(no subject)
The Perfect Crime is the best book of Baudrillard's I've read yet. I find with B. that people focus too much on the idea of simulation, and particularly, its recursive character. It's a constant refrain in Baudrillard studies of "the simulation cannibalises the real" or "Look at how simulations are just like reality, but even moreso." Eco for example, wants to maintain a distance between hyperreality and reality, as can be seen in his essay on Disneyland.
B. on the other hand, by the mid-90's, had gone far beyond that, into an idea he calls "integral reality". Integral reality is where simulation and reality no longer refer to one another, but are diffused throughout one another, interpenetrating and integrated. It's not that the simulation somehow mocks reality or kills it, but rather, simulation has taken reality within itself so that even the real has become part of the simulation. The real has been "liquidated" - and drunk.
This becomes important later on in his thought, particularly in "The Intelligence of Evil", which I read last year and finished the day before he died. Baudrillard plays on the puns in the title, where the intelligence is both the cleverness of the ineradicability of evil (le Mal) and problems (les mals) and our knowledge of evil ("intelligence" here in the sense of intelligence gathered by spy agencies). Integral reality has no place for evil within it - evil is liquidated just like truth, and taken up within it. We torture to protect justice and freedom. Justice, freedom and torture are not outside the system of reference by which we evalute our actions, serving as standards to which we can point, but rather exist _inside_ it, so that to say that one is working for justice is far more necessary than actually being just.
The knowledge of evil, will not cure us of integral reality and its hysterical escalation towards singularity and implosion, but it can at times serve at least as a kind of sabotage. Baudrillard speaks of those who know evil highly - Heidegger, Celine, etc. They are not good people, or even brave or subversive or whatever, but they scout and explore the terrain of evil so that we may know it more fully. This knowledge has been obtained at great cost (metaphysically, in that the knowledge we gain of evil reconciles it ever more with integral reality and brings us closer to the implosion-point; ethically, in that it sacrifices both the thinker and the victims of the evil that must exist for them to bring us knowledge of it - the genocide victims, the dupes of fascism and tyranny, etc.) and must not be squandered nor ever fully reconciled with integral reality.
Two lines: "Where the danger lies, there also the saving power grows" and "Those who hunt monsters beware, lest a monster they become. For if you gaze overlong into the abyss, the abyss gazes also back into you."
B. on the other hand, by the mid-90's, had gone far beyond that, into an idea he calls "integral reality". Integral reality is where simulation and reality no longer refer to one another, but are diffused throughout one another, interpenetrating and integrated. It's not that the simulation somehow mocks reality or kills it, but rather, simulation has taken reality within itself so that even the real has become part of the simulation. The real has been "liquidated" - and drunk.
This becomes important later on in his thought, particularly in "The Intelligence of Evil", which I read last year and finished the day before he died. Baudrillard plays on the puns in the title, where the intelligence is both the cleverness of the ineradicability of evil (le Mal) and problems (les mals) and our knowledge of evil ("intelligence" here in the sense of intelligence gathered by spy agencies). Integral reality has no place for evil within it - evil is liquidated just like truth, and taken up within it. We torture to protect justice and freedom. Justice, freedom and torture are not outside the system of reference by which we evalute our actions, serving as standards to which we can point, but rather exist _inside_ it, so that to say that one is working for justice is far more necessary than actually being just.
The knowledge of evil, will not cure us of integral reality and its hysterical escalation towards singularity and implosion, but it can at times serve at least as a kind of sabotage. Baudrillard speaks of those who know evil highly - Heidegger, Celine, etc. They are not good people, or even brave or subversive or whatever, but they scout and explore the terrain of evil so that we may know it more fully. This knowledge has been obtained at great cost (metaphysically, in that the knowledge we gain of evil reconciles it ever more with integral reality and brings us closer to the implosion-point; ethically, in that it sacrifices both the thinker and the victims of the evil that must exist for them to bring us knowledge of it - the genocide victims, the dupes of fascism and tyranny, etc.) and must not be squandered nor ever fully reconciled with integral reality.
Two lines: "Where the danger lies, there also the saving power grows" and "Those who hunt monsters beware, lest a monster they become. For if you gaze overlong into the abyss, the abyss gazes also back into you."