Quote

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.

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
Least
Slaves
Circuit
History
Replaced
Exploited
Liberal
Circuits
Terrorist
Dominating
Terrorism
Hostage
Exploiters
Slave
Dominated
Hostages
Worse
Nostalgia
Liberates
Masters
Terrorists
Replaces

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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.
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Power is only too happy to make football bear a diabolical responsibility for stupefying the masses.
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It is the corpse of the bourgeoisie that separates us. With us, it is that class that is the carrier of the chromosome of banality.
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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 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.
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The multiplication of individual sects should not fool us: the important point is that the whole of America is preoccupied with the sect as a moral institution, with its immediate demand for beatification, its material efficacity, its compulsion for justification, and doubtless also with its madness and frenzy.
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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.
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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.
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Every woman is like a time-zone. She is a nocturnal fragment of your journey. She brings you unflaggingly closer to the next night.
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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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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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All societies end up wearing masks.
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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.
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One has never said better how much humanism, normality, quality of life were nothing but the vicissitudes of profitability.
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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.
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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.
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Animals have no unconscious, because they have a territory. Men have only had an unconscious since they lost a territory.
Jean Baudrillard
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Like dreams, statistics are a form of wish fulfillment.
Jean Baudrillard
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Democracy is the menopause of Western society, the Grand Climacteric of the body social. Fascism is its middle-aged lust.
Jean Baudrillard
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A series of accidents creates a positively light-hearted state, out of consideration for this strange power.
Jean Baudrillard