Wednesday, March 07, 2007

Jean Baudrillard: 1929-2007

My friend JZ writes at hearing that Jean Baudrillard died:



First Bourdieu, then Derrida, now Baudrillard...Where have all the
poststructuralists gone? And will anyone be able to take their places?

Guardian: Obituary

As Baudrillard himself wrote in "Cool Memories", he was a "pataphysician at twenty – situationist at thirty – utopian at forty – transversal at fifty – and viral and metaleptic at sixty - that's my history”.

As we pause to think about our own hyperreality, what "history" have you been constructing for yourself?

May he finally rest in peace,

JZ

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Another friend TP adds:

It's interesting to think that since none of us knew him personally he was and is an abstraction to us regardless of his life/death status. Whether alive or
dead he wasn't/isn't even a simulation to us, he was an abstraction, a collection of ideas with a byline. Or was he a simulation of an abstraction? Or an abstraction of a simulation of an abstraction?


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My Reply:



Following Baudrillard, I would say his death never really happened, it was all a simulation (including his life)... OK, everyone, run to your copies of Cronenberg's film Videodrome and listen to the words of Brian O'Blivion...

JZ, I have been looping and splicing my "history" in order to overlay/delay/relay (depending on the mood of the day!) any final conclusion--thus it is still a work in progress, eternal return, becoming vs. being, reconstructive-deconstructions, and all that stuff...

TP, your point cuts through the mediated haze that clouds my mind and causes me to think why we mourn those we have never met. What havoc do these mediated simulations play in the development of our unconscious inner screens-- and what power do they have in our outer projections?

Thivai

Also check out Green Cine's memorial:

Baudrillard

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