Quotes About Reality

Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: A hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory - precession of simulacra - that engenders the territory.

The old slogan 'truth is stranger than fiction,' that still corresponded to the surrealist phase of this estheticization of life, is obsolete. There is no more fiction that life could possibly confront, even victoriously-it is reality itself that disappears utterly in the game of reality-radical disenchantment, the cool and cybernetic phase following the hot stage of fantasy.

To dissimulate is to pretend not to have what one has. To simulate is to feign to have what one doesn't have. One implies a presence, the other an absence. But it is more complicated than that because simulating is not pretending

At the heart of pornography is sexuality haunted by its own disappearance.

Take your desires for reality! can be understood as the ultimate slogan of power.

Pretending, or dissimulating, leaves the principle of reality intact: the difference is always clear, it is simply masked, whereas simulation threatens the difference between the true and the false, the real and the imaginary.

When everything is social, suddenly nothing is.

Mass(age) is the message.

It is the task of radical thought, since the world is given to us in unintelligibility, to make it more unintelligible, more enigmatic, more fabulous.

When you take away verisimilitude, you do not automatically find the veridical but, perhaps, the implausible.

The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth—it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true.

Ciddi olmamak ve ciddi görünmek gerekiyor. Ya da ciddi gibi görünmeden ciddi olmak. Ciddi gibi görünmekle ciddi olmay? birleÅŸtirenler deÄŸersiz kiÅŸilerdir.

The feminine seduces because it is never where it thinks it is, or where it thinks itself.

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.

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.

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

Americans believe in facts, but not in facticity. They do not know that facts are factitious, as their name suggests.

From the holocaust to the hologram: a fine programme.

The presence is not deleted before the vacuum is cleared before a redoubling of presence that erases the opposition of the presence and absence

Where this living death doesn't exist, life takes its place. Just as the person who loses his shadow becomes the shadow of himself. ('The shadow of himself - that would be a fine title. With the subtitle: 'Memoirs of a double life'.)

In the absence of value judgements, value goes up in flames. And it goes up in a sort of ecstasy.