Cool Memories V Quotes

“Man is obsessed with woman (this does not seem to be mutual). Possession does not set him free from obsession. Above and beyond jouissance, his obsession with her remains. It is an obsession with something like an eternally feminine prior state, an idea or fleshly form which was there before you and will outlive you. All other obsessions refer back to this one.
It is fuelled by the secret desire to wrest from woman more than she gives you or has ever given you, to wrest from her her femininity itself. Woman-as-object is the purest expression of this obsession, since it is the object that is ungraspable. And it is in becoming-object that woman puts herself out of reach, and becomes the horizon of the obsessional desire.

Just as it would be necessary to remove many other veils to wrest from women the secret of their power, so it would take many other tortures to wrest from men the secret underlying their unafraidness of death.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories V: 2000 - 2004

“Borges: 'Nazism suffers from unreality, like Erigena's hells. It is uninhabitable; men can only die for it, lie for it, kill and wound for it. No one, in the intimate depths of his being, can wish it to triumph. I shall hazard this conjecture: Hitler wants to be defeated. Hitler is collaborating blindly with the inevitable armies that will annihilate him ...'
This applies word for word to global, comfortable, imperial civilization. In the central solitude of those very people who profit by it, it is unliveable. And all are secretly won over to the forces that will destroy it.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories V: 2000 - 2004

“Deep sleep is when you are asleep but not dreaming. Paradoxical sleep is the sleep in which you dream. So, only paradoxical thought is the thought in which you think. Is there, by analogy, a paradoxical state of death - a deep death and a death with dreams?

It is evil that speaks evil: evil can ventriloquize.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories V: 2000 - 2004

“There are many ways of being witty and intelligent - almost as many as of not being, They are often the same.

Like free electrons on the planet of the apes, with a time window on to a parallel universe.

The only solution to the mechanization of man is Ie devenir-machine: becoming-machine. Warhol had seen this. He was the apotheosis of the machinic: total automatism, all trace of the human gone.
The dream of the virtual era, by contrast, is to wrest the machine from machinicity, to make it intelligent and soulful, 'interactive', to turn it into an associate 'anthropoid' with the same affective and intellectual, sexual and reproductive functions - and, lastly, the same viruses and melancholia.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories V: 2000 - 2004

“Intelligence is analysing things as they are.
Imagination is conceiving them as they could be.
Morality is conceiving them as they should be.
Magic is making them occur the way you conceive them.

There is no longer any interest in the mental hygiene of killers. Today we have only the mental hygiene of the victim, and the art of using one's own misfortune as a credit card.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories V: 2000 - 2004

“Already God existed only in the desperate attempt to prove his existence. It is the same today with human beings, whose existence we attempt desperately to verify by the very means that make it improbable.

Feminism, populism, humanism: all words with the suffix '-ism' are the caricature of their root. Of women, of the people, of the human. Including terrorism: the caricature of terror?”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories V: 2000 - 2004

“God scoffs at (smiles at) those he sees denouncing the evils of which they are the cause.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories V: 2000 - 2004

“The child that slumbers within us has become a confirmed insomniac. What is the point of growing up?

Some like to let their slips and parapraxes show through, to revel in their strange behaviour: they are absolutely set on having an Unconscious.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories V: 2000 - 2004

“New form of redemption: debt, companies, crimes, scandals - as in the past with slaves, everything must be redeemed. Everything must be transfigured and at the same time, as in the sales, everything must go. Everywhere the tiniest waste product, the slightest desire is being given its hour of glory. But the historic prototype of redemption is that of work, which was granted such moral and historical value only so as to enable the slave to accede to it as a free man. In this way the curse fulfils itself.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories V: 2000 - 2004

“Nothing distinguishes a natural intelligence from something that can give off all the outward signs of it, and this includes faltering before the test of truth.
So one can give off all the outward signs of power, and this includes faltering before the test of strength. A simulation which produces, with just the requisite degree of derision, the image of an illusory normality.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories V: 2000 - 2004

“The lack of distinction between the real and the virtual is the obsession of our age. Everything in our current affairs attests to this, not to mention the big cinematic productions: The Truman Show, Total Recall, Existenz, Matrix, etc.
This question has always been there behind literature and philosophy, but it has been present metaphorically, as it were, implicitly, through the filter of discourse. The 'encoding/decoding' of reality was done by discourse, that is to say, by a highly complex medium, never leaving room for a head-on truth.
The encoding/decoding of our reality is done by technology. Only what is produced by this technical effect acquires visible reality. And it does so at the cost of a simplification that no longer has anything to do with language or with the slightest ambivalence and which, therefore, puts an end to this subtle lack of distinction between the real and the virtual, as subtle as the lack of distinction between good and evil. Through special effects, everything acquires an operational self-evidence, a spectacular reality that is, properly speaking, the reign of simulation. What the directors of these films have not realized (any more than the simulationist artists of New York in the eighties) is that simulation is a hypothesis, a game that turns reality itself into one eventuality among others.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories V: 2000 - 2004

“Of the veil or unveiling, which is the most alienating, the most humiliating, the most insulting? The immense hypocrisy of all those who denounce the veil, but are quite at ease with universal pornography. In any event, the question goes far beyond the veil and the female condition. At issue is a culture of obscenity that cannot but tear away all veils - according to the imperative of transparency. At issue is the profound jealousy of a ragged culture at all the ceremonial cultures - those cultures whose signs enwrap them, whereas our culture is laid bare by its signs themselves.
This is merely the beginning of a general de-signification, in which all distinctive marks will become anathema, suspect of masking or even, quite simply, signifying something, and hence potentially terroristic. At the end of the process all that will be left will be lightweight, inoffensive signs - advertising signs or marks of the disembodied fanaticism of fashion.
That, no doubt, is where the story of the veil will end.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories V: 2000 - 2004

“Everything is competing to show its good will. Things tend irresistibly towards perfection, effusiveness, reconciliation. Fortunately, nothing is ever perfect, thanks to Dostoevsky's 'unspeakable little demon ... that evil spirit that prompts to murder and scorn.'
Everything tends irresistibly towards transparency. However, there remains a glimmer of secrecy - a clandestine dust-breeding that is mostly useless, an umbilical mirage, insider trading, but secret all the same.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories V: 2000 - 2004

“Glory and Performance.
Seen from America and by American intellectuals (Susan Sontag), the denial of reality in European cultures, and particularly in French theory, is merely 'metaphysical' pique at no longer being master of that reality, and the - at once arrogant and ironic - manifestation of that powerlessness. And this is no doubt true. But the converse is also true: is not the bias towards reality among Americans, their 'affirmative thinking', the naive and ideological expression of the fact that they have, by their power, a monopoly of reality?
We do, admittedly, live with a ridiculous nostalgia for glory (the glory of history and culture), but they live with the ridiculous illusion of performance.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories V: 2000 - 2004

“Against the advice of doctors, the governor refuses to allow an incurably ill man to be put out of his misery. This is the other face of capital punishment. One day we shall have to fight for the abolition of the life penalty, as we did in the past for the abolition of the death penalty.

Shadows have always preceded us, and they will outlive us. We were dead before we were alive, and we shall be again.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories V: 2000 - 2004

“Only metaphysical passion can compete with seduction. The one fights against the illusion of an objective reality, the other against the subjective illusion of desire.
The worst thing being to turn desire into a reality.

To consider everything from its dead angle, its blind spot: the place accidents come from.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories V: 2000 - 2004

“The global power's domination of the rest of the world mirrors the hegemony of the human race over other living creatures. Now, it is not clear how this 'superiority' of the human species over all the others would be given up.

Indifference to politics is said to be due to the disintegration of the social bond. In fact, it is quite the opposite. It is the wide scope for action within civil society and the intensification of communication networks - together with the promotion of a freedom whose perpetual benefits we enjoy, but of which we no longer have the concept - that create the absenteeism from oneself and from others of which political absenteeism is merely a symptom.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories V: 2000 - 2004

“Paris-Plage: the operation would be perfect if an oil slick drifted in to pollute this pretty little beach. Then the illusion would be total: the beach attendants would be transformed into ecological clean-up agents; they would have stopped sunbathing stupid.

WTC: no trace of the bodies of the 3,000 victims. It's as though they had been dropped into quicklime. All the images without the sound, silent, vitrified, pellicularized. The scrap metal and the rubble are auctioned off. The event has more or less vanished into thin air.

The pope has reached the state of 'martyr', that is to say, of witness: witness to the possibility that the human race can live beyond death. Living experience of brain-death, of spirituality on a life-support system, of automatic piloting of the vital functions in their death throes.
A great model for future generations”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories V: 2000 - 2004

“Satan and witches. If they admit they are in league with him, then they are disobeying him (since he forbids them to admit to being witches) and they are spared. Those who protest their innocence are burned.

A bus driver who falsely claims to have been assaulted is found guilty of wasting police time. A police spokesman declares: 'We already have so many problems with genuine violent crime. What are things coming to if we have to deal with the fake kind?' It is for this reason that a fake hold-up was in the past punished more severely than a real one, for faking evil is even more serious than evil. The hoax is evil raised to the second power.
And faking good? Isn't a fake 'good deed' worse than a bad one?”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories V: 2000 - 2004

“There is as little reason to speak of corruption in the political order as of perversion in the psychical order. Our entire mental universe may be said to be perverse: there are in it only defences and evasions, phantasms and duplicity, not to mention obsession and cruelty, ressentiment and the many different nuances of character. Everything about it is immoral. That is how it is, end of story. Any attempt at mental regulation is as pointless as the endeavour of moralizing the social world. The balance is always, as Mandeville rightly said, that of evil by evil.

Ideas do not give forth light and their light source is elsewhere. But they have a shadow and that shadow moves with the sun.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories V: 2000 - 2004

“When some dream only of transforming the world, others, regarding it as having disappeared, dream only of obliterating its traces.

The real considered as infantile disorder of the virtual.
Thought considered as infantile disorder of artificial intelligence.
The image considered as infantile disorder of representation.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories V: 2000 - 2004

“Chance does not exist. Either the universe obeys objective laws or it is of the order of will. But not of a will like our own: an inhuman will, in which all beings, minerals, animals, stars and elements are endowed with effective determination. Where the effect is an added extra, regardless of the cause, where the event is an added extra, regardless of history - chance being merely the intersection of all these wills. A universe consisting of antagonistic impulses, in which everything is lucky or ill-fated - isn't that more uplifting than the mere preoccupation with causes and consequences?

The downplaying of reality is a philosophical intuition and there is, therefore, nothing 'negationist' about it. The virtual, in its project of liquidating the real technically, is truly negationist.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories V: 2000 - 2004

“The Stockholm Syndrome, the Theatre of Cruelty, voluntary servitude, living coin, the ready made, the accursed share, the total social fact, dust-breeding, the perfect crime - we find all these figures in the reality-TV cocktail, in that potlatch of vacuousness. It even drags the judgement that condemns it into its vacuousness.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories V: 2000 - 2004

“What is one to do against an enemy whose weapons are conformism and stupidity? Should one make oneself more conformist and more stupid? If his strategy lies in cunning and achievement, should one make oneself more cunning, more of an achiever? Should one make oneself more mediatic than the media?”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories V: 2000 - 2004

“When God created man, He saw that he couldn't survive in that solitude and gave him a shadow. But since then man has never stopped selling it to the devil.

I knew him in all conditions. Moist in sacrifice, hostile or welcoming, voracious or retractile, excited or indifferent, impulsive and without qualms, dreamy on his best day.

That people who share the same genes should be separated by a moral chasm helps us to reassess the values in the name of which they are killing each other.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories V: 2000 - 2004

“As flat as the earth before they noticed it was round. As ambiguous as the truth before they noticed it was true. As real as reality before they noticed it didn't exist. As beautiful as a woman before they noticed she wasn't one.
And is the earth really round? It is when seen from another world. Just as the real is real only from our phenomenal point of view. Or, rather, from the viewpoint of the unverifiable hypothesis of its non- existence.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories V: 2000 - 2004

“Any gloss on authors, their character traits or biographies, hides the fact that only bad writing has an author, good writing does not.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories V: 2000 - 2004

“Beyond the end: the only unrestricted view.
Running after your shadow: the only way out from perpetual motion.
Dispersing the viewpoints: the only solution to the squaring of the circle.

His hypocritical air derived from the fact that he suffered simultaneously from an inferiority and a superiority complex towards himself.

The principle of insufficient reason: the only things that really take place are those which do not have sufficient reason to do so.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories V: 2000 - 2004

“All these novels in which the authors try desperately to dramatize their own histories, their experiences, to recount their own psychological dramas - this is not literature. It is secretion, just like bile, sweat or tears - and, sometimes even, excretion. It is the literary transcription of 'reality television'. It is all the product of a vulgar unconscious not unlike a small intestine, around which roam the phantasms and affects of those who, now they've been persuaded they have an inner life, don't know what to do with it.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories V: 2000 - 2004

“No mechanic now for modern cars, no doctor now for modern pathologies. The infinitesimal calculus of viral pathologies, unlocatable by traditional diagnostics, has entirely outstripped the mechanics of the body, just as the electronics of the modern car have outstripped the knowledge of its user. But one can imagine an electronic 'smartness' of the body (like 'smart' cars
or houses) that would inform you of all its anomalies, or even, by a kind of GPS effect, of your position in the space of human relations.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories V: 2000 - 2004