[Reader-list] [CTHEORY] 1000 Days of Theory: The Spirit of Jean Baudrillard

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From: Theory, Technology and Culture <ctheory at lists.uvic.ca>



 The Spirit of Jean Baudrillard
 In Memoriam: 1929-2007
 ================================


 ~Arthur Kroker~



 Like his intellectual predecessors -- Nietzsche, Artaud, and Bataille
 -- Jean Baudrillard was that rarity of a cultural philosopher, a
 thinker whose reflections, refusing to be simply culturally mimetic,
 actually became a complex sign of the social reality of the
 postmodern century. In his thought there was always something
 simultaneously futuristic and ancient: futuristic because his
 theorization of the culture of simulation ran parallel to the great
 scientific discoveries of our time, specifically the radical
 transformation of culture and society under the impact of the speed
 of light-time and light-space; and ancient because Baudrillard was
 haunted by the enigma of pataphysics, namely the magical ascent of
 the reality-principle itself into the language of artifice, seduction
 and terror.

 Not since Nietzsche's _The Gay Science_ has the secret of reality
 itself been so fully exposed. Neither referent nor signifier, social
 reality from Baudrillard's perspective always had about it the hint
 of a "referential illusion," a "fatal strategy," a "mirror of
 production," a "spirit of terrorism," a "desert of the real."
 Refusing the political closures of political economy as much as the
 social strictures of sociology, Baudrillard made of his thought a
 theatre of the medieval artistic practice of anamorphosis. Here, the
 desert of the real would be spun all the more wildly in order to draw
 out in reverse image the trace of its always hidden qualities of
 seduction and terror.

 Neither a skeptic nor an apologist, Baudrillard the theorist,
 Baudrillard the artist,  approached the delirium of contemporary
 reality with the delirious methods of art, with the always
 topological language of perspectival illusion. Which is why
 Baudrillard's thought was always fated to tease out the furies of
 Nietzsche's "last man." To read his thought was to enter directly
 into the complexity and indeterminacy of reality as a game of
 anamorphic perspective. While the last man would always prefer to
 take his comforts in the solidity of the reality-principle,
 Baudrillard actually completed Nietzsche by so clearly demonstrating
 in a life of the mind that thought as a "dancing star" was still
 possible, that in his practice of Arendt's "life of the mind" thought
 could once again rise to a greater fealty, namely to make of the
 referential illusion at the disappearing centre of everything -- sex,
 consciousness, culture, economy, bodies, terror -- a sure and certain
 sign of the indeterminacy that haunts life itself.

 If we now mourn the death of Jean Baudrillard, it is also with the
 knowledge that his intellectual presence in the world always was in
 the way of an early announcement that the twenty-first century will
 surely unwind precisely in the way he envisioned -- a political
 conflagration of mutually antagonistic, equally fascinating,
 reality-principles. When reality is exposed as simulation, theory as
 artifice, the sign as terror, and bodies as only apparent
 perspectives, then we can finally know that Baudrillard's thought had
 about it that certain pataphysical quality of always descending to
 the heights of the void, always, as Virilio would say, "falling
 upwards" into the desert of the real.

 In thought as in life, it is only the slow passage of great
 historical events which permits the spectacle of fiction which is
 social reality to be fully experienced. Our likely fate is to live
 out the premises of Baudrillard's _Seduction_ and _Symbolic Exchange
 and Death_ with all their abiding melancholy and brilliant
 fascination less as literature than as the theoretical storm-centers
 of twenty-first century politics, society, and culture.

 An intellectual friend, a pathway, a theorist who made of thought
 itself a faithful illusion of the sorcery of hyperreality, I mourn
 his death on this sad day by honoring the spirit of Jean Baudrillard.


 _____________________________________________________________________

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