Jean Baudrillard Quotes
Jean Baudrillard was a French sociologist and philosopher and one of the most provocative voices of late twentieth-century social theory. After early work on consumer society in the tradition of Marx and Lefebvre, he developed in Symbolic Exchange and Death and Simulacra and Simulation a sustained analysis of the modern condition as one in which signs no longer refer to anything beyond themselves and reality is replaced by hyperreality. The quotes below are attributed to Jean Baudrillard, organized by topic.
Browse Jean Baudrillard by topic
Jean Baudrillard on Death
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“Yet there is a certain solitude like no other - that of the man preparing his meal in public on a wall, or on the hood of his car, or along a fence, alone. You see that all the time here. It is the saddest sight in the world. Sadder than destitution, sadder than the 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 honour of sharing or disputing each other’s food. He who eats alone is dead (but not he who drinks alone. Why is this?).”
New York" (p. 15)
Jean Baudrillard on Knowledge
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“The real is not only what can be reproduced, but that which is already reproduced, the hyper-real.”
Simulations (1983), New York: Semiotext, p. 146 -
“Vanishing Point" (pp. 9-10)”
Driving is a spectacular form of amnesia. Everything is to be discovered, everything to be obliterated. Admittedly, there is the primal shock of the deserts and the dazzle of California, but when this is gone, the secondary brilliance of the journey begins, that of the excessive, pitiless distance, the infinity of anonymous faces and distances, or of certain miraculous geological formations, which -
“There are cultures that can only picture their origins and not their ends. Some are obsessed by both. Two other positions are possible: only picturing one's end - our own culture; picturing neither beginning nor end - the coming culture.”
Chapter 1
Jean Baudrillard on Life
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“The Marxist critique is only a critique of capital , a critique coming from the heart of the middle and petit bourgeois classes , for which Marxism has served for a century as a latent ideology…. The Marxist seeks a good use of economy . Marxism is therefore only a limited petit bourgeois critique, one more step in the banalization of life toward the "good use" of the social!”
Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory 15 (1987) "When Bataille Attacked the Metaphysical Principle of Economy
Jean Baudrillard on Nature
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“What you have to do is enter the fiction of America, enter America as fiction. It is, indeed, on this fictive basis that it dominates the world.”
Astral America
Jean Baudrillard on Politics
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“Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory 15 (1987) "When Bataille Attacked the Metaphysical Principle of Economy”
The Marxist critique is only a critique of capital , a critique coming from the heart of the middle and petit bourgeois classes , for which Marxism has served for a century as a latent ideology…. The Marxist seeks a good use of economy . Marxism is therefore only a limited petit bourgeois critique, one more step in the banalization of life toward the "good use" of the social! -
“A series of accidents creates a positively lighthearted state.”
Chapter 4
Jean Baudrillard on Time
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“Boredom is like a pitiless zooming in on the epidermis of time. Every instant is dilated and magnified like the pores of the face.”
Chapter 3
Jean Baudrillard on Truth
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Attributed to Jean Baudrillard:
“We live in the desert of the real.”
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Attributed to Jean Baudrillard:
“Simulation precedes reality in the postmodern era.”
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Attributed to Jean Baudrillard:
“Hyperreality replaces reality in the age of mass media.”
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Attributed to Jean Baudrillard:
“The Gulf War did not take place.”
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Attributed to Jean Baudrillard:
“We have to forget that we are dealing with copies; that is the secret of the simulacrum.”