Fragments Quotes

“The secret of theory is that truth does not exist.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Fragments

“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. How could one not wish for that with all one's heart? How could one not lend one's feeble resources to bringing it about?”
― Jean Baudrillard, Fragments

“Stigmatizing the millions of Italians as ‘consenting victims’ of Berlusconi, denouncing the stupidity of the masses and wrapping oneself in the flag of the divine Left and its democratic arrogance – this is the pose of the enlightened intellectual, who is prepared to leave his country as a punishment (though he does not do so).
All this comes from a short-sighted, conventional analysis of political Reason. The ‘blind’ masses, for their part, have a more subtle – perhaps transpolitical(?) – vision, to the effect that the locus of power is empty, corrupt and hopeless and that, logically, one has to fill it with a man who has the same profile – an empty, comical, histrionic, phoney individual who embodies the situation ideally: Berlusconi.(...)
But it is just as undeniable that we cannot bear either Berlusconi or the current state of affairs. We have, therefore, to take into account both the obvious fact that we have the system we deserve and the equally nonnegligible fact that we cannot bear it.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Fragments

“The traces of the dinosaurs howl in our memories. Had they been alive we would have exterminated them, but we respect their traces. It is the same with the human race: the more we imperil it, the more meticulously we preserve its remains.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Fragments

“The charm of sleepless nights is the idea that tomorrow will not come.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Fragments

“This is free-market fanaticism, the fanaticism of indifference to its own values and, for that very reason, total intolerance towards those who differ by any passion whatsoever. The New World Order implies the extermination of everything different to integrate it into an indifferent world order. Is there still room between these two fanaticisms for a non-believer to exercise his liberty?”
― Jean Baudrillard, Fragments

“Gut reaction against yobbery, the masses and solid Frenchness. But an equally visceral distaste for the elite, for castes, culture and the nomenklatura. Do we have to choose between the moronic masses and the arrogant privileged classes (particularly when they have an odour of demagogic humility about them)? No solution.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Fragments

“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 politcs, premature ejaculators of posthistory and hypochondriacs from the dead body of ideology and morality.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Fragments

“If truth and reality can clearly come only from the subject and his consciousness, then illusion, which is the opposite of these, must necessarily come from elsewhere. From the world of the object, from some other thing than the subject. Illusion, like profusion, comes to us from the world.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Fragments

“This is doubtless the true Oedipal problem for everyone. Not so much to free yourself from the parental triangle as from your virtual double, from that umbilical alter ego who, for each individual, is like a congenital figure of death. It is doubtless with this hidden twin, this virtual twin whom we all carry within us at birth, that we have the greatest difficulty breaking.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Fragments

“The cinema today: end or impossibility of ending? Most current films, through the bloody drift of their content, the weakness of their plots and their technological trumpery – useless high-tech – reveal an extraordinary contempt on the part of film-makers for the tools of their own trade, for their own profession: a supreme contempt for the image itself, which is prostituted to any special effect whatsoever; and, consequently, contempt for the viewer, who is called upon to figure as impotent voyeur of this prostitution of images, of this promiscuity of all forms beneath the alibi of violence. There is in fact no real violence in this, nothing of a theatre of cruelty, but merely a second-level irony, the knowing wink of quotation, which no longer has anything to do with cinematic culture, but derives from the resentment that culture feels towards itself, that culture which precisely cannot manage to come to an end and is becoming infinitely debased - a debasement being raised to the power of an aesthetic and spiritual commodity, bitter and obsolescent, which we consume as a 'work of art' with the same complicity with which we savour the debasement of the political class. The sabotaging of the image by the image professionals is akin to the sabotaging of the political by the politicians themselves.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Fragments

“We are threatened not just by memory loss, but by the routing of the synapses by the filterable viruses of memory. The strange disappearance of names, faces and places seems like a programmed erasure, like the imperceptible advance of a virus which, after infecting the artificial memories of computers, is now attacking natural memories. Might there not be a conspiracy of software?”
― Jean Baudrillard, Fragments

“It is not the world as it should be which puts an end to the real world, but the world as it is.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Fragments

“The universe is mystagogic. It talks without knowing it, and without anything meaningful in its speech. Pedagogues speak in full knowledge of what they are saying, but they treat us like children.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Fragments

“Every year, I verify here, alongside the intelligence of the mineral world and the animal kingdom, the proportional stupidity of the human race - the deculturated peasants and acculturated tourists, arrogant adults and children with their pretentious technical gadgetry and senseless chatter. All the other species are more docile and spiritual in their silence than this one.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Fragments

“Destruction of the neuronal flora by ingestion of media products which have passed their sell-by date even before being put into circulation. Destruction of the intellectual flora by the massive ingestion of conceptual products, sterilized or artificially preserved, like stereotyped political language, using bactericides, fungicides and anti-eidetics. Destruction of the linguistic flora which, like the destruction of intestinal flora, produces verbal diarrhoea, a disruption of digestion and something like a cacolalia, a coprolalia which has to be curbed by numerous pataphysical brainwashings.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Fragments

“True compassion is to suffer in silence for others.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Fragments

“She sucks at her words as they come out. She seems to practise a constant fellatio on the words she pronounces.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Fragments

“American campuses. Like Disneyland, they are an ideal micro-city, the artificial ideal type of an intellectual biosphere. Like any realization of an ideal, they end up secreting a fierce coercion ('political correctness') and an internal intoxication, with its poisons and endorphins.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Fragments

“When one looks at the emptiness of current art, the only question is how such a machine can continue to function in the absence of any new energy, in an atmosphere of critical disillusionment and commercial frenzy, and with all the players totally indifferent? If it can continue, how long will this illusion last? A hundred years, two hundred? This society is like a vessel whose edges move ever wider apart, and in which the water never comes to a boil.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Fragments

“All these old ultra-Leftists thwarted (by History), unclear where they are on the Left–Right spectrum, and ending up writing with both hands – from left to right, of course - in the hope of one day painting spaces of freedom for themselves with their toes.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Fragments

“All our societies on the verge of nervous breakdowns, but still they do not collapse. All these bodies subject to the most incredible physical, ideological, media persecutions, yet they resist with an improbable malleability. Far from bemoaning our fragility, we should admire our stamina and that of the social body as a whole.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Fragments

“Gombrowicz, Nabokov, Svevo, Schnitzler, Canetti. How is it that the greatest are, in their varying degrees, violently hostile to psychoanalysis? And, ultimately, towards the end of his life, Freud himself ?”
― Jean Baudrillard, Fragments

“Tautology, being the most vulgar logical expression, is always the strongest argument.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Fragments

“Keep objects as a system
Keep production as a mirror
Keep death as an exchange
Keep the world as a simulacrum

Keep the evil transparent
Keep the majorities silent
Keep your seduction alive
Keep your memory cool

Keep yourself as an other
Keep perfection as a crime
Keep illusion for the end
Keep on line for the while”
― Jean Baudrillard, Fragments

“Four vital functions, as basic as the four elements: sexuality, sociality, ideation and glory. Or: pleasure, speech, thought and prestige. Being deprived of any of the four leads to stupor and death.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Fragments

“It is not clear that, in their absolute sincerity, the testimonies themselves and the films do not contribute to this impossible memory. The real extermination is doomed to this other extermination which is that effected by the virtual. This is the true final solution.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Fragments

“The negationist proposition, in the age in which it is being advanced, cannot therefore be truly denied, since everything, all of us, including those who reject it, have passed over, whether we like it or not, into an age where there is no longer any objective recourse. The proposition, therefore, can be rejected only by a kind of mirror denial. And that is where its victory lies - though in fact it is not its victory, but the victory of real time over the present, over the past, over any form whatsoever of logical articulation of reality.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Fragments

“(...) Is not true optimism to consider the world a fundamentally negative event, with many happy exceptions? By contrast, does not true pessimism consist in viewing the world as fundamentally good, leaving the slightest accident to make us despair of that vision? An ideal universe at the mercy of the slightest reverse and doomed, in any case, to death? And does not true superstition consist in regarding evil as an exception which ought to disappear?
We judge everything today in terms of a real and rational sequence of events. But we could equally fully and reasonably view those events as part of an irrational sequence – we simply have to reverse the perspective and take a maleficent transcendence rather than a providential force as our reference. We would be less despairing if we regarded every misfortune as justified by a transcendent order of evil.
Such is the rule of a radical optimism. We must make evil the basic rule. Then, the fortunate occurrence becomes the exception. Then, it is joy we would be fated to meet with. At any rate, in relation to an impossible truth, the two hypotheses are equally (im)plausible. But the hypothesis of evil has the advantage of restoring to the world its illegal character. Moreover, it lends a new prestige to good and happiness, the prestige of a miraculous exception.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Fragments

“We discovered primitive societies, America, the atom, the unconscious, viruses. But the consequences of this expansion of the field of knowledge escape us. We believe we discovered these things innocently in the peaceful realm of science. But they, too, discovered us and have broken in on our world - just deserts for our breaking in on theirs.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Fragments