21 quotes
It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges persist here and there in the deserts that are no longer those of the Empire, but ours: The desert of the real itself.
Simulacra and Simulation (1981)
We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.
Simulacra and Simulation (1981)
One has never said better how much "humanism", "normality", "quality of life" were nothing but the vicissitudes of profitability.
Simulacra and Simulation (1981)
Never would the humanities or psychoanalysis have existed if it had been miraculously possible to reduce man to his "rational" behaviors.
Simulacra and Simulation (1981)
Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real.
Simulacra and Simulation (1981)
We are in a logic of simulation, which no longer has anything to do with a logic of facts and an order of reason.
Simulacra and Simulation (1981)
When the real is no longer what it was, nostalgia assumes its full meaning.
Simulacra and Simulation (1981)
Watergate was thus nothing but a lure held out by the system to catch its adversaries—a simulation of scandal for regenerative ends.
Simulacra and Simulation (1981)
For it is with the same imperialism that present-day simulators try to make the real, all of the real, coincide with their simulation models.
Simulacra and Simulation (1981)
To which Nature is at times given: in its inspired moments, it is God who through his cataclysms unknots the equilibrium of terror in which humans are imprisoned.
Simulacra and Simulation (1981)
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)
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)
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)
[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)
The Jesuits founded their politics on the virtual disappearance of God and on the worldly and spectacular manipulation of consciences—the evanescence of God in the epiphany of power—the end of transcendence, which now only serves as an alibi for a strategy altogether free of influences and signs. Behind the baroqueness of images hides the éminence grise of politics.
Simulacra and Simulation (1981)
"If he is this good at acting crazy, it's because he is." Nor is military psychology mistaken in this regard: in this sense, all crazy people simulate, and this lack of distinction is the worst kind of subversion. It is against this lack of distinction that classical reason armed itself in all its categories. But it is what today again outflanks them, submerging the principle of truth.
Simulacra and Simulation (1981)
This world wants to be childish in order to make us believe that the adults are elsewhere, in the "real" world, and to conceal the fact that true childishness is everywhere—that it is that of the adults themselves who come here to act the child in order to foster illusions as to their real childishness.
Simulacra and Simulation (1981)