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
We shall never resolve the enigma of the relation between the negative foundations of greatness and that greatness itself.
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.
It is always the same: once you are liberated, you are forced to ask who you are.
The very definition of the real becomes: 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. The hyper real.
It only takes a politician believing in what he says for the others to stop believing him.
If you say, I love you, then you have already fallen in love with language, which is already a form of break up and infidelity.
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.
What is a society without a heroic dimension?
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.
Television knows no night. It is perpetual day. TV embodies our fear of the dark, of night, of the other side of things.
The sad thing about artificial intelligence is that it lacks artifice and therefore intelligence.
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.
You are born modern, you do not become so.
A negative judgment gives you more satisfaction than praise, provided it smacks of jealousy.
The order of the world is always right - such is the judgment of God. For God has departed, but he has left his judgment behind, the way the Cheshire Cat left his grin.
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.
There exists, between people in love, a kind of capital held by each. This is not just a stock of affects or pleasure, but also the possibility of playing double or quits with the share you hold in the other's heart.
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.
There is nothing funny about Halloween. This sarcastic festival reflects, rather, an infernal demand for revenge by children on the adult world.
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?
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.
There is no aphrodisiac like innocence.
Like dreams, statistics are a form of wish fulfillment.
Americans may have no identity, but they do have wonderful teeth.
Seduction is always more singular and sublime than sex and it commands the higher price.
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.
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.
To love someone is to isolate him from the world, wipe out every trace of him, dispossess him of his shadow, drag him into a murderous future. It is to circle around the other like a dead star and absorb him into a black light.
Santa Barbara is a paradise; Disneyland is a paradise; the U.S. is a paradise. Paradise is just paradise. Mournful, monotonous, and superficial though it may be, it is paradise. There is no other.
Cowardice and courage are never without a measure of affectation. Nor is love. Feelings are never true. They play with their mirrors.
Driving is a spectacular form of amnesia. Everything is to be discovered, everything to be obliterated.
The great person is ahead of their time, the smart make something out of it, and the blockhead, sets themselves against it.
Perhaps the world's second worst crime is boredom. The first is being a bore.
