ISSN: 1705-6411
Volume 6, Number 2 (July, 2009)
Author: Jean Baudrillard
Selected by Dr. Gerry Coulter

I. Introduction
July 27th, 2009 marks the 80th anniversary of Baudrillard’s birth. What follows is a collection of what are, in my view, among Baudrillard’s more provocative, interesting, hilarious, and puzzling utterances. Since the absolute rule is to give back more than you were given, these fragments constitue a continuing gift to readers from Baudrillard. Enjoy.

II. 80 for Eighty
1. One must be simultaneously bursting with life and totally unreal (Cool Memories, [1987] 1990:193).

2. Everyday experience falls like snow. Immaterial, crystalline and microscopic, it enshrouds all the features of the landscape. It absorbs sounds, the resonance of thoughts and events; the wind sweeps across it sometimes with unexpected violence and it gives off an inner light, all malign florescence which bathes all forms in crepuscular indistinctness. Watching time snow down, ideas snow down, watching the silence of some aurora borealis light up, giving in to the vertigo of enshrouding and whiteness (Cool Memories [1987]1990:59).

3. Consider the story of a soldier who meets Death at a crossing in the marketplace, and believes he saw him make a menacing gesture in his direction. He rushes to the king’s palace and asks the king for his best horse in order that he might flee during the night far from Death, as far as Samarkand. Upon which the king summons Death to the palace and reproaches him for having frightened one of his best servants. But Death, astonished, replies: ‘I didn’t mean to frighten him. It was just that I was surprised to see this soldier here, when we had a rendez-vous tomorrow in Samarkand’ (Seduction [1979] 1990:72.

4. The world is a game (Baudrillard Live, 1993:46).

5. The political application of my point of view is unclear to me; I do not know what I can do with this standpoint from a political point of view. Yet I know that something has happened, and I can’t go on believing that theory is still possible, as indeed it used to be. Theory can be reintroduced to the system; however, we have to assume that theory subverts the models (in Guilbaut, 1990:27).

6. I’m always thinking of the next horizon to be crossed. To look ahead in this way contains a somewhat metaphysical and a somewhat transcendental curiosity. People have spoken so often about the end of things that I’d like to be able to see what goes on the other side of the end, in a sort of hyperspace and transfinity. And even if things are not really at their end, well!! Let’s act as if they were. It’s a game, a provocation. Not in order to put a full stop to everything but, on the contrary, to make everything begin again. So you see, I’m far from being a pessimist (Baudrillard Live, 1993:133).

7. My idea is that the catastrophe has already happened, it’s here already. What interests me is precisely beyond the catastrophe, what I would call its hypertelia. Catastrophe is acceleration, precipitation, excess, but not necessarily annihilation (Baudrillard Live, 1993:43).

8. I’m on the side of the principle of evil! …We need to go beyond negative consciousness and negativity, in order to develop a worst-case scenario strategy, given that a negative, dialectical strategy is no longer possible today. So one becomes…an intellectual terrorist. We shouldn’t presume to produce positive solutions. In my opinion this isn’t the intellectual’s or the thinker’s task. It’s not our responsibility (Baudrillard Live, 1993:169-170).

9. There is throughout my work something which goes like this: there are always two forms in opposition to each other, the polar opposite of each other… but there isn’t any ‘explanation’ here. There is a type of development which is more like music or at any rate like a rhythm. There is a polarity, opposition between production and seduction, political economy and death, the fatal and the banal. You can’t say, though, that this implies the existence of progress. I have never made any progress; I think everything is already there at the start but an interesting modulation takes place (Ibid.:201-202).

10. Keep objects as a system
Keep production as a mirror
Keep death as an exchange
Keep the world as a simulacrum

Keep the evil transparent
Keep the majorities silent
Keep the seduction alive
Keep your memory cool

Keep yourself as an other
Keep perfection as a crime
Keep illusion for the end
Keep on line for the while

(Fragments: Cool Memories III [1995] 1997:152).

11. The great philosophical question used to be: ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ Today, the real question is: ‘Why is there nothing rather than something?’ (The Perfect Crime [1995] 1996:2).

12. The absolute rule is to give back more than you were given. Never less, always more. The absolute rule of thought is to give back the world as it was given to us – unintelligible. And. If possible, to render it a little more unintelligible (Ibid.:105).

13. …at the core of every human being and every thing there is… a fundamentally inaccessible secret. This is the vital illusion of which Nietzsche spoke, the glass wall of truth and illusion. From our rational point of view, this may appear rather desperate and could even justify something like pessimism. But from the point of view of singularity, of alterity, of secret and seduction, it is, on the contrary, our only chance: our last chance. In this sense, the Perfect Crime is an hypothesis of radiant optimism (The Vital Illusion, [1999] 2000:80).

14. In homage to Magritte: in front of a pile of rubbish by the side of the road, a sign which reads: ‘This is not a dump’ (Cool Memories II [1990] 1996:53).

15. Is not true optimism to consider the world a fundamentally negative event, with many happy exceptions? By contrast, does not true pessimism consist in viewing the world as fundamentally good, leaving the slightest accident to make us despair of that vision? (Fragments: Cool Memories III [1995] 1997:137-138).

16. If the law of natural selection were true, our brains would have to shrink, for their capacities exceed all natural purposes and endanger the species (The Perfect Crime  [1995] 1996:48).

17. Intellectuals are doomed to disappear when artificial intelligence bursts on the scene, just as the heroes of silent cinema disappeared with the coming of the talkies. We are all Buster Keatons (Cool Memories II [1990] 1996:80).

18. Something in all men profoundly rejoices in seeing a car burn (The Mirror of Production [1973] 1975:141).

19. The Mad Cow epidemic… Cows have never come to terms with being fed rotten sheep carcases and so turned into carnivores… with being turned into butcher’s meat for a single species… with being turned into simulacra… For everything about them is programmed now: by hormones, transplants, the genetic redistribution of parts of the body, by way of a plastic surgery aimed at maximum profitability of the animal as meat. The cow is not what it once was. It is an artefact, a kind of disembodied meat, which takes its suicidal revenge by infecting its predator. This is the vengeance cows have been ruminating. It is because the body of the cow has become a non-body, a meat machine, that the viruses lay hold of it. …Studies have already shown that cattle – and, indeed, all ruminants — to be the main destroyers of the ozone layer, with their sulphurous farting, their poisonous flatulence. So the conspiracy ha
s been going on for some time! (Screened Out [2000] 2002:172-173).

20. A pill against your house burning down (Fragments: Cool Memories III [1995] 1997:6).

21. …perhaps we may see this as a kind of adventure, a heroic test: to take the artificialization of living beings as far as possible in order to see, finally, what part of human nature survives the greatest ordeal. If we discover that not everything can be cloned, simulated, programmed, genetically and neurologically managed, then whatever survives could be truly called ‘human’: some inalienable and indestructible human quality could finally be identified. Of course, there is always the risk, in this experimental adventure, that nothing will pass the test – that the human will be permanently eradicated (The Vital Illusion [1999] 2000:15-16).

22. Everything must now circulate freely – well, so then must germs, viruses, drugs, capital and terrorists. And this circulation of the worst of things is much quicker than the circulation of the best. There will be no end, then, to the opening and re-closing of frontiers (Screened Out (2000) 2002:174).

23. The problem of security, as we know, haunts our societies and long ago replaced the problem of liberty (Fatal Strategies [1983] 1990:37).

24. Governing today means giving acceptable signs of credibility (America [1986] 1988:109).

25. …the institutional smile… intimacy where there is none… This huge system of solicitude is based on a total contradiction … of the deep contradictions of our so called ‘affluent’ society: that being the notion of ‘service’, which has feudal origins and traditions, and the dominant democratic values. … ‘functionalised’ human relations, cleansed of all temperamental or psychological aspects, cleansed of all real, effective harmonics, and reconstituted on the basis of the calculated vibrations of the ideal relationship – in a word, freed from any violent moral dialectic of being and appearance, and restored to the simple functionality of the system of relations (The Consumer Society [1970] 1998:164).

26. From the discourse of labour to the discourse of sex, from the discourse of productive forces to that of drives, one finds the same ultimatum, that of pro-duction in the literal sense of the term. …To produce is to materialize by force what belongs to another order, that of the secret and of seduction. Seduction is, at all times and all places, opposed to production. Seduction removes something from the order of the visible, while production constructs everything in full view… Everything is to be produced, everything is to be legible, everything is to become real, visible, accountable… This is sex as it exists in pornography, but more generally, this is the enterprise of our culture, whose natural condition is obscene: a culture of monstration, of demonstration, of productive monstrosity (Seduction [1979] 1990:34-35).

27. After the First World War Paul Valery said, ‘Henceforth, civilizations knew that they were mortal’. After the Second World War, after Auschwitz and Hiroshima, we knew that henceforth they were dead. From then on we were post catastrophe civilizations, representations in light of catastrophe (in Guilbaut, 1990:23).

28. …this whole cloning business is not so very new; we have experience of it in all areas of life – intellectual, cultural and operational, not to mention the fields of work and technology, where the system long since trained us to be clones of ourselves and of each other. … The clones are already there; the virtual beings are already there. We are all replicants! We are so in the sense that, as in Blade Runner, it is already almost impossible to distinguish properly human behaviour from its projection on the screen, from its double in the image and its computerized prostheses (Screened Out [2000] 2002:200).

29. …even the ‘clonic twin’ will never be identical to its progenitor, will never be the same, if only because it will have had another before it. It will never be ‘just like what the genetic code in itself would have changed it to’. Millions of interferences will make of it, despite everything, a different being, who will have the very same blue eyes of its father, which is not new. And the cloning experiment will at least have the advantage of demonstrating the radical impossibility of mastering a process simply by mastering information and the code (Simulacra and Simulation [1981] 1994:102-103 fn. 1).

30. The sad thing about artificial intelligence is that it lacks artifice and therefore intelligence (Cool Memories I [1987] 1990:127).

31. …what good is it complaining about the adverts? By their worthlessness, they at least help to make the programmes around them seem of a higher level (America [1986] 1988:102).

32. …our modern media images: if they fascinate us so much it is not because they are sites of the production of meaning and representation – this would not be new – it is on the contrary because they are sites of the disappearance of meaning and representation, sites in which we are caught quite apart from any judgement of reality, thus sites of a fatal strategy of denegation of the real and of the reality principle (Evil Demon of Images, 1987:29).

33. If you take one-thousandth of what you see on the TV news to heart, you’re done for (Illusion of the End [1992] 1994:62-63).

34. What we have forgotten in modernity, by dint of constantly accumulating, adding, going for more, is that force comes from subtraction, power from absence. Because we are no longer capable today of coping with the symbolic mastery of absence, we are immersed in the opposite illusion, the disenchanted illusion of the proliferation of screens and images (The Perfect Crime [1995] 1996:4).

35. Why has the World Trade Centre in New York got two towers? This architectural graphism belongs to the monopoly: the World Trade Centre’s two towers are perfect parallelipeds …perfectly balanced and blind communicating vessels.  The fact that there are two identical towers signifies the end of all competition, the end of every original reference.  …However high they are and however much higher than all the others, the two towers nevertheless signify an arrested verticality. They ignore the other buildings, they are not of the same race, they no longer challenge them nor compare themselves to them; the two towers reflect one another and reach their highest point in the prestige of similitude. They echo the idea of the model they are for one another, and their semi-detached altitude no longer has a transcendent value, but only signifies that the commutative strategy of the model will now historically prevail over the heart of the system itself (as New York truly is), over the traditional strategy of competition (Symbolic Exchange and Death, 1976:69-70).

36. The US is utopia achieved. We should not judge their crisis as we would judge our own, the crisis of the old European countries. Ours is a crisis of historical ideals facing up to the impossibility of their realization. Theirs is the crisis of an achieved utopia, confronted with the problem of its duration and permanence (America [1986] 1988:77).

37. Whatever happens, and whatever one thinks of the arrogance of the dollar or the multinationals, it is this culture which, the world over, fascinates those very people who suffer the most at its hands, and it does so through the deep insane conviction that it has made all their dreams come true (Ibid.:77).

38. I shall never forgive anyone who passes a condescending or contemptuous judgement on America (Cool Memories I [1987] 1990:209).

39. America affords itself the luxury of being a kind of primitive society, of enjoying an immoral power and innocence (Paroxysm [1997] 1998:84).

40. With the Rushdie affair, Khomeini can be said to have opened up a new era in the history of hostage taking. The awkward part of hostage taking, as is well known, is storing and keeping the hostage. Khomeini has pulled off the brilliant trick of having the Western powers themselves detain and stand guard over the hostage (Screened Out (2000) 2002:33).

41. Understood: terrorism is still a lesser evil than a police state capable of ending it. It is possible that we secretly acquiesce in this fantastic proposition. There’s no need of ‘political consciousness’ for this; it’s a secret balance of terror that makes us guess that a spasmodic eruption of violence is preferable to its rational exercise within the framework of the State, or to total prevention at the price of a total programmatic domination (Fatal Strategies [1983] 1990:47).

42. I could never travel in an aeroplane with God, nor with anyone who thought he was God (Verdiglione). It is too dangerous. It’s not so much that you might crash as that you might never come down again (Cool Memories [1987] 1990:137).

43. True compassion is to suffer in silence for others (Fragments: Cool Memories III [1995] 1997:70).

44. Islamic fundamentalism – a providential target for a system which no longer knows what values to subscribe to – has a pendant in Western integrism, the integrism of the universal and of forced democracy, which is equally intolerant, since it, too, doesn’t grant the other the moral and political right to exist. This is free-market fanaticism, the fanaticism of indifference to its own values and, for that very reason, total intolerance towards those who differ by any passion whatsoever. The New World Order implies the extermination of everything different to integrate it into an indifferent world order. Is there still room between these two fanaticisms for a non-believer to exercise his liberty? (Ibid.:133).

45. So today, with the loss of utopias and ideologies, we lack objects of belief. But even worse, perhaps, we lack objects in which not to believe. For it is vital – maybe even more vital – to have things in which not to believe. Ironic objects, so to speak, dis-invested practices, ideas to believe or disbelieve as you like. Ideologies performed this ambitious function pretty well. All this is now jeopardized, vanishing progressively into extreme reality and extreme operationality (The Vital Illusion [1999] 2000:48-49)

46. …war, when it has been turned into information, ceases to be a realistic war and becomes a virtual war (The Gulf War Did Not Take Place [1991] 1995:41).

47. …language is not the reflection of meaning, it is there in place of meaning (Illusion of the End [1992] 1994:92).

48. Meaning, truth, the real cannot appear except locally, in a restricted horizon, they are partial objects… (Simulacra and Simulation [1981] 1994:108).

49. Does the world have to have meaning, then? That is the real problem. If we could accept this meaninglessness of the world, then we could play with forms, appearances and our impulses, without worrying about their ultimate destination. If there were not this demand for the world to have meaning, there would be no reason to find a general equivalent for it in money. …Do we absolutely have to choose between meaning and non-meaning? But the point is precisely that we do not want to. The absence of meaning is no doubt intolerable, but it would be just as intolerable to see the world assume a definitive meaning (Impossible Exchange [1999] 2001:128).

50. Strictly speaking, nothing remains for us to base anything on (Symbolic Exchange and Death [1976] 1993:5).

51. …what is an absolute value? (For A Critique… [1972] 1981:94).

52. Ambivalence awaits the most advanced systems… (Symbolic Exchange and Death [1976] 1993:4).

53. Truth itself only complicates the working of the mind (Cool Memories [1987] 1990:27).

54. …uncertainty invades our screens like a real oil slick, in the image of that blind sea bird stranded on a beach near the gulf, which will remain the symbol-image of what we all are in front of our screens, in front of that sticky and unintelligible event (The Gulf War… [1991] 1995:32).

55. We no longer have any standards of truth or objectivity, but a scale of probability. …The space between the true and the false is no longer a relational space, but a space of random distribution. …The uncertainty principle does not belong to physics alone; it is at the heart of all our actions, at the heart of ‘reality’ (Screened Out [2000] 2002:85-86).

56. Some idea swimming in the blue gelatine of the reptilian brain, seeking the gossamer-thin difference between illusion and the real (Fragments:  Memories III [1995] 1997:63).

57. …theory is simply a challenge to the real (Forget Baudrillard [1985] 1987:124)

58. I personally think there is such a thing as the responsibility of intellectuals, only this responsibility cannot be manifested in the same kind of good faith and determination as before. Of course intellectuals are responsible, since they are the ones who use discourse. They are responsible for a fantastic thing. But does this mean that they must take the responsibility for the political sphere? In relation to what are intellectuals responsible? …I still feel responsibility at an individual level. …I don’t think an intellectual can speak for anything or anyone. Something similar holds for the political class. It is very difficult to believe, today, that political representatives can speak for others. How can they? Who gives them the right or the limits according to which they can decide in the name of others? (in Shevtsova, 1985:172)

59. …Marxism assists the cunning of capital. It convinces men that they are alienated by the sale of their labour power, thus censoring the much more radical hypothesis that they might be alienated as labour power, as the ‘inalienable’ power of creating value by their labour (The Mirror of Production [1973] 1975:31).

60. Destroy, he said, not deconstruct. Deconstructing is a weak form of thought, the inverse gloss to constructive structuralism. Nothing is more constructive than deconstructionism, which exhausts itself in passing the world through the sieve of the text, going over and over the text and the exegesis with so many inverted commas, italics, parenthesis and so much etymology that there is literally no text left. There are only the remnants of a forced organization of meaning, a forced literalism of language. Deconstructing is as interminable as psychoanalysis, in which it finds a fitting partner. Deconstruction has something of the homoeopathy of difference about it; it is an analytics of trace elements (Cool Memories II [1990] 1996:25).

61. The university is in ruins: non-functional in the social arenas of the market and employment, lacking cultural substance or an end purpose of knowledge. …Power (or what takes its place) no longer believes in the university.  It knows fundamentally that it is only a zone for the shelter and surveillance of a whole class of a certain age, it therefore has only to select – it will find its elite elsewhere, or by other means. …By rotting the university can still do a lot of damage… (Simulacra and Simulation [1981] 1994:149-150).

62. What did the torturers of the inquisition want? …confession restored a reassuring causality, and torture, and the extermination of evil through torture, were nothing but the triumphal coronation of the fact of having produced Evil as cause. Otherwise, the least heresy would have rendered all of divine creation suspect. In the same way, when we use and abuse animals in laboratories, in rockets with experimental ferocity in the name of science, what confession are we seeking to extort from them, from beneath the scalpel and the electrodes? Precisely the admission of a principle of objectivity of which science is never certain, of which it secretly despairs.  Animals must be made to say that they are not animals. ..Bestiality, and its principle of uncertainty, must be killed in animals. Experimentation is thus not a means to an end, it is a contemporary challenge and torture. It does not found an intelligibility, it extorts a confession from science as previously one extorted a profession of faith (Ibid.:129).

63. Like dreams, statistics are a form of wish fulfilment (Cool Memories [1987] 1990:147).

64. Every real idea of an object involves the denial of its reality, its abstraction – not the abstraction of method, but the abstracting of the object itself – and thus a trans-objectal form which scorns objectivity. In this sense, all thought is an imposture. It speaks of what it is not. This is the Great Game. If I speak of the game without being a player, then that precisely is play, a game, and in precisely that respect I am a player (who will never be bigger than the game itself). (Fragments:  Memories III [1995] 1997:145-46).

65. Today it is concepts, much more than individuals, that are under house arrest, under the fierce control of each discipline. Interdisciplinarity merely plays the role of Interpol (Cool Memories II [1990] 1996:19).

66. The ferocity of man as a species is reflected in the ferocity of humanism as a way of thinking: his claim to universal transcendence and his intolerance of other types of thought is the very model of a superior racism (Cool Memories [1987] 1990:114).

67. Whereas adults make children believe that they, the adults, are adults, children for their part let adults believe that they, the children, are children. Of these two strategies the second is the subtler, for while adults believe that they are adults, children do not believe that they are children. They are children, but they do not believe it. …The feminine principle also partakes of this ‘lascivious’ irony, as when women let men believe that they are men, while they themselves, secretly, do not believe that they are women (any more than children believe that they are children). One who lets others believe is always superior to the one who believes, or makes others believe. The idea of the sexual and political liberation of women was a trap precisely in that it made women believe that they were women. Consequently, the idea of femininity triumphed: the rights of women, the status of women, the idea of women – all these carried the day, along with the belief in women’s own sexual nature. Once women were thus ‘liberated’, once they want to be women, the superior irony of the community of women is perforce lost. No one is immune from this kind of misadventure. Think how men, by taking themselves for men, have fallen into voluntary servitude (The Transparency of Evil [1990] 1993:169-170).

68. Identity is a dream pathetic in its absurdity (Paroxysm [1997] 1998:49).

69. In the empty space of desire, the seats don’t come cheap (The Perfect Crime  [1995] 1996:79).

70. …we need a symbolic violence more powerful than any political violence (Forget Foucault, [1977] 1987:58).

71. When one looks at the emptiness of current art, the only question is how such a machine can continue to function in the absence of any new energy, in an atmosphere of critical disillusionment and commercial frenzy, and with all the players totally indifferent? If it can continue, how long will this illusion last? A hundred years, two hundred? This society is like a vessel whose edges move ever wider apart, and in which the water never comes to a boil (Fragments: Cool Memories III (1995) 1997:27).

72. Perhaps the desire to take photographs arises from the observation that on the broadest view, from the standpoint of reason, the world is a great disappointment. In its details, however, and caught by surprise, the world always has a stunning clarity (The Transparency of Evil [1990] 1993:155).

73. The postmodern is the first truly universal conceptual conduit, like jeans or Coca-Cola. It has the same virtues in Vancouver or Zanzibar, Chicago or Budapest. It is a world-wide verbal fornication (Cool Memories II [1990] 1996:70).

74. There is something in the fact that reversibility proceeds to a superior irony. That theme is very strong in all mythologies, in any case, and that has nothing to do with modernity. We are in systems which do not any more play on reversibility, on metamorphosis. And which have installed themselves, on the contrary, in the irreversibility of time, of production, and things like that. What interests me is indeed something like a fatal strategy behind it somewhere, which dismantles the beautiful order of irreversibility, of the finality of things (Baudrillard Live, 1993:57).

75. One should not be reconciled with one’s body, nor with oneself, one should not be reconciled with the other, one should not be reconciled with nature, one should not reconcile male and female, nor good and evil. Therein lies the secret of a strange attraction (The Perfect Crime [1995] 1996:129-130)

76. We need to reawaken the principle of Evil active in Manicheanism and all the great mythologies in order to affirm, against the principle of Good, not exactly the supremacy of Evil, but the fundamental duplicity that demands that any order exists only to be disobeyed, attached, exceeded, and dismantled… That is the basic rule: for a group or an individual to live, it can never aim at its own good, its own interest, its own ideal. It always has to aim elsewhere, to the side, beyond, off centre, like the combatant in the Japanese martial arts. It is useless to attempt to reconcile these two principles. Duplicity is strategic and fatal (Fatal Strategies [1983] 1990:77-78).

77. Evil protects us from the worst-case scenario: the automatic proliferation of happiness… We are traditionally sensitive to the threat which the ‘forces of Evil’ pose for the Good, whereas it is the threat posed by the forces of Good which is the fateful threat to the world of the future. …We are on course for the perfect crime, perpetrated by Good and in the name of Good, for the implacable perfection of the technical, artificial universe which will see the accomplishment of all our desires, of a world unified by the elimination of all anti-bodies. This is our negentropic phantasm of total information. That all matter should become energy and all energy information. …That all genes should be operational… (Impossible Exchange [1999] 2001:92, 99).

78. …why is there nothing rather than something? …I make the hypothesis that the world exists as it is, that you can take it for real and intelligible in its internal functioning, but that otherwise, taken overall, there’s no general equivalent of this world and, as a consequence, no intelligibility to it, and no objective evaluation of it.  It can’t be exchanged for something else. It’s of the order of impossible exchange. …radical thought situates itself in the zone of the impossible exchange, of non-equivalence, of the unintelligible, the undecidable (Paroxysm [1997] 1998:35).

79. Every culture worthy of the name meets its ruin in the universal. Every culture which universalizes itself loses its singularity and dies away. …The increasingly intense resistances to globalization – social and political resistances, which may seem like an archaic rejection of modernity at all costs – have to be seen as harbouring an original defiant reaction to the sway of the universal. …Everything which constitutes an event today is done against the universal, against that abstract universality (Ibid.:12-13).

80. It’s the book which reads me.
It’s the TV which watches you.
It’s the object which thinks us.
It’s the lens which focuses on us.
It’s the effect which causes us.
It’s language which speaks us.
It’s time which wastes us.
It’s money which earns us.
It’s death which lies in wait for us.
(Impossible Exchange [1999] 2001:89).

References

Jean Baudrillard [1970]. The Consumer Society. London: Sage, 1998. Translator unknown.

Jean Baudrillard[1972]. For A Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign. St. Louis, Mo: Telos Press, 1981. Translated by Charles Levin.

Jean Baudrillard [1973]. The Mirror of Production.  St. Louis, Mo: Telos Press, 1975. Translated by Mark Poster.

Jean Baudrillard [1976]. Symbolic Exchange and Death. London: Sage Publications, 1993. Translated by Iain Hamilton Grant.

Jean Baudrillard [1977].  Forget Foucault  pp. 7-54  of Forget Foucault, Forget Baudrillard. New York: Semiotexte, 1987. Translated by Nicole Dufresne.

Jean Baudrillard [1979]. Seduction. Montreal: New World Perspectives, 1990. Translated by Brian Singer.

Jean Baudrillard [1981]. Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1994. Translated by Sheila Faria Glaser.

Jean Baudrillard [1983]. Fatal Strategies: Revenge of the Crystal. New York: Semiotext(e)/ Pluto Press, 1990. Translator unknown.

Jean Baudrillard [1986]. “Hot Painting: The Inevitable Fate of the Image” (A paper given at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, 1986).  In Serge Guilbaut. Reconstructing Modernism: Art in New York, Paris, and Montreal: 1945-1964.  Boston: MIT Press, 1990.

Jean Baudrillard [1985]. America. New York: Verso, 1988.

Jean Baudrillard [1987]. The Evil Demon of Images. Sydney: Power Institute Publications. Translated by Paul Patton and Paul Foss.

Jean Baudrillard [1987] Forget Baudrillard: An Interview With Sylvere Lotringer, pp. 55-135 of Forget Foucault, Forget Baudrillard. New York: Semiotexte. Translated by Phil Beitchmann, Lee Hildreth and Mark Polizzotti.

Jean Baudrillard [1987]. Cool Memories, 1980-1985. New York: Verso, 1990. Translated by Chris Turner.

Jean Baudrillard [1987]. Ecstasy of Communication. New York: Semiotexte, 1988. Translated by Bernard and Caroline Schutze.

Jean Baudrillard [1990]. Cool Memories II: 1987-1990. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996. Translated by Chris Turner.

Jean Baudrillard [1990]. The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena. New York: Verso, 1993. Translated by James Benedict.

Jean Baudrillard [1991]. The Gulf War Did Not Take Place. Bloomington, University of Indiana Press, 1995. Translated by Paul Patton.

Jean Baudrillard [1992]. The Illusion of the End. Stanford University Press, 1994. Translated by Chris Turner.

Jean Baudrillard [1993]. Baudrillard Live: Selected Interviews (1982-1993). Edited by Mike Gane,  London: Routledge.

Jean Baudrillard [1995]. Fragments: Cool Memories III, 1990-1995. New York: Verso, 1997. Translated by Emily Agar.

Jean Baudrillard [1997]. Paroxysm: Interviews with Philippe Petit. New York: Verso, 1998. Translated by Chris Turner.

Jean Baudrillard [1995]. The Perfect Crime. New York: Verso, 1996. Translated by Chris Turner.

Jean Baudrillard [1999]. Impossible Exchange. New York: Verso, 2001. Translated by Chris Turner.

Jean Baudrillard [2000]. The Vital Illusion. New York: Columbia University Press. Edited by Julia Witwer.

Jean Baudrillard [2000]. Screened Out. New York: Verso, 2002. Translated by Chris Turner.

Gary Genosko [Editor, 2001]. The Uncollected Baudrillard. London: Sage Publications.

Maria Shevtsova [1985]. “Intellectual Commitment and Political Power: An Interview With Jean Baudrillard”.  Thesis Eleven. 10/11: 166-173.