9 Quotes by Jean Baudrillard about philosophy

  • Author Jean Baudrillard
  • Quote

    Philosophy has never been anything but a disavowal of the reality principle. Up until now, it has been the business of philosophers. Today this unreality has entered into things. This then is the end of philosophy and the beginning of something else in which reality merges with its ironic refraction.

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  • Author Jean Baudrillard
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    Theory does not derive its legitimacy from established facts, but from future events. Its value is not in the past events it can illuminate, but in the shockwave of the events it prefigures. It does not act upon consciousness, but directly on the course of things from which it draws its energy. It therefore has to be dis tinguished from the academic practice of philosophy and from all that is written with an eye to the history of ideas.

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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
  • Quote

    To choose the wrong strategy is a serious matter. All the movements that only play on liberation, emancipation, on the resurrection of a subject of history, of the group, of the word based on “consciousness raising,” indeed a “raising of the unconscious” of subjects and of the masses, do not see that they are going in the direction of the system, whose imperative today is precisely the overproduction and regeneration of meaning and of speech.

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  • Author Jean Baudrillard
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    One knows that the social can be dissolved in a panic reaction, an uncontrollable chain reaction. But it can also be dissolved in the opposite reaction, a chain reaction of inertia, each micro-universe saturated, auto-regulated, computerized, isolated in automatic pilot. Advertising is the prefiguration of this: the first manifestation of an uninterrupted thread of signs, like ticker tape—each isolated in its inertia.

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