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All societies end up wearing masks.

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
Mask
Wearing
Ends
Masks
Societies

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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.
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It is always the same: once you are liberated, you are forced to ask who you are.
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Protect everything, detect everything, contain everything - obsessional society. Save time. Save money. Save our souls - phobic society. Low tar. Low energy. Low calories. Low sex. Low speed - anorexic society.
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To love someone is to isolate him from the world, wipe out every trace of him, dispossess him of his shadow, drag him into a murderous future. It is to circle around the other like a dead star and absorb him into a black light.
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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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At male strip shows, it is still the women that we watch, the audience of women and their eager faces. They are more obscene than if they were dancing naked themselves.
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The repentant, run-to-seed ultra-Leftists who have converted to humanitarianism, artificial inseminators of the widow and the orphan, themselves orphans of reality and malades imaginaires of politics, premature ejaculators of posthistory and hyperchondriacs of the dead body of ideology and morality.
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Depression moods lead, almost invariably, to accidents. But, when they occur, our mood changes again, since the accident shows we can draw the world in our wake, and that we still retain some degree of power even when our spirits are low. A series of accidents creates a positively light-hearted state, out of consideration for this strange power.
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The day the world ends, no one will be there, just as no one was there when it began. This is a scandal. Such a scandal for the human race that it is indeed capable collectively, out of spite, of hastening the end of the world by all means just so it can enjoy the show.
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Illusion is no longer possible, because the real is no longer possible.
Jean Baudrillard
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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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One has never said better how much humanism, normality, quality of life were nothing but the vicissitudes of profitability.
Jean Baudrillard
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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.
Jean Baudrillard
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A successful object is one which exists beyond its own reality, which creates a dual (and not merely interactlve) relation (with its users also), a relation of contradiction, misappropriation and destablilisation.
Jean Baudrillard
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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.
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We are no longer dealing with historical events, but with places of collapse.
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I hesitate to deposit money in a bank. I am afraid I shall never dare to take it out again. When you go to confession and entrust your sins to the safe-keeping of the priest, do you ever come back for them?
Jean Baudrillard
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Pornography is the quadraphonics of sex. It adds a third and fourth track to the sexual act. It is the hallucination of detail that rules. Science has already habituated us to this microscopics, this excess of the real in its microscopic detail, this voyeurism of exactitude.
Jean Baudrillard
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What is a society without a heroic dimension?
Jean Baudrillard
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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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