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Illusion is no longer possible, because the real is no longer possible.

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
Illusion
Longer
Possible
Real
Simulacrum

More quotes by Jean Baudrillard

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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.
Jean Baudrillard
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Simulation is the situation created by any system of signs when it becomes sophisticated enough, autonomous enough, to abolish its own referent and to replace it with itself.
Jean Baudrillard
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There are only a few images that are not forced to provide meaning, or have to go through the filter of a specific idea.
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 new shopping malls make possible the synthesis of all consumer activities, not least of which are shopping, flirting with objects, idle wandering, and all the permutations of these.
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.
Jean Baudrillard
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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
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Genius is childhood recaptured.
Jean Baudrillard
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Here in the U.S., culture is not that delicious panacea which we Europeans consume in a sacramental mental space and which has its own special columns in the newspapers - and in people's minds. Culture is space, speed, cinema, technology. This culture is authentic, if anything can be said to be authentic.
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.
Jean Baudrillard
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We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.
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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Laughter on American television has taken the place of the chorus in Greek tragedy. In other countries, the business of laughing is left to the viewers. Here, their laughter is put on the screen, integrated into the show. It is the screen that is laughing and having a good time. You are simply left alone with your consternation.
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.
Jean Baudrillard
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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
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Neither dead nor alive, the hostage is suspended by an incalculable outcome. It is not his destiny that awaits for him, nor his own death, but anonymous chance, which can only seem to him something absolutely arbitrary. He is in a state of radical emergency, of virtual extermination.
Jean Baudrillard
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The obese is in a total delirium. For he is not only large, of a size opposed to normal morphology: he is larger than large. He no longer makes sense in some distinctive opposition, but in his excess, his redundancy.
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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You are born modern, you do not become so.
Jean Baudrillard
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It is the task of radical thought, since the world is given to us unintelligibly, to make it more unintelligible, more enigmatic, more fabulous.
Jean Baudrillard