Jean Baudrillard Quotes
Seduction is always more singular and sublime than sex and it commands the higher price.
Baudrillard, Jean. Seduction. Translated by Brian Singer, New World Perspectives, 1990, p. 21.
Usually, a prominent politician sending love notes to a mistress does not make for a notable quotation. However, in this bizarre instance, his passion was so great that he went to Argentina without telling his staff of the Lieutenant Governor where he was going. He disappeared for almost a week and the state was left without a chief executive. When he returned amidst the scandal, he refused to resign. That in itself was noteworthy when he had earlier called for the resignation of President William Clinton for sexual indiscretions which did not even affect the government as his indiscretions did. See {628239}.
Wilson was a very formal, seemingly distant, and unemotional leader. This quotation is fascinating in that it shows a side of Wilson’s personality that most people then and later never suspected. What makes it even more important, was that he wrote this letter just after the American ocean liner Lusitania had been torpedoed by the Germans and sunk with loss of American lives and the President was in the midst of a huge International Crisis that would culminate in America entering the First World War. Even that did not take Wilson’s mind off his sex life.
Jean Baudrillard was a French sociologist, philosopher and cultural theorist. He is best known for his analyses of media, contemporary culture, and technological communication, as well as his formulation of concepts such as simulation and hyperreality. He wrote about diverse subjects, including consumerism, gender relations, economics, social history, art, Western foreign policy, and popular culture. Among his best 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.
