Comments | rekraft: how can you jump over your shadow when you no longer have one?

rekraft

how can you jump over your shadow when you no longer have one?

Mar 09, 2007 01:32

This compulsive desire for immortality, for a definitive immortality, revolves around a strange madness - the mania for what has achieved its goal. The mania for identity - for saturation, completion, repletion. For perfection too. The lethal illusion of perfection: hence these objects from which wear-and-tear, death or ageing have been eradicated ( Read more... )

Comments 4

currawong March 8 2007, 23:22:43 UTC

Vale Baudrillard ... the most accessible and grounded of the post-war French philosophers ... it was worth the stuggle with the density of language and ideas ...not sure I'm ready for Derrida and some of the others though.

rekraft March 10 2007, 18:34:04 UTC

Well-put... I think this sums up what attracts me to his work and ideas more than that of Derrida et al.

currawong March 10 2007, 20:33:20 UTC

...and for the same reasons, he will continue to be by far, the most influential of the lot... He shared with the bio-scientist Richard Dawkins the gift of making difficult concepts accessible to mere mortals such as we.

queerbychoice March 9 2007, 03:14:29 UTC

I don't understand why people like him! The Illusion of the End bored me to death, and not just because of the academic language. Foucault's language can take a while to wade through, but once I figure out what he's saying, his ideas tend to be interesting and worthy of at least some prolonged consideration. By contrast, Baudrillard's ideas all seemed to be either so blindingly obvious that I absolutely did not need him to point them out to me, or else blindingly obviously wrong. For example:"The reality-fundamentalists equip themselves with a form of magical thinking that confuses message and messenger: if you speak of the simulacrum, then you are a simulator; if you speak of the virtuality of war, then you are in league with it and have no regard for the hundreds of thousands of dead ... it is not we, the messengers of the simulacrum, who have plunged things into this discredit, it is the system itself that has fomented this uncertainty that affects everything today."
This defense misses the point. If he had been a messenger of the ( ... )