What's the most nihilistic Jean Baudrillard book

What's the most nihilistic Jean Baudrillard book

America

Is this the guy that made Seinfield?

he played as jerry in seinfield

no that would be jerry seinfeld

As an American, that book hurt muh feelingz.

Hey he's the guy who "The Matrix" made famous. His book "Simulation and Simulacra" appears in the film, made him an overnight sensation as an author.

You know it's a simulation because in The Matrix the book appears to have a 3-4x greater page count than in reality

How

...

Did you read it for real? I thought it was a journal of him visiting america

elon musk btfo

No, that's Bernie Sanders.

Travel was once a means of being elsewhere, or of being nowhere. Today it is the only way we have of feeling that we are somewhere. At home, surrounded by information, by screens, I am no longer anywhere, but rather everywhere in the world at once, in the midst of a universal banality - a banality that is the same in every country. To arrive in a new city, or in a new language, is suddenly to find oneself here and nowhere else. The body rediscovers how to look. Delivered from images, it rediscovers the imagination.

No, that's Carlos Bianchi

Yeah, verso published it. Picked it up at B&N about a year ago. It's about 150 pages of his most beautiful writing basically talking shit about the hyperreality of American culture as being born in a simulation of ideals. Americans are all part of it and were too fucked to see ourselves out of it.

Did you read any other of his works beforehand

bump

"Allez tous vous faire foutre, bande d'enculés! (Dans les marges de Hegel)"

I'd say Transparency of Evil or maybe the Spirit of Terrorism are Baudrillard at peak-nihilism. The Conspiracy of Art has is a pretty harsh take down of the art world too.

Hardly, he's been popular in American academia since the 90s. I'm not sure that the Matrix extended his popularity very far, if anything it just confused people about his theory of simulation (which does not resemble the Matrix at all).


Anyway, I've read a lot of JB. If anyone has specific questions I can try to answer them.

Baudrillard
>Dawg you don't have reality anymore you just have self referential symbols. Even at its best, reality nowadays can only behave as a sign for simulation
Wachowski Brothers
>So you be saying an evil demon is tricking us into believing reality is real when it ain't

Allow me a really dumb question: how can there be a total loss of referents (does Baudrillard even claim this?) when I can literally point at things and say "that".

What does he mean by representation and negativity

Yeah, so the big distinction between The Matrix and JB is the idea of something beneath the simulation. In the Matrix, you can exit the simulation and find 'true reality'. In JB's version, there is nothing behind the simulation, it obscures the fact that nothing is beneath it.

Have a specific source on his use of negativity? If I knew the context I could answer better.

This is a language issue mostly. Semiotic systems previously had the Signified (a supposed real object) that the Human then attaches a Signifier (a word, concept, idea).

Baudrillard inverts the relation. Our signifiers determine what we see, what we understand.

>Baudrillard inverts the relation. Our signifiers determine what we see, what we understand.

Two questions from this: first, this seems like he doesn't allow for pre-conceptual experience, is that so? Second, and related, this seems to subscribe to some sort of representational model of experience. Do you think it does? And does he argue in favor of it?

Or am I completely missing the point? I've dabbled a bit in Baudrillard years ago, and found it interesting but very difficult.

>inverts
not this again

He uses negative all throughout the second part of agony of power. I mean I have a general idea of it I'd just like to get your take on it

Sorry, I just don't think I'm well versed enough in phenomology to answer that.

I think the Simulacrum is more of a sociological theory than a phenomological one. His precession of the Simulacra is a historical theory, more than an attempt to describe perception of experience?

The precession is like this:
1.The image is the reflection of a profound reality
2.The image masks and denatures a profound reality
3.The image masks the absence of a profound reality
4 It has no relation to reality, it is pure simulacra.

The way I tend to conceptualize this (and maybe I'm oversimplifying it) is "What is Nature?" At one point, images reflect nature, they're a crude attempt to represent non-present things. Eventually, images come to be Nature itself. We don't walk through primordial jungles anymore, we don't use words and pictures to describe it. Instead we walk through a simulacrum of images, the image has become the wilderness.

>a crude attempt to represent non-present things
Don't you mean present?

signs...desert...primal...meaning...information...entropy...correlation...deconstructed...demarcation..identity...signify...simulacra...authenticity...imaginary...real...stimulation...phantoms...world

The Agony of Power is actually sitting on my desk right now, but I haven't read it yet. It's one of his final works, so I wonder if earlier texts are using negativity in the same way.

One thing that springs to mind is his kind of 'anti-manichaeism' from the Spirit of Terror. Many philosophies and religions have concepts of shadow and light, good and evil, yin-yang. And these philosophies are generally tied up in ideas of either balancing the forces, or the light overcoming darkness. In the Spirit of Terror, JB instead argues that Good and Evil, Positivity and Negativity, rise and fall together in unison. The more good, then the more evil.

>"This is precisely where the crucial point lies — in the total misunderstanding on the part of Western philosophy, on the part of the Enlightenment, of the relation between Good and Evil. We believe naively that the progress of Good, its advance in all fields (the sciences, technology, democracy, human rights), corresponds to a defeat of Evil. No one seems to have understood that Good and Evil advance together, as part of the same movement. The triumph of the one does not eclipse the other — far from it. In metaphysical terms, Evil is regarded as an accidental mishap, but this axiom, from which all the Manichaean forms of the struggle of Good against Evil derive, is illusory. Good does not conquer Evil, nor indeed does the reverse happen: they are at once both irreducible to each other and inextricably interrelated. Ultimately, Good could thwart Evil only by ceasing to be Good since, by seizing for itself a global monopoly of power, it gives rise, by that very act, to a blowback of a proportionate violence.

>In the traditional universe, there was still a balance between Good and Evil, in accordance with a dialectical relation which maintained the tension and equilibrium of the moral universe, come what may — not unlike the way the confrontation of the two powers in the Cold War maintained the balance of terror. There was, then, no supremacy of the one over the other. As soon as there was a total extrapolation of Good (hegemony of the positive over any form of negativity, exclusion of death and of any potential adverse force — triumph of the values of Good all along the line), that balance was upset. From this point on, the equilibrium was gone, and it was as though Evil regained an invisible autonomy, henceforward developing exponentially."

From reading that excerpt you provided, I think he's trying to make a similar argument about Master/Slave dynamics?

>I've read a lot of JB
So what do you make of Baudrillard's analysis? Do you think it's plausible?

bump

You guys know he isn't jewish, right?

what do you think of baudrillards critique of foucault

But it seems that the inversion of signified and signifier necessarily rests on phenomenonological grounds. Unless his thesis isn't nearly as radical as I used to think, and that you're right, it is more of a sociological point than an epistemological/phenomenological. In that case, it might be that it should be interpreted not as radical semiological idealism, but rather as an elaboration of what happens when the complexity of the signified becomes too great and catch-all signifiers are used to reduce that complexity.


I dunno, I might have to dive into his work again.

No he wrote the the Matrix, not the movie but the book.

The book had a lot less fighting but more sex.

No, he's my wife's son.

can someone recommend me a summarization of his views?

his prose is a pain to read, it's simply buzzword bingo

see

It really isn't, you just have ADHD and can't make it through a text when it uses self-referential concepts and idiomatic lingo.

even Derrida and Foucault considered him a fraud

He is first and foremost a sociologist. Which to my understanding is how he has been received in England as opposed to America.

derridas sensationalist philosophy still had some relevant application for the real world

baudrillards doesnt

why?

bump

He literally says himself that you cannot get out of our semiotic mess. I mean, maybe he is "right", but then what? You just sit in the shit.

What is the peak of French fraud philosophy? I want to just dive in for the hell of it.