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Cool Memories #1980-1985
Cool Memories
Jean Baudrillard’s last book was about America. His new one is about cats, Foucault, Alfa Romeas, leukemia, Catholicism, the Berlin Wall, mattresses, Laurent Fabius, Jean-Paul II, roses, Antarctica, Lech Walesa, mud wrestling, Zinoviev, porn films, snow, feminism, Rio, Jacques Lacan, Stevie Wonder, Palermo, DNA and terrorism.
“ Cool Memories is the other side of America , the disillusioned side, presented in the form of a diary, though not in the classical sense. I’m trying to grasp a world in all its silences and its brutality. Can you grasp a world when you’re no longer tied to it by some kind of ideological enthusiasm, or by traditional passions? Can things “tell” themselves through stories and fragments? These are some of the questions posed in a book which may seem melancholic. But then I think almost every diary is melancholic. Melancholy is in the very state of things.”
“ Cool Memories is the other side of America , the disillusioned side, presented in the form of a diary, though not in the classical sense. I’m trying to grasp a world in all its silences and its brutality. Can you grasp a world when you’re no longer tied to it by some kind of ideological enthusiasm, or by traditional passions? Can things “tell” themselves through stories and fragments? These are some of the questions posed in a book which may seem melancholic. But then I think almost every diary is melancholic. Melancholy is in the very state of things.”
240 pages, Paperback
First published April 10, 1987
15 people are currently reading
503 people want to read
About the author
Jean Baudrillard
210 books1,976 followersJean Baudrillard was a French sociologist, philosopher and poet, with interest in cultural studies. He is best known for his analyses of media, contemporary culture, and technological communication, as well as his formulation of concepts such as hyperreality. Baudrillard wrote about diverse subjects, including consumerism, critique of economy, social history, aesthetics, Western foreign policy, and popular culture. Among his most well-known works are Seduction (1978), Simulacra and Simulation (1981), America (1986), and The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (1991). His work is frequently associated with postmodernism and specifically post-structuralism. Nevertheless, Baudrillard had also opposed post-structuralism, and had distanced himself from postmodernism.
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Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews
October 19, 2012
Fun, Nietzschean, disorganized, laconic, quotable, mixed-bag, post-heyday era post-structuralist works.
Read
August 25, 2015Great text to set atop one's toilette, read a page or two here and there.
March 30, 2022
သောင်းပြောင်းထွေလာ စာစဉ်ကြီးပါ။ ဖတ်ရတာတော့ surreal ဖြစ်ပြီး semiotic text ဆန်တယ်။ 80s ကရေးထားပေမယ့် ယနေ့အထိ ခေတ်မှီနေဆဲ ဖြစ်တဲ့ ပို့စ်မော်ဒန် text ဖြစ်တယ်။
August 21, 2025
Baudrillard is briljant. Niet eens puur theoretisch - maar alleen al vanwege zijn stijl. Hoe die man schreef: echt onwaarschijnlijk. Abstract maar glashelder. Alles een zekere diepte
April 1, 2023
He's right, those were cool memories.
February 15, 2025
“The only revolutionary transformation in things today comes not from their dialectical transcendence, but from raising them to the power of X, whether it be the revolution of terrorism, irony or simulation. It is not dialectics that are happening today, but ecstasy. Thus terrorism is an ecstatic form of violence, the state an ecstatic form of society”
“Against the whole controversy about chance. Determinism, indeterminism?
What use is there in establishing that chance is an objective process when it is in fact an ironic process? Certainly it exists, but only as the pataphysics of causes and effects, and fate exists as well, at the same time. The difference is that the irony of fate is greater than the irony of chance”
“Respect for the mask. Submission to unlimited reciprocal judgement. Total commitment and total egoism: distances are kept.
The final implied effusion is like a last judgement. Meanwhile, meticulous precautions are taken towards the mask, which is not a function of presence, since this is unceasing and haunts us like a slow-burning, indirectly fuelled flame.”
“Today, it is all our artificial memory systems that play the museum-building role of natural disasters.”
“What comes out of a conflict like the Falklands is an unequal scale of passions between North and South and a parallel escalation of rage. Rage (it's the same with Israel and the Arab countries) at always seeing the weak imbued with contempt for themselves by a sort of capillary action from the superior race, so frightened are they by the revenge that needs to be taken and so much do they prefer to indulge in all their own suicidal fantasies. In the order of passions (which is the true order of power), the same countries and peoples are eternally doomed to resentment, to the hysteria of impotence in the face of the arrogant efficiency of the Whites' strategies. That is what is unbearable and which would lead me to detest the Southern - and the Islamic - peoples for their feeble-mindedness, their suicidal rhetorics, if I did not already detest even more the little hardline Whites, who are so sure they will always have the upper hand.”
“The work of the negative. Having ended in history, this has also come to an end in the video or digital image: no more negative, no more depth, less definition (only close-ups work well). Immediate positive synthesis of the image. Tactile and digital: the image no longer made present by the sense of sight, but by the digital sense, which is a sense designed for processing and control.”
“We are in shifting circumstances in which nothing is hidden and everything is mobile - a world of a quite new kind of innocence, but a world no longer illuminated by the utopian constellation of secrecy.
The individual is less alienated by the fact that everything is known about him than by the fact that he is called upon to know everything about himself. In this demand lies the principle of a new and irreversible servitude.”
“This is actually the only strong symbolic chain, the one through which a victim of the whim of a superior power passes it on to an inferior species, the whole process ending with someone taking it out on a powerless simulacrum, like a toy - and beginning no doubt with an all-powerful simulacrum, like the masked divinities which men themselves invent to justify this wretched chain.”
“No one can be expected to bear the responsibility for their own life. This Christian and modern idea is a vain and arrogant proposition.
Moreover, it is a groundless utopian notion. The individual would have to be able to transform himself into the vestal, or the slave, of his identity, control all his circuits and all the circuits of the world which meet in his genes, nerves and thoughts. An unprecedented state of servitude. Who would wish to have salvation at such a price?
It is so much more human to put one's fate, one's desire, one's will into the hands of another. Circulation of responsibilities, declension of wills, perpetual transfer of forms. Apart from this subtle path, which is attested to by a great many cultures, there is only the totalitarian path of a collective assumption.”
“Fragility, which belongs to the realm of appearances, is to be preferred to the
fractal which is merely the quality of a mathematical object.”
“When the future is frozen, or even the present - as it now is - we see all the excrement of the past rising.”
“God bless dissidence! Our Pope, the postmodern Imposter, has lost all spirituality and hawks the divinity around the tropics at knockdown prices. He makes peace with his assassin. Just think of it!
Rome, the millennial monument to hypocrisy, is dead. All the hypocrisy has passed to the East and the spirituality has gone with it. The old theological power, that of the Black Virgin and the Jesuits, regenerated by communism, has rediscovered all its force in Walesa and Solidarity, in dissidence and pro-dissidence.
Let us leave the West, as Kant said, to digest its crisis, this hypochondriacal wind passing through its intestines.”
“It is the mask which makes sacrifice possible, which allows us to make war, the mask alone which enables us to engage in politics.”
“Snow is no longer a gift from on high. It falls precisely at those places designated as winter resorts.”
“Catholicism was founded on the symbolic obligation placed upon the Pope that he remain at the centre of the world - in the days when there was one. Today he jets off to its four corners, like a professional: apostolate by jet. He can thus afford the luxury of a failed assassination attempt. It adds nothing to the glory of God, but it authenticates him - as media idol, as a figure in the limelight. It authenticates him as a target, and allows him to target the international community as his audience. He really has become the best special effect of the late twentieth century.
'You should see him at sunset, when the last oblique rays are striking Bernini's colonnades, as he emerges from the great door of the basilica, dressed in pale purple, surrounded by Swiss guards, each illuminated by twenty little spotlights hidden behind the statues. This is the way the Polish Pope hopes to carry the Gospel - in pictures - to the pagans of industrial civilization, who have deserted Christianity, but have also been starved of spectacles.'
You are reminded of the theologians' interrogation of Galileo when confronted with his discovery of the astronomical telescope: is a Mass still a Mass when viewed through this looking-glass? It is true that through our telescopic and microscopic devices we are squinting at another world. The theologians were right: a Mass is no longer a Mass when seen through a telescope, just as a particle is no longer a particle when seen through a microscope. But the Vatican couldn't give a damn. Today, it is the scientists who have scruples. As for the Pope, that Master of the Episcopate has now become Master of the Telescopate.”
“Computer science only indicates the retrospective omnipotence of our techno-logies. In other words, an infinite capacity to process data (but only data - i.e. the already given) and in no sense a new vision. With that science, we are entering an era of exhaustivity, which is also an era of exhaustion. Of generalized interactivity abolishing particularized action. Of the interface which abolishes challenge”
“The river of irises: instead of a river flowing along bordered by irises, it is the irises which flow between two banks of water.”
“Those thinkers whose minds were rooted in a humanist configuration, whether liberal or libertine (Lévi-Strauss, Lefebvre, Aron - and Sartre too) survive better. Whether or not they are still alive, they have not 'disappeared' in the same way; they have not been infected with the virus; their works perpetuate them and they bear the glory of those works without weakening. A whole generation, by contrast, will have disappeared in a manner wholly coherent with what it described, what it sensed, of the inhuman. It is ironic signs they have left behind, and the whole labour that is left for those whom they have sumptuously disappointed will be to make positive monuments out of those signs, monuments worthy of memory, of a juicy, intellectual memory, with no regard for the elegance and style of their disappearance.”
“The Aboriginals were certainly had. They were led to claim for themselves stretches of land which in the days when they had been left alone they had roamed through as nomads with never a thought of ownership. Their claim was directed towards an object they had never possessed and which they would have thought it contemptible and sacrilegious to possess. Typical Western cunning. In return they have palmed off an even deadlier virus on to us - the virus of origins.”
“If terrorism is a sort of murderous advertising campaign which keeps our imagination on tenterhooks, it can be countered only by a piece of even more effective advertising.”
“Since if it no longer exists, it is much more difficult to destroy it. Tautologies like these really are the genuine article. But terrorism is tautological. And its ultimate lesson is of the order of the syllogism: if the State really existed, terrorism would make political sense. Since it manifestly does not,
that proves the State doesn't exist.”
“This fabulous object, a testament to the immense useless capacity of man, should immediately be put away in a museum, in a crypt of neon, together with all the workers who are now slaves not of capital, but merely of the legend of work, and who have, in their own lifetimes, become part of the legend of the factories.
Man has lost the basic skill of the ape, the ability to scratch its back. Which gave it extraordinary independence, and the liberty to associate for reasons other than the need for mutual back-scratching.”
“The driver of the train which crashed killing forty-two admits that he did indeed see the signal, that he even recorded it in the black box, but that he did not slow down. Reflex registration, but not followed by action. Automatic reaction to the sign, but not to the content. Closed circuit of brain and machine. Interaction with the black box, but not with the world. This is the deep logic of communications - being connected in to the sign and making a sign in return, responding to signs with signs rather than with acts. It is therefore the very logic of communication which produces accidents of this type, and not some human or organizational failing.”
“
- having cultivated a twilight zone of thought the more effectively to disguise the difference between night and day
- never having been tempted to throw everything away, but merely obsessed by a sense of frustration and of having sublimated all cowardice in theoretical radicalism
- having sinned by omission of references
AMEN”
“One of the objectives of Satellite X is to study the social behaviour of ants in a state of weightlessness. This is less absurd than you might think - not for the result, but for what it tells us about ourselves: are we not ourselves in a state of weightlessness? Isn't it our sociality which is already weightless? Though we are unable to master this phase of the evolution of the species, we still have the power to exorcize it in the form of experimentation in space. The solution to all our problems seems to be to put them into orbit.”
“time stands perfectly still if you are lucky enough to be flying in the same direction as the sun.”
“Against the whole controversy about chance. Determinism, indeterminism?
What use is there in establishing that chance is an objective process when it is in fact an ironic process? Certainly it exists, but only as the pataphysics of causes and effects, and fate exists as well, at the same time. The difference is that the irony of fate is greater than the irony of chance”
“Respect for the mask. Submission to unlimited reciprocal judgement. Total commitment and total egoism: distances are kept.
The final implied effusion is like a last judgement. Meanwhile, meticulous precautions are taken towards the mask, which is not a function of presence, since this is unceasing and haunts us like a slow-burning, indirectly fuelled flame.”
“Today, it is all our artificial memory systems that play the museum-building role of natural disasters.”
“What comes out of a conflict like the Falklands is an unequal scale of passions between North and South and a parallel escalation of rage. Rage (it's the same with Israel and the Arab countries) at always seeing the weak imbued with contempt for themselves by a sort of capillary action from the superior race, so frightened are they by the revenge that needs to be taken and so much do they prefer to indulge in all their own suicidal fantasies. In the order of passions (which is the true order of power), the same countries and peoples are eternally doomed to resentment, to the hysteria of impotence in the face of the arrogant efficiency of the Whites' strategies. That is what is unbearable and which would lead me to detest the Southern - and the Islamic - peoples for their feeble-mindedness, their suicidal rhetorics, if I did not already detest even more the little hardline Whites, who are so sure they will always have the upper hand.”
“The work of the negative. Having ended in history, this has also come to an end in the video or digital image: no more negative, no more depth, less definition (only close-ups work well). Immediate positive synthesis of the image. Tactile and digital: the image no longer made present by the sense of sight, but by the digital sense, which is a sense designed for processing and control.”
“We are in shifting circumstances in which nothing is hidden and everything is mobile - a world of a quite new kind of innocence, but a world no longer illuminated by the utopian constellation of secrecy.
The individual is less alienated by the fact that everything is known about him than by the fact that he is called upon to know everything about himself. In this demand lies the principle of a new and irreversible servitude.”
“This is actually the only strong symbolic chain, the one through which a victim of the whim of a superior power passes it on to an inferior species, the whole process ending with someone taking it out on a powerless simulacrum, like a toy - and beginning no doubt with an all-powerful simulacrum, like the masked divinities which men themselves invent to justify this wretched chain.”
“No one can be expected to bear the responsibility for their own life. This Christian and modern idea is a vain and arrogant proposition.
Moreover, it is a groundless utopian notion. The individual would have to be able to transform himself into the vestal, or the slave, of his identity, control all his circuits and all the circuits of the world which meet in his genes, nerves and thoughts. An unprecedented state of servitude. Who would wish to have salvation at such a price?
It is so much more human to put one's fate, one's desire, one's will into the hands of another. Circulation of responsibilities, declension of wills, perpetual transfer of forms. Apart from this subtle path, which is attested to by a great many cultures, there is only the totalitarian path of a collective assumption.”
“Fragility, which belongs to the realm of appearances, is to be preferred to the
fractal which is merely the quality of a mathematical object.”
“When the future is frozen, or even the present - as it now is - we see all the excrement of the past rising.”
“God bless dissidence! Our Pope, the postmodern Imposter, has lost all spirituality and hawks the divinity around the tropics at knockdown prices. He makes peace with his assassin. Just think of it!
Rome, the millennial monument to hypocrisy, is dead. All the hypocrisy has passed to the East and the spirituality has gone with it. The old theological power, that of the Black Virgin and the Jesuits, regenerated by communism, has rediscovered all its force in Walesa and Solidarity, in dissidence and pro-dissidence.
Let us leave the West, as Kant said, to digest its crisis, this hypochondriacal wind passing through its intestines.”
“It is the mask which makes sacrifice possible, which allows us to make war, the mask alone which enables us to engage in politics.”
“Snow is no longer a gift from on high. It falls precisely at those places designated as winter resorts.”
“Catholicism was founded on the symbolic obligation placed upon the Pope that he remain at the centre of the world - in the days when there was one. Today he jets off to its four corners, like a professional: apostolate by jet. He can thus afford the luxury of a failed assassination attempt. It adds nothing to the glory of God, but it authenticates him - as media idol, as a figure in the limelight. It authenticates him as a target, and allows him to target the international community as his audience. He really has become the best special effect of the late twentieth century.
'You should see him at sunset, when the last oblique rays are striking Bernini's colonnades, as he emerges from the great door of the basilica, dressed in pale purple, surrounded by Swiss guards, each illuminated by twenty little spotlights hidden behind the statues. This is the way the Polish Pope hopes to carry the Gospel - in pictures - to the pagans of industrial civilization, who have deserted Christianity, but have also been starved of spectacles.'
You are reminded of the theologians' interrogation of Galileo when confronted with his discovery of the astronomical telescope: is a Mass still a Mass when viewed through this looking-glass? It is true that through our telescopic and microscopic devices we are squinting at another world. The theologians were right: a Mass is no longer a Mass when seen through a telescope, just as a particle is no longer a particle when seen through a microscope. But the Vatican couldn't give a damn. Today, it is the scientists who have scruples. As for the Pope, that Master of the Episcopate has now become Master of the Telescopate.”
“Computer science only indicates the retrospective omnipotence of our techno-logies. In other words, an infinite capacity to process data (but only data - i.e. the already given) and in no sense a new vision. With that science, we are entering an era of exhaustivity, which is also an era of exhaustion. Of generalized interactivity abolishing particularized action. Of the interface which abolishes challenge”
“The river of irises: instead of a river flowing along bordered by irises, it is the irises which flow between two banks of water.”
“Those thinkers whose minds were rooted in a humanist configuration, whether liberal or libertine (Lévi-Strauss, Lefebvre, Aron - and Sartre too) survive better. Whether or not they are still alive, they have not 'disappeared' in the same way; they have not been infected with the virus; their works perpetuate them and they bear the glory of those works without weakening. A whole generation, by contrast, will have disappeared in a manner wholly coherent with what it described, what it sensed, of the inhuman. It is ironic signs they have left behind, and the whole labour that is left for those whom they have sumptuously disappointed will be to make positive monuments out of those signs, monuments worthy of memory, of a juicy, intellectual memory, with no regard for the elegance and style of their disappearance.”
“The Aboriginals were certainly had. They were led to claim for themselves stretches of land which in the days when they had been left alone they had roamed through as nomads with never a thought of ownership. Their claim was directed towards an object they had never possessed and which they would have thought it contemptible and sacrilegious to possess. Typical Western cunning. In return they have palmed off an even deadlier virus on to us - the virus of origins.”
“If terrorism is a sort of murderous advertising campaign which keeps our imagination on tenterhooks, it can be countered only by a piece of even more effective advertising.”
“Since if it no longer exists, it is much more difficult to destroy it. Tautologies like these really are the genuine article. But terrorism is tautological. And its ultimate lesson is of the order of the syllogism: if the State really existed, terrorism would make political sense. Since it manifestly does not,
that proves the State doesn't exist.”
“This fabulous object, a testament to the immense useless capacity of man, should immediately be put away in a museum, in a crypt of neon, together with all the workers who are now slaves not of capital, but merely of the legend of work, and who have, in their own lifetimes, become part of the legend of the factories.
Man has lost the basic skill of the ape, the ability to scratch its back. Which gave it extraordinary independence, and the liberty to associate for reasons other than the need for mutual back-scratching.”
“The driver of the train which crashed killing forty-two admits that he did indeed see the signal, that he even recorded it in the black box, but that he did not slow down. Reflex registration, but not followed by action. Automatic reaction to the sign, but not to the content. Closed circuit of brain and machine. Interaction with the black box, but not with the world. This is the deep logic of communications - being connected in to the sign and making a sign in return, responding to signs with signs rather than with acts. It is therefore the very logic of communication which produces accidents of this type, and not some human or organizational failing.”
“
- having cultivated a twilight zone of thought the more effectively to disguise the difference between night and day
- never having been tempted to throw everything away, but merely obsessed by a sense of frustration and of having sublimated all cowardice in theoretical radicalism
- having sinned by omission of references
AMEN”
“One of the objectives of Satellite X is to study the social behaviour of ants in a state of weightlessness. This is less absurd than you might think - not for the result, but for what it tells us about ourselves: are we not ourselves in a state of weightlessness? Isn't it our sociality which is already weightless? Though we are unable to master this phase of the evolution of the species, we still have the power to exorcize it in the form of experimentation in space. The solution to all our problems seems to be to put them into orbit.”
“time stands perfectly still if you are lucky enough to be flying in the same direction as the sun.”
May 7, 2019
"Writing is the living alternative to the worst of what it says."
"There are two sorts of silence. The silence of the words and the silence of the voice.
The latter touches us deeply."
"You can talk of things so much that they end up materializing in your life:
simulation, seduction, reversibility, indifference.
Gradually, life comes to resemble a montage of all these things, in a floating circulation of women, concepts, dreams and journeys.
In this way, writing ends up preceding life, determining it. And life ends up conforming to a sign which was initially quite cavalier. This is no doubt why so many are afraid to write."
"The people are bored ? Then give them something to marvel at. Otherwise they will make their own entertainment at your expense."
"How can one regret the absence of the other while at the same time feeling a sense of deliverance from their presence ? But language itself tells us how: Regretter la presence de quelqu ‘un means both to feel regret that they are there and to be sorry they are not. Regretter son absence means to feel regret that he is not there and for
the time when he was not there. The melancholy of parting brings on this emotional confusion.
It is true that presence is less delicate in its effects than absence. It is true that it is rare to be able to dream of someone in their presence. To touch them and dream you are touching them. To talk to them and dream you are talking to them. To look at them and dream you are looking at them. Now, the presence of the other has to be like a dream. Otherwise it becomes unbearable. Pure presence is unbearable"
"They say that stupidity is a crime, but it seems to me that explanation is the real crime. I understand very well when things are explained to me, but deep down, I am at one with those who will never understand. A brute slumbers within me who sneers at such understanding and doesn’t give a damn for intelligence.
With those who understand, I make a contract of intelligence, but with the others, at the very same instant, I secretly make a pact of stupidity. The intellectual or the person who claims that title (there are no others) is the one who has broken that pact of stupidity, and feels released from it. In so doing, he plumbs the very depths of stupidity."
"A sign of life: the moistness of the lips. That’s what you do for the dying: you moisten their lips so that they don’t feel they are already dead. The pleasure of water on the lips is greater than the pleasure of drinking. The lips, as the Koran says, are our fountainhead. Their tactile pleasure, their perpetual motion. The moistness of the lips is in itself a sign of love, their dryness a sign of indifference and death. An unblinking gaze too takes on the fixity of death. But the eyes must not blink too much, or the lips be too moist. These are the fragile signs of our equilibrium of love."
"Male eroticism in advertising is always ridiculous. Those who argue for it as the equivalent of the ‘erotic prostitution’ of the female body on the public stage have no understanding of the mental play of images. The success of the erotic hallucination of the feminine (even for women) comes from the translucidity of those arses, their perfection as object of idolatry. Only the feminine lends itself to this hallucination. The masculine is never transparent, it cannot be hallucinated.
Once it appears, with its ponderousness, its affectation, the magic of the object is gone. The masculine performs poorly on the stage of illusion: whatever thinks it is a subject is always exposed to ridicule by the play of appearances.
All it can do is disappear."
"There are two sorts of silence. The silence of the words and the silence of the voice.
The latter touches us deeply."
"You can talk of things so much that they end up materializing in your life:
simulation, seduction, reversibility, indifference.
Gradually, life comes to resemble a montage of all these things, in a floating circulation of women, concepts, dreams and journeys.
In this way, writing ends up preceding life, determining it. And life ends up conforming to a sign which was initially quite cavalier. This is no doubt why so many are afraid to write."
"The people are bored ? Then give them something to marvel at. Otherwise they will make their own entertainment at your expense."
"How can one regret the absence of the other while at the same time feeling a sense of deliverance from their presence ? But language itself tells us how: Regretter la presence de quelqu ‘un means both to feel regret that they are there and to be sorry they are not. Regretter son absence means to feel regret that he is not there and for
the time when he was not there. The melancholy of parting brings on this emotional confusion.
It is true that presence is less delicate in its effects than absence. It is true that it is rare to be able to dream of someone in their presence. To touch them and dream you are touching them. To talk to them and dream you are talking to them. To look at them and dream you are looking at them. Now, the presence of the other has to be like a dream. Otherwise it becomes unbearable. Pure presence is unbearable"
"They say that stupidity is a crime, but it seems to me that explanation is the real crime. I understand very well when things are explained to me, but deep down, I am at one with those who will never understand. A brute slumbers within me who sneers at such understanding and doesn’t give a damn for intelligence.
With those who understand, I make a contract of intelligence, but with the others, at the very same instant, I secretly make a pact of stupidity. The intellectual or the person who claims that title (there are no others) is the one who has broken that pact of stupidity, and feels released from it. In so doing, he plumbs the very depths of stupidity."
"A sign of life: the moistness of the lips. That’s what you do for the dying: you moisten their lips so that they don’t feel they are already dead. The pleasure of water on the lips is greater than the pleasure of drinking. The lips, as the Koran says, are our fountainhead. Their tactile pleasure, their perpetual motion. The moistness of the lips is in itself a sign of love, their dryness a sign of indifference and death. An unblinking gaze too takes on the fixity of death. But the eyes must not blink too much, or the lips be too moist. These are the fragile signs of our equilibrium of love."
"Male eroticism in advertising is always ridiculous. Those who argue for it as the equivalent of the ‘erotic prostitution’ of the female body on the public stage have no understanding of the mental play of images. The success of the erotic hallucination of the feminine (even for women) comes from the translucidity of those arses, their perfection as object of idolatry. Only the feminine lends itself to this hallucination. The masculine is never transparent, it cannot be hallucinated.
Once it appears, with its ponderousness, its affectation, the magic of the object is gone. The masculine performs poorly on the stage of illusion: whatever thinks it is a subject is always exposed to ridicule by the play of appearances.
All it can do is disappear."
December 31, 2023
Hard to frame how unique Baudrillard was. The beauty of this book is underpinned by so many concepts but the coalescence of culture, mysticism, nature, science, psychoanalysis, and love is so profoundly different from anything I've read. All are accentuated by Baudrillard's inimitable prose and scattered yet witty humor. It's a brilliant, diary-esque collection of linked aphorisms and paragraphs that present an amazing time capsule to the 80s and decades prior.
Cool Memories (vol 1) has been wonderful to read.
The work serving as a time capsule has both positive and ultimately negative consequences. The framing of women/femininity, while unquestionably that of adoration, wonder, and love, does reveal the conceptions of a man born in 1929 writing in the early/mid-80s. However, so much of the written period is presented so distinctly and vividly. It's poignant and lovely - you see the passage of time in full, unadulterated force.
Among numerous other premises the interplay between scientific ideas and social/cultural/psychological concepts is so novel and fascinating. The presented sense of mysticism shouldn't be understated either - Baudrillard is aware that certain things just can't be objective or empirical. His skepticism towards the scientific advances that occurred during his lifetime ring hauntingly true today. The book's prescience is jarring, yet beautiful nonetheless.
One thing I loved in particular was the way he used words in reference to space, dreams, and death: 'Astral,' 'spectral,' 'sidereal,' and 'oneiric' - all lovely.
‘Poetry reeks too much of poetry and philosophy too much of philosophy. Each suffers from an abominable redundancy, the one an affectation of diction, the other an affectation of profundity. We find both equally tiresome.’
Cool Memories (vol 1) has been wonderful to read.
The work serving as a time capsule has both positive and ultimately negative consequences. The framing of women/femininity, while unquestionably that of adoration, wonder, and love, does reveal the conceptions of a man born in 1929 writing in the early/mid-80s. However, so much of the written period is presented so distinctly and vividly. It's poignant and lovely - you see the passage of time in full, unadulterated force.
Among numerous other premises the interplay between scientific ideas and social/cultural/psychological concepts is so novel and fascinating. The presented sense of mysticism shouldn't be understated either - Baudrillard is aware that certain things just can't be objective or empirical. His skepticism towards the scientific advances that occurred during his lifetime ring hauntingly true today. The book's prescience is jarring, yet beautiful nonetheless.
One thing I loved in particular was the way he used words in reference to space, dreams, and death: 'Astral,' 'spectral,' 'sidereal,' and 'oneiric' - all lovely.
‘Poetry reeks too much of poetry and philosophy too much of philosophy. Each suffers from an abominable redundancy, the one an affectation of diction, the other an affectation of profundity. We find both equally tiresome.’
October 14, 2017
"Sotto la tortura sottile della scienza, il reale confessa soltanto la sua inesistenza." (p. 83)
"Il pensiero non vive di salute o di vitalità, ma di lucidità e di orgoglio, e il cedimento del corpo eccita questa lucidità e quest’orgoglio." (p. 111)
"Il pensiero non vive di salute o di vitalità, ma di lucidità e di orgoglio, e il cedimento del corpo eccita questa lucidità e quest’orgoglio." (p. 111)
June 26, 2018
this was painful
June 23, 2022
To listen to Baudrillard talks in sleep, is to surf on the spindrift of metaphysics.
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March 23, 2023Schatje 🥰
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May 5, 2023one thing about baudrillard is that he makes a lot of observations without any deep study and it’s really hard to like someone like that
February 12, 2024
profundity & misogyny.
September 8, 2020
I went up into the first part of this already forgotten literary franchise only after getting all the ending spoilers. I guess that being some sort of literary mnemonist and being able to understand everything out of its original historical and chronological order context has to ruin it all to me. However, it ended up being another 'philosophically dilettant' book with a musical subtext like Nietzsche's 'grunge': in this case its also non-chronological as all of it smacks of a fading Punk sentiment.
May 28, 2008
"After the best book, the most beautiful women and the finest desert you have ever seen; you think to yourself this is where life begins. And then another book, another women, another desert and life simply becomes itself. Even the hope of a definitive horizon, a horizon that could stamp what comes next with an irrevocable quality is impossible. New Deal of Life. New deal of Desire."
This is a page turner of fragmented thoughts and statements that had more importance 5-6 years ago, but I can't say I like it any less.
This is a page turner of fragmented thoughts and statements that had more importance 5-6 years ago, but I can't say I like it any less.
April 2, 2012
As befits a personal journal he aims for a tour de force of random bollocks and mostly misses but there are a few insightful gems. More (preferably about less) politics and a lot less on sex and seduction please (bit of a waste of time asking now he's dead but think of it as a general rule).
May 19, 2021
cool
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