Quotes from Jean Baudrillard

Never would the humanities or psychoanalysis have existed if it had been miraculously possible to reduce man to his "rational" behaviors. The whole discovery of the psychological, whose complexity can extend ad-infinitum, comes from nothing but the impossibility of exploiting to death (the workers), of incarcerating to death (the detained), of fattening to death (the animals).

Theory does not derive its legitimacy from established facts, but from future events. Its value is not in the past events it can illuminate, but in the shockwave of the events it prefigures. It does not act upon consciousness, but directly on the course of things from which it draws its energy. It therefore has to be dis tinguished from the academic practice of philosophy and from all that is written with an eye to the history of ideas.

In the same way as the mentally handicapped will be entitled to damages for the fact of being born, every citizen should be able to claim a natural right to intelligence and therefore, in the worst of cases, demand a stupidity support allowance. The most difficult thing will be to assemble the evidence. Death orders matters well, since the very fact of your absence makes the world distinctly less worthy of being lived in.

Beaubourg illustrates very well that an order of simulacra only establishes itself on the alibi of the previous order. Here, a cadaver all in flux and surface connections gives itself as content a traditional culture of depth. An order of prior simulacra (that of meaning) furnishes the empty substance of a subsequent order, which, itself, no longer even knows the distinction between signifier and signified, nor between form and content.

Seen from a distant star, the monotony of current events takes on fantastic proportions.

There is no more evidence of the effectiveness of advertising than of the existence of God.

She sucks at her words as they come out. She seems to practise a constant fellatio on the words she pronounces.

vivimos de la seducción, pero morimos de la fascinación

That an obscure Filipino computer-user can spread confusion through the global computer networks by launching the 'I love you' virus is possible only because the computer loves us and, feeling abandoned, like Hal in 2001: A Space Odyssey, takes its revenge by suiciding the network.

Our greatest adversaries now threaten us only with their disappearance.

Keep objects as a system Keep production as a mirror Keep death as an exchange Keep the world as a simulacrum Keep the evil transparent Keep the majorities silent Keep your seduction alive Keep your memory cool Keep yourself as an other Keep perfection as a crime Keep illusion for the end Keep on line for the while

It has to be written, if only to lock away the real key to the story in a single page, and remove that page once the book is finished, so that no one will know what it is all about - as ever, the perfect crime. However, it must be possible for that page to be reconstituted without its secret being revealed, and this dispersal is the very mainspring of theoretical fiction.

There is something stupid about raw events of which Destiny, if it exists, cannot be insensible. There is something stupid about self-evidence and truth from which a superior irony cannot but spare us. Thus everything is expiated one way or another. Forgetting or mourning are no more then the period of time required by reversibility.

When we had no means, we said the end justifies the means. Now that we have no ends, we say the means justify the end. Neither is immoral. What is entirely immoral is that there is no longer any contradiction between the two: ends and means have become indifferent to one another. They are quite simply no longer of the same order.

Teksas tepelerinin ve New Mexsico s?radaÄŸlar?n?n uçsuz bucaks?z olmalar?ndan kaynaklanan özlem: otoyollarda kayar gibi gidiÅŸ, Chrysler marka araban?n radyoteybinde çal?nan süper "hit" parçalar ve s?cak dalgas?.

The problem of reference was already an almost insoluble one: how is it with the real? How is it with representation? But when, with the Virtual, the referent disappears, when it disappears into the technical programming of the image, when there is no longer the situation of the real world set over against a light-sensitive film (it is the same with language, which is like the sensitive film of ideas), then there is, ultimately, no possible representation any more.

A clone is not a child, not a twin, not a narcissistic reflection; rather, it is the materialization of a double by genetic means - in other words, the abolition of all otherness and of the entire imaginary sphere.

Cosmopolitan evolutionism is an illusion, and it is everywhere being exposed as such. There is no solution to Foreignness. It is eternal - and radical. It is not a matter of wanting it to be that way. It simply is so.

The workers, once the heroes of historical negativity, have become the transparent unemployed workforce of factories that are but simulacra. The intellectual, once the herald of historical negativity, has become the transparent clown of dissidence.

There is a perverse stubbornness in preserving a space of ill-will, of rejection of the world and the political order. But also justified aversion for the idea of our collective assumption into the firmament of the operational, of general, simulated reconciliation. We already have to few enemies. In this age of socialist synergy, do we also have to cultivate consensus?

However, we must not look on this domination of the Virtual as something inevitable. Above all, we must not take the Virtual for a 'reality' (definitely going too far!) and apply the categories of the real and the rational to it.(...)

It seems nothing can counteract the proliferation of this Artificial Intelligence based on the zero degree of thought. Nothing, that is, except this reversibility of intelligence and stupidity - the latter representing a renewed challenge to victorious intelligence. There is something here too like a revenge of evil. Something to which the tyranny of reality leads equally well - to appreciating any old form of madness and illusion.

So should we save absence? Should we save the void and this nothingness at the heart of the image? At any rate, removing meaning brings out the essential point: namely, that the image is more important than what it speaks about-just as language is more important than what it signifies.

O êxtase é antinômico da paixão.