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.
http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=573#bio
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