Quote

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

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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
Signals
Promiscuous
Empty
Dissolved
Meaning
Authenticity
Coherence
Quality
Random
Disposable
Evacuated
Culture
Nostalgia
Traditionally
Swirl
Originality
Eclectic
Fragmentary
Sensations
Amid
Superficiality
Qualities
Valued
Swirls
Depth

More quotes by Jean Baudrillard

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Business owners are like joggers. If you stop a jogger, he goes on running on the spot. If you drag an owner away from his business, he goes on running on the spot, pawing the ground, talking business. He never stops hurtling onwards, making decisions and executing them.
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If everything is perfect, language is useless. This is true for animals. If animals don't speak, it's because everything's perfect for them. If one day they start to speak, it will be because the world has lost a certain sort of perfection.
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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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
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It is always the same: once you are liberated, you are forced to ask who you are.
Jean Baudrillard
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In the same way that we need statesmen to spare us the abjection of exercising power, we need scholars to spare us the abjection of learning.
Jean Baudrillard
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Driving is a spectacular form of amnesia. Everything is to be discovered, everything to be obliterated.
Jean Baudrillard
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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.
Jean Baudrillard
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Art does not die because there is no more art. It dies because there is too much.
Jean Baudrillard
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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.
Jean Baudrillard
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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.
Jean Baudrillard
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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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Prophesying catastrophe is incredibly banal. The more original move is to assume that it has already happened.
Jean Baudrillard
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Cities are distinguished by the catastrophic forms they presuppose and which are a vital part of their essential charm. New York is King Kong, or the blackout, or vertical bombardment: Towering Inferno. Los Angeles is the horizontal fault, California breaking off and sliding into the Pacific: Earthquake.
Jean Baudrillard
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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
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The desert is no longer a landscape, it is a pure form produced by the abstraction of all others.
Jean Baudrillard
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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.
Jean Baudrillard
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For the heavenly fire no longer strikes depraved cities, it is rather the lens which cuts through ordinary reality like a laser, putting it to death.
Jean Baudrillard
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The Yuppies are not defectors from revolt, they are a new race, assured, amnestied, exculpated, moving with ease in the world of performance, mentally indifferent to any objective other than that of change and advertising.
Jean Baudrillard
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What is a society without a heroic dimension?
Jean Baudrillard