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
Sadder than destitution, sadder than a 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 honor of sharing or disputing each other’s food.
—Jean Baudrillard
Topics: Food
Terror is as much a part of the concept of truth as runniness is of the concept of jam. We wouldn’t like jam if it didn’t, by its very nature, ooze. We wouldn’t like truth if it wasn’t sticky, if, from time to time, it didn’t ooze blood.
—Jean Baudrillard
Topics: Fear
Neither dead nor alive, the hostage is suspended by an incalculable outcome. It is not his destiny that awaits for him, nor his own death, but anonymous chance, which can only seem to him something absolutely arbitrary. He is in a state of radical emergency, of virtual extermination.
—Jean Baudrillard
Topics: Terrorism
Large department stores, with their luxuriant abundance of canned goods, foods, and clothing, are like the primary landscape and the geometrical locus of affluence. Streets with overcrowded and glittering store windows…the displays of delicacies, and all the scenes of alimentary and vestimentary festivity, stimulate a magical salivation. Accumulation is more than the sum of its products: the conspicuousness of surplus, the final and magical negation of scarcity…mimic a new-found nature of prodigious fecundity.
—Jean Baudrillard
Topics: Consumerism
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
Fiction is not imagination. It is what anticipates imagination by giving it the form of reality. This is quite opposite to our own natural tendency which is to anticipate reality by imagining it, or to flee from it by idealizing it. That is why we shall never inhabit true fiction; we are condemned to the imaginary and nostalgia for the future.
—Jean Baudrillard
Topics: Fiction, Authors & Writing
As for freedom, it will soon cease to exist in any shape or form. Living will depend upon absolute obedience to a strict set of arrangements, which it will no longer be possible to transgress. The air traveler is not free. In the future, life’s passengers will be even less so: they will travel through their lives fastened to their (corporate) seats.
—Jean Baudrillard
Topics: Freedom
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
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: America, Culture
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
It is the task of radical thought, since the world is given to us unintelligibly, to make it more unintelligible, more enigmatic, more fabulous.
—Jean Baudrillard
Topics: Thought
We are becoming like cats, slyly parasitic, enjoying an indifferent domesticity. Nice and snug in the social, our historic passions have withdrawn into the glow of an artificial coziness, and our half-closed eyes now seek little other than the peaceful parade of television pictures.
—Jean Baudrillard
One of life’s primal situations; the game of hide and seek. Oh, the delicious thrill of hiding while the others come looking for you, the delicious terror of being discovered, but what panic when, after a long search, the others abandon you! You mustn’t hide too well. You mustn’t be too good at the game. The player must never be bigger than the game itself.
—Jean Baudrillard
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
Contact with men who wield power and authority still leaves an intangible sense of repulsion. It’s very like being in close proximity to fecal matter, the fecal embodiment of something unmentionable, and you wonder what it is made of and when it acquired its historically sacred character.
—Jean Baudrillard
Topics: Power
The sad thing about artificial intelligence is that it lacks artifice and therefore intelligence.
—Jean Baudrillard
Topics: Computers
Like dreams, statistics are a form of wish fulfillment.
—Jean Baudrillard
Topics: Statistics
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 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: Events, Humanity
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 the heart of pornography is sexuality haunted by its own disappearance
—Jean Baudrillard
Topics: Sex
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: Living, Life, Death
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
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: Indecision, Decisions
Boredom is like a pitiless zooming in on the epidermis of time. Every instant is dilated and magnified like the pores of the face.
—Jean Baudrillard
Topics: Boredom, Bores
The abjection of our political situation is the only true challenge today. Only facing up to this situation in all its desperation can help us get out of it.
—Jean Baudrillard
Topics: Politics
A negative judgment gives you more satisfaction than praise, provided it smacks of jealousy.
—Jean Baudrillard
Topics: Criticism, Critics
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
Deep down, the US, with its space, its technological refinement, its bluff good conscience, even in those spaces which it opens up for simulation, is the only remaining primitive society.
—Jean Baudrillard
Topics: America
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
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
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
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
Executives are like joggers. If you stop a jogger, he goes on running on the spot. If you drag an executive away from his business, he goes on running on the spot, pawing the ground, talking business. He never stops hurtling onwards, making decisions and executing them.
—Jean Baudrillard
Topics: Business
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
Democracy is the menopause of Western society, the Grand Climacteric of the body social. Fascism is its middle-aged lust.
—Jean Baudrillard
Topics: Democracy
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
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
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
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