50 quotes
Our entire linear and accumulative culture collapses if we cannot stockpile the past in plain view.
Simulacra and Simulation (1981)
Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or substance. It is a generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal.
Simulacra and Simulation (1981)
Today's terrorism is not the product of a traditional history of anarchism, nihilism, or fanaticism. It is instead the contemporary partner of globalization.
The Spirit of Terrorism (2003)
Democracy is the menopause of Western society, the Grand Climacteric of the body social. Fascism is its middle-aged lust.
The simulacrum is never what hides the truth—it is truth that hides the fact that there is none. The simulacrum is true. — Ecclesiastes
Simulacra and Simulation (1981)
One may dream of a culture where everyone bursts into laughter when someone says: this is true, this is real.
Radical Thought (1994)
If the thought enunciates an object as a truth, it is only as a challenge to this object's own self-fulfillment.
Radical Thought (1994)
Information can tell us everything. It has all the answers. But they are answers to questions we have not asked, and which doubtless don’t even arise.
There are only a few images that are not forced to provide meaning, or have to go through the filter of a specific idea.
Photography, or the Writing of Light (2000)
So-called "realist" photography does not capture the "what is." Instead, it is preoccupied with what should not be, like the reality of suffering for example.
Photography, or the Writing of Light (2000)
There is no aphrodisiac like innocence.
Cool Memories (1987)
The very ideology of "cultural production" is antithetical to all culture, as is that of visibility and of the polyvalent space: culture is a site of the secret, of seduction, of initiation, of a restrained and highly ritualized symbolic exchange.
Simulacra and Simulation (1981)
One day, we shall stand up and our backsides will remain attached to our seats.
Cool Memories (1987)
The Violence of the Image European Graduate School.
[In cloning,] the Father and the Mother have disappeared, not in the service of an aleatory liberty of the subject, but in the service of a matrix called code.
Simulacra and Simulation (1981)
Disneyland exists in order to hide that it is the "real" country, all of "real" America that is Disneyland (a bit like prisons are there to hide that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, that is carceral). Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real.
Simulacra and Simulation (1981)
Photography and cinema contributed in large part to the secularization of history, to fixing it in its visible, "objective" form at the expense of the myths that once traversed it. Today cinema can place all its talent, all its technology in the service of reanimating what it itself contributed to liquidating. It only resurrects ghosts, and it itself is lost therein.
Simulacra and Simulation (1981)
Challenge, and not desire, lies at the heart of seduction. (p. 57)
The Ecstasy of Communication (1987)
Distinctive signs, full signs, never seduce us. (p. 59)
The Ecstasy of Communication (1987)
Picturing others and everything which brings you closer to them is futile from the instant that ‘communication’ can make their presence immediate. (p. 42)
The Ecstasy of Communication (1987)