Quote

You are born modern, you do not become so.

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
Modernism
Modern
Born
Become

More quotes by Jean Baudrillard

Image
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.
Jean Baudrillard
Image
The opposite of knowledge is not ignorance, but deceit and fraud.
Jean Baudrillard
Image
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.
Jean Baudrillard
Image
Every photographed object is merely the trace left behind by the disappearance of all the rest. It is an almost perfect crime, an almost total resolution of the world, which merely leave the illusion of a particular object shining forth, the image of which then becomes an impenetrable enigma.
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
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
Image
The sickly cultural pathos which the whole of France indulges in, that fetishism of the cultural heritage.
Jean Baudrillard
Image
Images have become our true sex objects. It is this promiscuity and the ubiquity of images, this viral contamination of images which are the fatal characteristics of our culture.
Jean Baudrillard
Image
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
Image
The war was won on both sides: by the Vietnamese on the ground, by the Americans in the electronic mental space. And if the one side won an ideological and political victory, the other made Apocalypse Now and that has gone right around the world.
Jean Baudrillard
Image
The price we pay for the complexity of life is too high. When you think of all the effort you have to put in -telephonic, technological and relational -to alter even the slightest bit of behavior in this strange world we call social life, you are left pining for the straightforwardness of primitive peoples and their physical work.
Jean Baudrillard
Image
We shall never resolve the enigma of the relation between the negative foundations of greatness and that greatness itself.
Jean Baudrillard
Image
Welcome to the Desert of the Real.
Jean Baudrillard
Image
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.
Jean Baudrillard
Image
A woman spent all Christmas Day in a telephone box without ringing anyone. If someone comes to phone, she leaves the box, then resumes her place afterwards. No one calls her either, but from a window in the street, someone watched her all day, no doubt since they had nothing better to do. The Christmas syndrome.
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. If humanity's language, technology, and buildings are an extension of its constructive faculties, the desert alone is an extension of its capacity for absence, the ideal schema of humanity's disappearance.
Jean Baudrillard
Image
History that repeats itself turns to farce. Farce that repeats itself turns to history.
Jean Baudrillard
Image
Illusion is no longer possible, because the real is no longer possible.
Jean Baudrillard
Image
There is nothing more mysterious than a TV set left on in an empty room. It is even stranger than a man talking to himself or a woman standing dreaming at her stove. It is as if another planet is communicating with you.
Jean Baudrillard