Quotes from Jean Baudrillard

The denunciation of scandal is always an homage to the law. [...] Capital, immoral and without scruples, can only function behind a moral superstructure, and whoever revives this public morality (through indignation, denunciation, etc.) works spontaneously for the order of capital.

Do not take the side of those already in the right.

We have at this millennium end produced the perfect specimen of the species in the form of mobile-phone man. But even he will disappear before the future digital prosthesis, who will leave room in turn only for telepathic ghosts.

For people of a certain age in this country, culture comes free of charge. It is thought they are too old to misuse it.

e, assim como as sociedades primitivas foram devastadas pela explosão por não terem sabido controlar durante mais tempo o processo implosivo, assim nossas culturas começam a ser devastadas pela implosão por não terem sabido controlar e equilibrar o processo explosivo.

This is the true break, not a social fracture but a symbolic one: in the advent of an integral reality that absorbs all aspirations towards dreaming, surpassing or revolt. -The despair of having everything. -The despair of being nothing. -The despair of being everybody. -The despair of being nobody.

With the mechanics of the transpolitical, the transsexual and the transaesthetic, all desiring machines are becoming bachelor machines...

If their own duplicity deserts human beings, then the roles are reversed: it is the machine that goes gaga, that falters and becomes perverse, diabolic, ventriloquous. The duplicity merrily goes over to the other side. If subjective irony disappears - and it disappears in the play of the digital- then irony becomes objective. Or it becomes silence.

The champions of the digital adopt an absurd line of argument (absurd in the sense of Freud's story of the kettle): 1. It is a revolution, an absolute advance. 2. At any rate, we have no choice, the process is irreversible. But it must be one or the other: if it is inevitable, there's no point representing it as an ideal dimension. And if it's destined to win out, there's no point claiming it is best. Any form of irony or offhandedness about one's own ideas is wounding to one's interlocutor.

Foresight being the memory of the future, when everything is seeable nothing is any longer foreseeable.

One knows that the social can be dissolved in a panic reaction, an uncontrollable chain reaction. But it can also be dissolved in the opposite reaction, a chain reaction of inertia, each micro-universe saturated, auto-regulated, computerized, isolated in automatic pilot. Advertising is the prefiguration of this: the first manifestation of an uninterrupted thread of signs, like ticker tape—each isolated in its inertia.

Three elements which balance out: a rural unconscious, an urban subconscious and a cosmopolitan consciousness.

When some dream only of transforming the world, others, regarding it as having disappeared, dream only of obliterating its traces. The real considered as infantile disorder of the virtual. Thought considered as infantile disorder of artificial intelligence. The image considered as infantile disorder of representation.

Instead of dreams being the place where desires from real life are fulfilled, it would be the real that was the place where desires born of dreams would be fulfilled. Dreams would be a search engine. The Aborigines, for example, scorning biological paternity, give priority to begetting by dreams. Reality would gain by this in becoming much more mysterious and dreams would cease to be the dumping ground of the unconscious.

The shores run together, the waters are parallel. The waters run together, the shores are parallel. A single leaf rustles, the others are silent. Who knows how this dream ends? He was so thin, so translucent, that he had to pass through the same place twice to leave a shadow. Living out a destiny of convenience the way others sail under a flag of convenience.

Man has lost the basic skill of the ape, the ability to scratch its back. Which gave it extraordinary independence, and the liberty to associate for reasons other than the need for mutual back-scratching. Trampling down the leaves like snow in the wild light of the dead citadel, whose prince in days gone by rebelled against his king, for which reason the walls were pulled down.

Philosophy has never been anything but a disavowal of the reality principle. Up until now, it has been the business of philosophers. Today this unreality has entered into things. This then is the end of philosophy and the beginning of something else in which reality merges with its ironic refraction.

Thought can no longer keep itself in a critical equilibrium. It has to be spread eagled between violent nostalgia and violent anticipation. Of course we should dream of all women. There isn't one of them who wouldn't be offended if a man didn't dream of all of them through her.

We dream of passing through ourselves and of finding ourselves in the beyond: the day when your holographic double will be there in space, eventually moving and talking, you will have realized this miracle. Of course, it will no longer be a dream, so its charm will be lost.

There is no point questioning reality when more than ten are present. Every audience of more than ten automatically turns defensive and reacts violently to any challenge to reality and manifest truth. No radical statement can be made to more than ten people.

It is not a question of conferring some kind of positivity on thought, since its operation is precisely to detract from the truth and the legitimacy of existence. And radicality doubtless has no other function than to provide an added bonus of pleasure.

Brilliant little irruptions Brilliant little connections Brilliant little illusions Brilliant little lips Brilliant little altercations Very brilliant little honey combs Brilliant little adversities Very brilliant little ravages Brilliant little cogs Brilliant little circumvolutions Around a vertical axis Why has the deficiency of the mentally deficient become a cultural fact, whereas the very much more terrible fact of ordinary stupidity strikes no one as very odd?

A spider so fragile, so spindly, so translucent that it runs like a watermark across the paper, just like the tiny blood vessels on your skin. It disturbs nothing, running around in the void, in a very great hurry to live and die. In fact, its tiny size, its microscopic structure is a challenge to the monstrous being that we are. It's fragility can only make us wish to crush it, and that would not even be a crime since our two universes are so entirely separate.

The silence of metaphor accompanies the act of cruelty, as for example with the cannibalistic Japanese who moved directly from the metaphor of love to devouring that marvellous Dutch girl. Or the woman who made a present of her eye to the man who said he was so in love with her gaze. The effacement of metaphor is characteristic of the object and its cruelty. Words are left with only a literal, material tenor. They are no longer signs in a language. This is the silence of pure objectality.