Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007) was a French sociologist and cultural critic, associated with postmodernism. An authority of postmodernism and post-structuralism, Baudrillard was best known as a critic of contemporary culture.
Born in Reims, Baudrillard trained as a Germanist and translated German literary works, including the works of Bertolt Brecht and Peter Weiss. Baudrillard then turned to sociology and served as a sociology professor at Nanterre and University of Paris IX for many decades.
Baudrillard became renowned for his analyses of the modern society, including the developments of the consumer society, media and technology, cyberspace and the information society, and biotechnology. His polemical works include Oublier Foucault (1977; Forget Foucault, 1989) and La Guerre du Golfe n’a pas eu lieu (1991; The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, 1995,) a reflection on how listeners and viewers, influenced by the media, are trapped in a maelstrom of stories, scripts, paradigms, and icons, which in turn determines how the media presents events.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Jean Baudrillard
The skylines lit up at dead of night, the air-conditioning systems cooling empty hotels in the desert and artificial light in the middle of the day all have something both demented and admirable about them. The mindless luxury of a rich civilization, and yet of a civilization perhaps as scared to see the lights go out as was the hunter in his primitive night.
—Jean Baudrillard
Topics: Civilization
At male strip shows, it is still the women that we watch, the audience of women and their eager faces. They are more obscene than if they were dancing naked themselves.
—Jean Baudrillard
Topics: Pornography, Audiences
It is always the same: once you are liberated, you are forced to ask who you are.
—Jean Baudrillard
Topics: Identity
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.
—Jean Baudrillard
Topics: Love
The sad thing about artificial intelligence is that it lacks artifice and therefore intelligence.
—Jean Baudrillard
Topics: Computers
Genius is childhood recaptured.
—Jean Baudrillard
Topics: Genius
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
Topics: Culture, America
Pornography is the quadraphonics of sex. It adds a third and fourth track to the sexual act. It is the hallucination of detail that rules. Science has already habituated us to this microscopics, this excess of the real in its microscopic detail, this voyeurism of exactitude.
—Jean Baudrillard
Topics: Pornography
The surprises of thought are like those of love: they wear out. But here too you can carry on for a long time doing your conjugal duty.
—Jean Baudrillard
Topics: Thought
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
Topics: Simplicity
With the truth, you need to get rid of it as soon as possible and pass it on to someone else. As with illness, this is the only way to be cured of it. The person who keeps truth in his hands has lost.
—Jean Baudrillard
Topics: Truth
Santa Barbara is a paradise; Disneyland is a paradise; the U.S. is a paradise. Paradise is just paradise. Mournful, monotonous, and superficial though it may be, it is paradise. There is no other.
—Jean Baudrillard
Topics: Paradise
The very definition of the real has become: that of which it is possible to give an equivalent reproduction… The real is not only what can be reproduced, but that which is always already reproduced: that is the hyperreal
—Jean Baudrillard
Topics: Reality
Driving is a spectacular form of amnesia. Everything is to be discovered, everything to be obliterated.
—Jean Baudrillard
Everywhere one seeks to produce meaning, to make the world signify, to render it visible. We are not, however, in danger of lacking meaning; quite the contrary, we are gorged with meaning and it is killing us.
—Jean Baudrillard
Topics: Discovery
You need an infinite stretch of time ahead of you to start to think, infinite energy to make the smallest decision. The world is getting denser. The immense number of useless projects is bewildering. Too many things have to be put in to balance up an uncertain scale. You can’t disappear anymore. You die in a state of total indecision.
—Jean Baudrillard
Topics: Decisions, Indecision
We have dreamt of every woman there is, and dreamt too of the miracle that would bring us the pleasure of being a woman, for women have all the qualities—courage, passion, the capacity to love, cunning—whereas all our imagination can do is naively pile up the illusion of courage.
—Jean Baudrillard
Topics: Women
Governing today means giving acceptable signs of credibility. It is like advertising and it is the same effect that is achieved—commitment to a scenario.
—Jean Baudrillard
Topics: Government
A society which allows an abominable event to burgeon from its dung heap and grow on its surface is like a man who lets a fly crawl unheeded across his face or saliva dribble from his mouth—either epileptic or dead.
—Jean Baudrillard
Topics: Humanity, Events
Mistakes, scandals, and failures no longer signal catastrophe. The crucial thing is that they be made credible, and that the public be made aware of the efforts being expended in that direction. The “marketing” immunity of governments is similar to that of the major brands of washing powder.
—Jean Baudrillard
Topics: Mistakes
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
Topics: Holidays, Christmas
The sumptuous age of stars and images is reduced to a few artificial tornado effects, pathetic fake buildings, and childish tricks which the crowd pretends to be taken in by to avoid feeling too disappointed. Ghost towns, ghost people. The whole place has the same air of obsolescence about it as Sunset or Hollywood Boulevard.
—Jean Baudrillard
Topics: Hollywood
There is no aphrodisiac like innocence.
—Jean Baudrillard
Topics: Innocence
In the same way that we need statesmen to spare us the abjection of exercising power, we need scholars to spare us the abjection of learning.
—Jean Baudrillard
We shall never resolve the enigma of the relation between the negative foundations of greatness and that greatness itself.
—Jean Baudrillard
Topics: Greatness, Greatness & Great Things
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
Topics: Politics
Computer science only indicates the retrospective omnipotence of our technologies. In other words, an infinite capacity to process data (but only data—i.e. the already given) and in no sense a new vision. With that science, we are entering an era of exhaustivity, which is also an era of exhaustion.
—Jean Baudrillard
Topics: Computers
The great person is ahead of their time, the smart make something out of it, and the blockhead, sets themselves against it.
—Jean Baudrillard
Topics: Change
If we consider the superiority of the human species, the size of its brain, its powers of thinking, language and organization, we can say this: were there the slightest possibility that another rival or superior species might appear, on earth or elsewhere, man would use every means at his disposal to destroy it.
—Jean Baudrillard
Topics: Humanity, Humankind
A negative judgment gives you more satisfaction than praise, provided it smacks of jealousy.
—Jean Baudrillard
Topics: Critics, Criticism
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