Jean Baudrillard
Jean Baudrillard
Jean Baudrillardwas a French sociologist, philosopher, cultural theorist, political commentator, and photographer. His work is frequently associated with postmodernism and specifically post-structuralism...
NationalityFrench
ProfessionPhilosopher
Date of Birth27 July 1929
CountryFrance
destruction renovation reconstruction
Postmodernity is the simultaneity of the destruction of earlier values and their reconstruction. It is renovation within ruination.
technology silence humanity
The desert is a natural extension of the inner silence of the body. If humanity's language, technology, and buildings are an extension of its constructive faculties, the desert alone is an extension of its capacity for absence, the ideal schema of humanity's disappearance.
photography mirrors exorcism
Photography is our exorcism. Primitive society had its masks, bourgeois society its mirrors. We have our images.
almost-perfect shining world
Every photographed object is merely the trace left behind by the disappearance of all the rest. It is an almost perfect crime, an almost total resolution of the world, which merely leave the illusion of a particular object shining forth, the image of which then becomes an impenetrable enigma.
time boredom faces
Boredom is like a pitiless zooming in on the epidermis of time. Every instant is dilated and magnified like the pores of the face.
technology space people
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.
safe-keeping banking bankers
I hesitate to deposit money in a bank. I am afraid I shall never dare to take it out again
farce turns repeats
History that repeats itself turns to farce. Farce that repeats itself turns to history.
generations world being-there
Imagine the amazing good fortune of the generation that gets to see the end of the world. This is as marvelous as being there in the beginning.
wearing-a-mask mask ends
All societies end up wearing masks.
time blood jam
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.
sophisticated enough simulation
Simulation is the situation created by any system of signs when it becomes sophisticated enough, autonomous enough, to abolish its own referent and to replace it with itself.
mistake government effort
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.
your-smile
Smile and others will smile back.