Goddamn, I love Baudrillard

[wintermute84]

Mainly because he says things like this:

"Capital in fact has never been linked by a contract to the society it dominates. It is a sorcery of the social relation, and it is a challenge to society and should be responded to as such

Comments

[iblamexianity]

"By an unforeseen twist of events and an irony which no longer belongs to history, it is through the death of the social that socialism will emerge - as it is through the death of God that religions emerge."So I'm reading this out of context of course, but it appears that, though I would infinitely prefer Baudrillard's take on it, society and religion infinitely reinforce &/or recreate each other and have throughout history. I mean, the Socialists/Communists in China and N. Korea 'killed' gods first thing by outlawing religion to bring about a socialist mentality, and our own gov't utilizes religion to mobilize the anomic populace. (Is anomic even a word? Like anemic but for anomie?) Anyway, it appears to me that these seem to cross lines (death of social --> birth of religion; death of god[s] --> birth of socialist group mentality

[wintermute84]

Baudrillard is arguing, essentially, that groups in society construct an opposition in order to gain power. In some cases, they stage the death of something in order to prove that it exists. If God is dead, it means that he had to be alive at somepoint and so he exist(s)/(ed