Quotes from Jean Baudrillard

It has never been so clear that the content-- here, culture, elsewhere, information or commodities-- is nothing but the phantom support for the operation of the medium itself, whose function is always to induce mass, to produce a homogeneous human and mental flux. An immense to-and-fro movement similar to that of suburban commuters, absorbed and ejected at fixed times by their workplace.

Just as the waste of time nourishes the hell of leisure, so technological wastes nourish the hell of war. Wastes which incarnate the secret violence of this society, uncoerced and non-degradable defecation.

Oysa tüm düÅŸleri elinden al?nm?? bir dünyaya gerçeklik egemen olabilir mi? Gerçeklikten ibaret bir dünya oluÅŸturmaya çal??t???m?z ölçüde elimiz aya??m?za dolaÅŸmakta ve bu gerçeklikten giderek uzaklaÅŸmaktay?z. GerçekleÅŸtiÄŸi an ortadan kaybolmaya baÅŸlayan bir gerçeklik evreni içinde ya??yoruz.

The concepts of value, abstraction, speculation must be extended to cerebral matter, as they once were to the faecal matter of labour. Speculating on intelligence as grey matter valued like any other raw matter or material, with its equivalent in toytown money. . . This matter is the prey of our headhunters now.

Çocuklar bir yanda özerk, sorumlu, özgür ve bilinçli varl?klar olmak zorundayken öte yandan boyun eÄŸmek, tepki göstermemek, itaat etmek ve kurallara uymak zorundad?rlar. Çocuk, bütün bu alanlarda mücadele etmek durumundad?r. ÖrneÄŸin, uymak zorunda kald??? çeliÅŸkili bir mecburiyete ikili bir stratejiyle kar?? koymaktad?r.

What goes out of fashion passes into everyday life. What disappears from everyday life is revived in fashion.

Cultures, taken in themselves, are not moving towards each other. Or, if they are, they are doing so as slowly as tectonic plates. The dream of reconciling them all one day is an absurdity. From the point of view of the universal, which is our point of view, they can only be exterminated - including our own. The space left for any culture by Western un-culture can only be that of le mort (the dead man, but also the 'dummy' at cards).

Japanese culture is thus a cannibalistic form - assimilating, absorbing, aping, devouring. Afro-Brazilian culture is also a rather good example of cannibalism in this sense: it too devours white modern culture, and it too is seductive in character. Cannibalism must indeed always be merely an extreme form of the relationship to the other, and this includes cannibalism in the relationship of love. Cannibalism is a radical form of hospitality.

The West is seized with panic at the thought of not being able to save what the symbolic order had been able to conserve for forty centuries, but out of sight

As soon as it becomes impossible for states to attack and destroy one another, they turn almost automatically against their own peoples, their own territories; a sort of civil war or internecine conflict begins between the State and its natural referent. Is it not in fact the fate of every sign, every signifying and representative agency, to abolish its natural referent?

But what becomes of the divinity when it reveals itself in icons, when it is multiplied in simulacra? Does it remain the supreme power that is simply incarnated in images as a visible theology? Or does it volatilize itself in the simulacra that, alone, deploy their power and pomp of fascination - the visible machinery of icons substituted for the pure and intelligible Idea of God?

Like dreams, statistics are a form of wish fulfilment. Manicheism is the irreconcilable antagonism between two forces. Morality is merely the opposition of two values. In the order of values, there is always a possibility of reconciliation. The disorder of forces is irreconcilable.

An unknown individual accosts me outside a café: 'Surely you're not going to wait till you're dead to be loved? The implication of his remark: when are you going to do what you have to do to be loved? Implied beneath this: you are not loved. Hurry up and die: it's your last chance. But in another sense, the question suggests that I have to be love one way or another. And that is also a declaration of love.

La politique qui entre à l'université est celle qui sort de l'histoire, c'est une politique rétro, vidée de sa substance et légalisée dans son exercice superficiel, aire de jeu et terrain d'aventure (…)

Adversity no longer exists within the subject, which has become indifferent to misfortune and to itself. Between the object and the subject of vengeance, no demarcation. A single, dual being, and nothing is separate.

It is not clear that, in their absolute sincerity, the testimonies themselves and the films do not contribute to this impossible memory. The real extermination is doomed to this other extermination which is that effected by the virtual. This is the true final solution.

Culture contradicts all genetic capital. It is the touch of magic, the special touch which contradicts biology, heredity, etc. and condenses a whole dynasty into one generation. What cannot be obtained in a single generation is ease and courage. Mutants are cowards.

Theory is never so fine as when it takes the form of a fiction or a fable.

All life has two trajectories: the one linear and irreversible, the trajectory of ageing and dying, the other elliptical and reversible, a cycle of the same forms in a sequence which knows neither childhood, death nor the unconscious, and which leaves nothing behind. This sequence is constantly intersecting with the other, and occasionally erases all traces of it at a stroke.

?nsan?n ya?ant?s?n? paralize eden ?eyin ad? atom bombas? atma tehdidi de?ildir. Ya?am?m?z? kanser eden ?eyin ad? cayd?rmad?r.

There is something occulted inside us: our death. But something else is hidden there, lying in wait for us within each of our cells: the forgetting of death. In our cells our immortality lies in wait for us. It's common to speak of the struggle of life against death, but there is an inverse peril. And we must struggle against the possibility that we will not die. (p. 5)

Where accidents happen in succession, there is a kind of instinctive relationship between them. Having once smelled blood, they come running with a passion, impatient to occur in their turn, drawn in by the magnetic field. You become a kind of accident attraction zone. New mothers, for example, are particularly fecund and fertile. We underestimate this capacity which events - particularly unfortunate events - have of reproducing themselves not sexually but by contiguity, by 'kairo- genesis'.

The aura of our world is no longer sacred. We no longer have the sacred horizon of appearances, but that of the absolute commodity. Its essence is promotional. At the heart of our universe of signs there is an evil genius of advertising, a trickster who has absorbed the drollery of the commodity and its mise en scène. A scriptwriter of genius (capital itself?) has dragged the world into a phantasmagoria of which we are all the fascinated victims.

Today, generalized communication and surplus information threaten to overwhelm all human defences.