Quote

We shall never resolve the enigma of the relation between the negative foundations of greatness and that greatness itself.

Jean Baudrillard

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Jean Baudrillard
Age: 77 †
Born: 1929
Born: July 29
Died: 2007
Died: March 6
Anthropologist
Literary Critic
Philosopher
Photographer
Professor
Sociologist
Translator
Rheims
Ḻāṉ Pōtriyā
Resolve
Relation
Greatness
Foundation
Negative
Shall
Never
Enigma
Foundations

More quotes by Jean Baudrillard

Image
The era of the political was one of anomie: crisis, violence, madness and revolution. The era of the trans-political is that of anomaly: an aberration of no consequence, contemporaneous with the event of no consequence.
Jean Baudrillard
Image
Terror is as much a part of the concept of truth as runniness is of the concept of jam. We wouldn't like jam if it didn't, by its very nature, ooze. We wouldn't like truth if it wasn't sticky, if, from time to time, it didn't ooze blood.
Jean Baudrillard
Image
Nothing is wholly obvious without becoming enigmatic. Reality itself is too obvious to be true .
Jean Baudrillard
Image
Photography is our exorcism. Primitive society had its masks, bourgeois society its mirrors. We have our images.
Jean Baudrillard
Image
Americans may have no identity, but they do have wonderful teeth.
Jean Baudrillard
Image
I hesitate to deposit money in a bank. I am afraid I shall never dare to take it out again
Jean Baudrillard
Image
Computer science only indicates the retrospective omnipotence of our technologies. In other words, an infinite capacity to process data (but only data -- i.e. the already given) and in no sense a new vision. With that science, we are entering an era of exhaustivity, which is also an era of exhaustion.
Jean Baudrillard
Image
Sadder than destitution, sadder than a beggar is the man who eats alone in public. Nothing more contradicts the laws of man or beast, for animals always do each other the honor of sharing or disputing each other's food.
Jean Baudrillard
Image
America is the original version of modernity. We are the dubbed or subtitled version. America ducks the question of origins it cultivates no origin or mythical authenticity it has no past and no founding truth. Having known no primitive accumulation of time, it lives in a perpetual present.
Jean Baudrillard
Image
We are becoming like cats, slyly parasitic, enjoying an indifferent domesticity. Nice and snug in the social, our historic passions have withdrawn into the glow of an artificial coziness, and our half-closed eyes now seek little other than the peaceful parade of television pictures.
Jean Baudrillard
Image
Feelings are never true. They play with their mirrors.
Jean Baudrillard
Image
Postmodernity is said to be a culture of fragmentary sensations, eclectic nostalgia, disposable simulacra, and promiscuous superficiality, in which the traditionally valued qualities of depth, coherence, meaning, originality, and authenticity are evacuated or dissolved amid the random swirl of empty signals.
Jean Baudrillard
Image
Politicians - power itself - are abject because they merely embody the profound contempt people have for their own lives. One should be grateful to the politicians for accepting the abstractness of power, and ridding others of its burden. This inevitably kills them but they get their revenge by passing onto others the corpse of power.
Jean Baudrillard
Image
The desert is a natural extension of the inner silence of the body.
Jean Baudrillard
Image
One has never said better how much humanism, normality, quality of life were nothing but the vicissitudes of profitability.
Jean Baudrillard
Image
The sumptuous age of stars and images is reduced to a few artificial tornado effects, pathetic fake buildings, and childish tricks which the crowd pretends to be taken in by to avoid feeling too disappointed. Ghost towns, ghost people. The whole place has the same air of obsolescence about it as Sunset or Hollywood Boulevard.
Jean Baudrillard
Image
Every woman is like a time-zone. She is a nocturnal fragment of your journey. She brings you unflaggingly closer to the next night.
Jean Baudrillard
Image
This is what terrorism is occupied with as well: making real, palpable violence surface in opposition to the invisible violence of security.
Jean Baudrillard
Image
The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth--it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true.
Jean Baudrillard
Image
... the age of simulation thus begins with a liquidation of all referentials - worse: by their artificial resurrection in systems of signs, a more ductile material than meaning... It is no longer a question of imitation, nor of reduplication, nor even of parody. It is rather a question of substituting signs of the real for the real itself.
Jean Baudrillard