have come from.

Europe's} is a crisis of historical ideals facing up to the impossibility of their realization. (The US'} is the crisis of an achieved utopia, confronted with the problem of its duration and permanence.