Jean Baudrillard - Ranskan viimeinen postmoderniksi ellei peräti nihilistiksi luokiteltava filosofi

Kaikki muut ranskalaisen postmodernin "raskassarjalaiset" - Barthes, Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari, Lyotard ja Derrida ovat jo kuolleet.

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Otsikkoa on syytä tarkentaa haastattelun mukaiseksi.

Baudrillard - postmodernisti, joka hylkäsi "ranskalaisen teorian" - "Nobody needs French theory."

Hyvästi siis sisällyksetön älyllinen anarkismi/RR!

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New York Times haastattelee Jean Baudrillardia

Questions for Jean Baudrillard

Continental Drift

Interview by DEBORAH SOLOMON
Published: November 20, 2005

Q: As one of France's most celebrated philosophers, can you give us any insight into the civil discontent that is pitting a generation of young people against the rest of the country?

Jean Baudrillard.

It will get worse and worse and worse. For a long time, it was a relatively friendly coexistence or cohabitation, but the French haven't done much to integrate the Muslims, and there is a split now. Our organic sense of identity as a country has been split.

Perhaps that was inevitable. Many of us here were surprised last year when the French government banned hijabs, head scarves, and other religious emblems from public schools.

Yes, in America there is more of a history of immigration. America is constituted by ethnic communities, and though they may compete with one another, America is still America. Even if there were no Americans living in the United States, there would still be America. France is just a country; America is a concept.

Are you saying that America represents the ideal of democracy?

No, the simulation of power.

At 76, you are still pushing your famous theory about "simulation" and the "simulacrum," which maintains that media images have become more convincing and real than reality.

All of our values are simulated. What is freedom? We have a choice between buying one car or buying another car? It's a simulation of freedom.

So you don't think that the U.S. invaded Iraq to spread freedom?

What we want is to put the rest of the world on the same level of masquerade and parody that we are on, to put the rest of the world into simulation, so all the world becomes total artifice and then we are all-powerful. It's a game.

When you say "we," who are you talking about? In your new book, "The Conspiracy of Art," you are pretty hard on this country.

France is a byproduct of American culture. We are all in this; we are globalized. When Jacques Chirac says, "No!" to Bush about the Iraq war, it's a delusion. It's to insist on the French as an exception, but there is no French exception.

Hardly. France chose not to send soldiers to Iraq, which has real meaning for countless individual soldiers, for their families and for the state.

Ah, yes. We are "against" the war because it is not our war. But in Algeria, it was the same. America didn't send soldiers when we fought the Algerian war. France and America are on the same side. There is only one side.

Isn't that kind of simplistic reasoning why people get so tired of French intellectuals?

There are no more French intellectuals. What you call French intellectuals have been destroyed by the media. They talk on television, they talk to the press and they are no longer talking among themselves.

Do you think there are intellectuals in America?

For us, there was Susan Sontag and Noam Chomsky . But that is French chauvinism. We count ourselves. We don't pay attention to what comes from outside. We accept only what we invented.

Were you a friend of Susan Sontag?

We saw each other from time to time, but the last time, it was terrible. She came to a conference in Toronto and blasted me for having denied that reality exists.

Do you read the work of any American writers?

I read many, many American novelists. Updike, Philip Roth, Truman Capote. I prefer American fiction to French fiction.

Perhaps French literature fell prey to French theory?

Unfortunately, French literature starved itself. It didn't need French theory to die. It died by itself.

Some here feel that the study of the humanities at our universities has been damaged by the incursion of deconstruction and other French theories.

That was the gift of the French. They gave Americans a language they did not need. It was like the Statue of Liberty. Nobody needs French theory.

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PS. Baudrillard on tullut kuuluisaksi etenkin länsimaista nykykulttuuria analysoivista käsitteistään simulacrum/simulacra ja simulaatio.

Baudrillard_Simulacra and Simulations (Pari otetta linkin sisällöstä)

Web määritykset: Simulacrum
Web määritykset: Simulation

"The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth--it is the truth which conceals that there is none.
The simulacrum is true." (Ecclesiastes - Saarnaajan kirja )

(Baudrillard siis vihjannee, että Jumala-käsityksemme on nimenomaan simulacrum!)

Thus perhaps at stake has always been the murderous capacity of images: murderers of the real; murderers of their own model as the Byzantine icons could murder the divine identity. To this murderous capacity is opposed the dialectical capacity of representations as a visible and intelligible mediation of the real.

All of Western faith and good faith was engaged in this wager on representation: that a sign could refer to the depth of meaning, that a sign could exchange for meaning and that something could guarantee this exchange God, of course.

But what if God himself can be simulated, that is to say, reduced to the signs which attest his existence? Then the whole system becomes weightless; it is no longer anything but a gigantic simulacrum: not unreal, but a simulacrum, never again exchanging for what is real, but exchanging in itself, in an umnterrupted circuit without reference or circumference.

So it is with simulation, insofar as it is opposed to representation. Representation starts from the principle that the sign and the real are equivalent (even if this equivalence is Utopian, it is a fundamental ax~om).

Conversely, simulation starts from the Utopia of this principle of equivalence, from the radical negation of the sign as value, from the sign as reversion and death sentence of every reference. Whereas representation tries to absorb simulation by interpreting it as false representation, simulation envelops the whole edifice of representation as itself a simulacrum.

These would be the successive phases of the image:

1) It is the reflection of a basic reality.
2) It masks and perverts a basic reality.
3) It masks the absence of a basic reality.
4) It bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum.

In the first case, the image is a good appearance: the representation is of the order of sacrament. In the second, it is an evil appearance: of the order of malefice. In the third, it plays at being an appearance: it is of the order of sorcery. In the fourth, it is no longer in the order of appearance at all, but of simulation.

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Verratkaa Baudrillardin simulacrum-määritelmää alla olevaan Nietzschen tiivistelmään ajattelun/filosofian sisäisestä kehittymisestä ja historiasta. Yhtäläisyyksiä löytyy.

How the "True World"Finally Became a Fable (kirjasta Twilight of the Idols. (Published January 24, 1889.)

How the "True World" Finally Became a Fable -The History of an Error

1. The true world—attainable for the sage, the pious, the virtuous man; he lives in it, he is it.
(The oldest form of the idea, relatively sensible, simple, and persuasive. A circumlocution for the sentence, "I, Plato, am the truth.")

2. The true world—unattainable for now, but promised for the sage, the pious, the virtuous man ("for the sinner who repents").
(Progress of the idea: it becomes more subtle, insidious, incomprehensible—it becomes female, it becomes Christian ...)

3. The true world—unattainable, indemonstrable, unpromisable; but the very thought of it—a consolation, an obligation, an imperative.
(At bottom, the old sun, but seen through mist and skepticism. The idea has become elusive, pale, Nordic, Königsbergian.)

4. The true world—unattainable? At any rate, unattained. And being unattained, also unknown. Consequently, not consoling, redeeming, or obligating: how could something unknown obligate us? ...
(Gray morning. The first yawn of reason. The cockcrow of positivism.)

5. The "true" world—an idea which is no longer good for anything, not even obligating—an idea which has become useless and superfluous—consequently, a refuted idea: let us abolish it!
(Bright day; breakfast; return of bon sens and cheerfulness; Plato's embarrassed blush; pandemonium of all free spirits.)

6. We have abolished the true world: what world has remained? the apparent one perhaps? ... But no! With the true world we have also abolished the apparent one!

(Noon; moment of the briefest shadow; end of the longest error; high point of humanity; INCIPIT ZARATHUSTRA.)

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Minulla on selkeä syy tuoda nämä teemat esille juuri Baudrillardin yhteydessä.

NIETZSCHEN "FAABELI" JA BAUDRILLARDIN SIMULACRUM-ANALYYSI OVAT LÄNSIMAISEN TODELLISUUSKÄSITYKSEN OSUVIMMIN ILMAISTU, NIHILISMIIN JOHTAVA KEHITYSKAAVIO.
BAUDRILLARD VAIN VEI NIETZSCHEN KUUDENNEN KOHDAN JOHDONMUKAISEEN PÄÄTEPISTEESEENSÄ.

Mutta kuka pystyy elämään todellisuudessa, jossa mikään muu ei ole todellista kuin simulacrum ja simulaatio?
Baudrillardin vastaus kuuluu - Amerikka.

(Ote linkistä)

"Oli asia miten hyvänsä ja ajatellaan dollarin tai monikansallisten yritysten röyhkeydestä mitä tahansa, tällä kulttuurilla on valtava vetovoima juuri niihin ihmisiin, jotka joutuvat siitä kärsimään. Ja mainittu voima on peräisin nimenomaan Amerikan syvästä ja järjettömästä uskosta siihen, että se on toteuttanut kaikki näiden ihmisten unelmat."

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Jean Baudrillard

Simulacrum

Baudrillard on the Web

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