507 Quotes by Jean Baudrillard

  • Author Jean Baudrillard
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    Doesn't everyone have in them this potential change and becoming? This absolute singularity which demands only to occur effortlessly, an inspired form freed from the straitjacket of our individual being? We have this becoming within us, and we lack nothing, since we are rid of truth.The world too lacks nothing as it is; it opposes any attempt to make it signify anything whatever. To inflict truth on it is like explaining a joke or a funny story.

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  • Author Jean Baudrillard
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    It has to be written, if only to lock away the real key to the story in a single page, and remove that page once the book is finished, so that no one will know what it is all about - as ever, the perfect crime. However, it must be possible for that page to be reconstituted without its secret being revealed, and this dispersal is the very mainspring of theoretical fiction.

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  • Author Jean Baudrillard
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    Ronald Reagan, struck down by Alzheimer's disease, has simply forgotten he was once President of the United States. Is this really so serious? When he was President he had already forgotten he had been an actor. And isn't it more serious to take yourself for the President of the United States when you are, than to forget you have been when you no longer are?

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  • Author Jean Baudrillard
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    If you do not lend your car, your fountain pen or your wife to anyone, that is because these objects, according to the logic of jealously, are narcissistic equivalents of the ego: to lose them, or for them to be damaged, means castration.

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  • Author Jean Baudrillard
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    Never would the humanities or psychoanalysis have existed if it had been miraculously possible to reduce man to his “rational” behaviors. The whole discovery of the psychological, whose complexity can extend ad-infinitum, comes from nothing but the impossibility of exploiting to death (the workers), of incarcerating to death (the detained), of fattening to death (the animals).

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  • Author Jean Baudrillard
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    Stalin's double. Since he wasn't a perfect likeness, they touched him up using plastic surgery, after which they eliminated all his relatives and all the witnesses to the operation. He played his role so well that in the end he came to think he was Stalin (as did Stalin himself!). At that point they sent him to the Gulag. But so well did he identify with his role that, on learning of Stalin's death, he died three days later.

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  • Author Jean Baudrillard
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    This is the reappearance of the principle of Evil in a new guise. No morality or guilt is implied, however: the principle of Evil is simply synonymous with the principle of reversal, with the turns of fate. In systems undergoing total positivization - and hence desymbolization - evil is equivalent, in all its forms, to the fundamental rule of reversibility.

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