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

Jean Baudrillard

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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
Negative
Shall
Never
Enigma
Foundations
Resolve
Relation
Greatness
Foundation

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Man has lost the basic skill of the ape, the ability to scratch its back. Which gave it extraordinary independence, and the liberty to associate for reasons other than the need for mutual back-scratching.
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The sickly cultural pathos which the whole of France indulges in, that fetishism of the cultural heritage.
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The price we pay for the complexity of life is too high.
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This is what terrorism is occupied with as well: making real, palpable violence surface in opposition to the invisible violence of security.
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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.
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Animals have no unconscious, because they have a territory. Men have only had an unconscious since they lost a territory.
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Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real.
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At the heart of pornography is sexuality haunted by its own disappearance.
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Imagine the amazing good fortune of the generation that gets to see the end of the world. This is as marvelous as being there in the beginning.
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The liberated man is not the one who is freed in his ideal reality, his inner truth, or his transparency he is the man who changes spaces, who circulates, who changes sex, clothes, and habits according to fashion, rather than morality, and who changes opinions not as his conscience dictates but in response to opinion polls.
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Kitschis one of the major categories of the modern object. Knick-knacks, rustic odds-and-ends, souvenirs, lampshades, and African masks: the kitsch-object is collectively this whole plethora of trashy, sham or faked objects, this whole museum of junk which proliferates everywhere.... Kitsch is the equivalent to the cliché in discourse.
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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.
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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.
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We are all hostages, and we are all terrorists. This circuit has replaced that other one of masters and slaves, the dominating and the dominated, the exploiters and the exploited. It is worse than the one it replaces, but at least it liberates us from liberal nostalgia and the ruses of history.
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Driving is a spectacular form of amnesia. Everything is to be discovered, everything to be obliterated.
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Prophesying catastrophe is incredibly banal. The more original move is to assume that it has already happened.
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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.
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Photography is our exorcism. Primitive society had its masks, bourgeois society its mirrors. We have our images.
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Feelings are never true. They play with their mirrors.
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Contact with men who wield power and authority still leaves an intangible sense of repulsion. It's very like being in close proximity to fecal matter, the fecal embodiment of something unmentionable, and you wonder what it is made of and when it acquired its historically sacred character.
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