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
We shall never resolve the enigma of the relation between the negative foundations of greatness and that greatness itself.
—Jean Baudrillard
Topics: Greatness & Great Things, Greatness
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
What is a society without a heroic dimension?
—Jean Baudrillard
Topics: Heroism, Heroes, Heroes/Heroism
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.
—Jean Baudrillard
Topics: America
We are no longer in a state of growth; we are in a state of excess. We are living in a society of excrescence. The boil is growing out of control, recklessly at cross purposes with itself, its impacts multiplying as the causes disintegrate.
—Jean Baudrillard
Topics: Civilization
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
Topics: City Life, Cities
Holidays are in no sense an alternative to the congestion and bustle of cities and work. Quite the contrary. People look to escape into an intensification of the conditions of ordinary life, into a deliberate aggravation of those conditions: further from nature, nearer to artifice, to abstraction, to total pollution, to well above average levels of stress, pressure, concentration and monotony—this is the ideal of popular entertainment. No one is interested in overcoming alienation; the point is to plunge into it to the point of ecstasy. That is what holidays are for.
—Jean Baudrillard
Smile and others will smile back. Smile to show how transparent, how candid you are. Smile if you have nothing to say. Most of all, do not hide the fact you have nothing to say nor your total indifference to others. Let this emptiness, this profound indifference shine out spontaneously in your smile.
—Jean Baudrillard
Topics: Smile
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
Topics: Freedom
Perhaps our eyes are merely a blank film which is taken from us after our deaths to be developed elsewhere and screened as our life story in some infernal cinema or dispatched as microfilm into the sidereal void.
—Jean Baudrillard
Topics: Prophecy
Information can tell us everything. It has all the answers. But they are answers to questions we have not asked, and which doubtless don’t even arise.
—Jean Baudrillard
Topics: Information
The era of the political was one of anomie: crisis, violence, madness and revolution. The era of the trans-political is that of anomaly: an aberration of no consequence, contemporaneous with the event of no consequence.
—Jean Baudrillard
Topics: Politics
Depression moods lead, almost invariably, to accidents. But, when they occur, our mood changes again, since the accident shows we can draw the world in our wake, and that we still retain some degree of power even when our spirits are low. A series of accidents creates a positively light-hearted state, out of consideration for this strange power.
—Jean Baudrillard
Topics: Depression
Never resist a sentence you like, in which language takes its own pleasure and in which, after having abused it for so long, you are stupefied by its innocence.
—Jean Baudrillard
Topics: Language
Deep down, no one really believes they have a right to live. But this death sentence generally stays tucked away, hidden beneath the difficulty of living. If that difficulty is removed from time to time, death is suddenly there, unintelligibly.
—Jean Baudrillard
Topics: Life, Living, Death
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
The war was won on both sides: by the Vietnamese on the ground, by the Americans in the electronic mental space. And if the one side won an ideological and political victory, the other made Apocalypse Now and that has gone right around the world.
—Jean Baudrillard
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
Topics: Diet
There is nothing more mysterious than a TV set left on in an empty room. It is even stranger than a man talking to himself or a woman standing dreaming at her stove. It is as if another planet is communicating with you.
—Jean Baudrillard
Topics: Television
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
If there is a species which is more maltreated than children, then it must be their toys, which they handle in an incredibly off-hand manner. Toys are thus the end point in that long chain in which all the conditions of despotic high-handedness are in play which enchain beings one to another, from one species to another—cruel divinities to their sacrificial victims, from masters to slaves, from adults to children, and from children to their objects.
—Jean Baudrillard
Topics: Children
Like dreams, statistics are a form of wish fulfillment.
—Jean Baudrillard
Topics: Statistics
The world is not dialectical—it is sworn to extremes, not to equilibrium, sworn to radical antagonism, not to reconciliation or synthesis. This is also the principle of evil.
—Jean Baudrillard
The sad thing about artificial intelligence is that it lacks artifice and therefore intelligence.
—Jean Baudrillard
Topics: Computers
We are no longer in a state of growth; we are in a state of excess. We are living in a society of excrescence. The boil is growing out of control, recklessly at cross purposes with itself, its impacts multiplying as the causes disintegrate.
—Jean Baudrillard
Topics: Excess
I hesitate to deposit money in a bank. I am afraid I shall never dare to take it out again. When you go to confession and entrust your sins to the safe-keeping of the priest, do you ever come back for them?
—Jean Baudrillard
If you are prepared to accept the consequences of your dreams then you must still regard America today with the same naive enthusiasm as the generations that discovered the New World.
—Jean Baudrillard
Topics: Discovery
You are born modern, you do not become so.
—Jean Baudrillard
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: Audiences, Pornography
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
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