Cool Memories V: 2000

1 " The worm that devours the parasite that enables it to digest, and dies of it. The crustacean that wanders beneath the sea until it finds a fixed point. Once secured to that spot, it devours its own brain, which is now useless since it served it only to find this landing place. In this same way, we devour the Nothing that enables us to digest the world, and without which we cannot survive. But we cannot prevent ourselves from doing so - just as the scorpion cannot prevent itself from killing the frog that gets it across the river.

Heavenly bodies are irresponsible - who would hold it against them? Ultimate responsibility is light years away.

Contemporary art summed up by a London taxi driver outside Tate Modern: 'When you go in, you understand why it's free. "

― Jean Baudrillard , Cool Memories V: 2000 - 2004

2 " 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

3 " Dart a very fine reed into the victim's heart. He will be left with a lethal stupefaction, but will not die of it. Dart a very fine glance into the eye of the torturer. He will be left with eternal remorse, without even remembering it. "

― Jean Baudrillard , Cool Memories V: 2000 - 2004

4 " 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

5 " That everything exceptional is doomed to be destroyed derives from the symbolic rule that no player must be bigger than the game itself. "

― Jean Baudrillard , Cool Memories V: 2000 - 2004

6 " 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

7 " 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

8 " Against Machiavelli's Prince, a treatise on the ploys of domination, we should set a treatise on the ruses of servitude. Its ploys are not those of the lion, but of the fox; not those of the eagle, but of the moray eel and the chameleon. "

― Jean Baudrillard , Cool Memories V: 2000 - 2004

9 " 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

10 " 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

11 " 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

12 " The temptation to fulfil all desires was, in the past, that of evil; temptation by the devil. Today it is good which presides over that fulfilment, but it is no longer the fulfilment of a desire or an impulse of our own. We no longer aspire to anything; we are aspirated, sucked up, by the void.

The logic of distinction is, ultimately, a precious vestige of the bygone time of signs and sign-value, the loss of which, though imperceptible in the equivalence of images, is even more serious than the loss of the real.
Prestige, challenge, rivalry, privileges - it was, at bottom, the golden age of symbolic violence, the only antidote to democratic erosion and the great game of equality of opportunity. It is doubtless as absurd to wish to eliminate that violence as any other.
Is it better to stop the haemorrhage and live in a state of perpetual transfusion? "

― Jean Baudrillard , Cool Memories V: 2000 - 2004

13 " 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

14 " There is something worse than being unmasked: not being unmasked. Thus the crime will have kept on leaving clues, and illusion itself cannot bear to remain illusion. It is constantly prostituting itself to the world and actualizing itself in full view.

Thinking is as difficult as walking in the snow without leaving tracks.
Or else you have to go back over your tracks step by step, like the child in The Shining, pursued by his father in the labyrinth of ice.

Political power exists only because we want absolutely none of it. And the political sphere is there only to mask this defection on our part by a trompe-l'oeil system of representation.
But life, such as it is, we want too. And force, potency. That too we want, irresistibly. But perhaps less deeply than we want its opposite. "

― Jean Baudrillard , Cool Memories V: 2000 - 2004

15 " The champions of the digital adopt an absurd line of argument (absurd in the sense of Freud's story of the kettle): 1. It is a revolution, an absolute advance. 2. At any rate, we have no choice, the process is irreversible.
But it must be one or the other: if it is inevitable, there's no point representing it as an ideal dimension. And if it's destined to win out, there's no point claiming it is best.

Any form of irony or offhandedness about one's own ideas is wounding to one's interlocutor. "

― Jean Baudrillard , Cool Memories V: 2000 - 2004

16 " The condemnation of sects is, like any witch-hunt, disgraceful: 'mental deficiency', 'cult of the guru', 'suicidal drive' etc. As though all these things were not standard in the normal sphere of conventions and the social order. This is reminiscent of the charge of 'cowardice' made against suicides. "

― Jean Baudrillard , Cool Memories V: 2000 - 2004

17 " God scoffs at (smiles at) those he sees denouncing the evils of which they are the cause. "

― Jean Baudrillard , Cool Memories V: 2000 - 2004

18 " Speech always begins with stammering. Acts and action always begin with trembling. There is no continuum of the will. It acts on the body by fits and starts (stossweise) and is the product of an interval, a rapid alternation, between tension and release: to act is to produce a difference - even a slight one - between you and yourself. If you eliminate the intervals, tetany ensues: you shake all over. "

― Jean Baudrillard , Cool Memories V: 2000 - 2004

19 " 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

20 " 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

Cool Memories V: 2000 - 2004 QUOTES