Future Cinema

Baudrillard in Life

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CTHEORY: THEORY, TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE VOL 30, NOS 1-2
*** Visit CTHEORY Online: http://www.ctheory.net ***

1000 Days 052 07/03/2007 Editors: Arthur and Marilouise Kroker
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1000 DAYS OF THEORY

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