Quotes from Jean Baudrillard

We are fascinated by Ramses as Renaissance Christians were by the American Indians, those (human?) beings who had never known the word of Christ.

The real joy of writing lies in the opportunity of being able to sacrifice a whole chapter for a single sentence, a complete sentence for a single word...

I vote, I participate, I am present, I am concerned - mirror of a paradoxical mockery, mirror of the indifference of all public signification.

As soon as you enter the system to denounce it, you are automatically made a part of it. There is no ideal omega point today from which hard and fast judgments can be made. You can see that those who make accusations against the political class are the same ones who replenish it. The class is fed by the accusations made against it. Even the bluntest critic is caught up in this circularity.

So, there is no longer striking, nor work, but both simultaneously, that is to say something else: a magic of work, a trompel'oeil, a scenodrama (so as not to say a melodrama) of production, a collective dramaturgy on the empty stage of the social.

A thing which has lost its idea is like the man who has lost his shadow, and it must either fall under the sway of madness or perish.

What do Chile, Biafra, the boat people, Bologna, or Poland matter? All of that comes to be annihilated on the television screen. We are in the era of events without consequences (and of theories without consequences).

What every society looks for in continuing to produce, and to overproduce, is to restore the real that escapes it.

All liberation affects Good and Evil equally. The liberation of morals and minds entails crimes and catastrophes. The liberation of law and pleasure leads inevitably to the liberation of crime.

Speed is simply the rite that initiates us into emptiness: a nostalgic desire for forms to revert to immobility, concealed beneath the very intensification of their mobility. Akin to the nostalgia for living forms that haunts geometry.

Man has become less rational than his own objects, which now run ahead of him, so to speak, organizing his surroundings and thus appropriating his actions.

Something escapes us, and we are escaping from ourselves, or losing ourselves, as part of an irreversible process; we have now passed some point of no return, the point where the contradictoriness of things ended, and we find ourselves, still alive, in a universe of non-contradiction, of enthusiasm, of ecstasy - of stupor in the face of a process which, for all its irreversibility, is bereft of meaning.

We live of seduction, but die Fascination

The transition from signs that dissimulate something to signs that dissimulate that there is nothing marks a decisive turning point.

All these things - Factories, asylums, prisons, schools still exist and will no doubt continue to exist for an indefinite period as warning signs, to divert the reality of the domination of capital into an imaginary materiality. There have always been churches to hide the death of God, or to hide the fact that the God is everywhere, which amounts to the same thing.

The strategy of power has long seemed founded on the apathy of the masses. The more passive they were, the more secure it was. But this logic is only characteristic of the bureaucratic and centralist phase of power. And it is this which today turns against it: the inertia it has fostered becomes the sign of its death.

Bir katliami unutmak da katliam turunden bir seydir.

The idea of a clean war, like that of a clean bomb or an intelligent missile, this whole war conceived as a technological extrapolation of the brain is a sure sign of madness. It is like those characters in Hieronymus Bosch with a glass bell or a soap bubble around their head as a sign of their mental debility. A war enclosed in a glass coffin, like Snow White, purged of any carnal contamination or warrior's passion. A clean war which ends up in an oil slick.

We are all transsexuals, just as we are biological mutants in potentia. This is not a biological issue, however: we are all transsexuals symbolically.

In New York, madmen are free. Put out on the streets, they're not all that different from the punks, junk, junkies, alcoholics, beggars who fill it. It is unclear why a city, just as mad, would suddenly keep its madmen locked up, why should he deprive the movement of these samples of madness, if it, in one form or another, has already captured the entire city

The politics that enter the university are those that come from history, a retro politics, emptied of substance and legalized in their superficial exercise.

To choose the wrong strategy is a serious matter. All the movements that only play on liberation, emancipation, on the resurrection of a subject of history, of the group, of the word based on "consciousness raising," indeed a "raising of the unconscious" of subjects and of the masses, do not see that they are going in the direction of the system, whose imperative today is precisely the overproduction and regeneration of meaning and of speech.

la presencia no se borra ante el vacío, se borra ante un redoblamiento de presencia que borra la oposición de la presencia y de la ausencia

In symbolic exchange, of which the gift is our most proximate illustration, the object is not an object: it is inseparable from the concrete relation in which it is exchanged, the transferential pact that it seals between two persons: it is thus not independent as such. It has, properly speaking, neither use value nor (economic) exchange value. The object given has symbolic exchange value.