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" The Spirit of Jean Baudrillard
 In Memoriam: 1929-2007
 ================================


 ~Arthur Kroker~



 Like his intellectual predecessors -- Nietzsche, Artaud, and Bataille
 -- Jean Baudrillard was that rarity of a cultural philosopher, a  thinker
whose reflections, refusing to be simply culturally mimetic,  actually
became a complex sign of the social reality of the  postmodern century.
In his thought there was always something  simultaneously futuristic and
ancient: futuristic because his  theorization of the culture of
simulation ran parallel to the great  scientific discoveries of our time,
specifically the radical  transformation of culture and society under the
impact of the speed  of light-time and light-space; and ancient because
Baudrillard was  haunted by the enigma of pataphysics, namely the magical
ascent of  the reality-principle itself into the language of artifice,
seduction  and terror.

 Not since Nietzsche's _The Gay Science_ has the secret of reality  itself
been so fully exposed. Neither referent nor signifier, social  reality
from Baudrillard's perspective always had about it the hint  of a
"referential illusion," a "fatal strategy," a "mirror of  production," a
"spirit of terrorism," a "desert of the real."
 Refusing the political closures of political economy as much as the 
social strictures of sociology, Baudrillard made of his thought a 
theatre of the medieval artistic practice of anamorphosis. Here, the 
desert of the real would be spun all the more wildly in order to draw 
out in reverse image the trace of its always hidden qualities of 
seduction and terror.

 Neither a skeptic nor an apologist, Baudrillard the theorist, 
Baudrillard the artist,  approached the delirium of contemporary  reality
with the delirious methods of art, with the always  topological language
of perspectival illusion. Which is why  Baudrillard's thought was always
fated to tease out the furies of  Nietzsche's "last man." To read his
thought was to enter directly  into the complexity and indeterminacy of
reality as a game of  anamorphic perspective. While the last man would
always prefer to  take his comforts in the solidity of the
reality-principle,  Baudrillard actually completed Nietzsche by so
clearly demonstrating  in a life of the mind that thought as a "dancing
star" was still  possible, that in his practice of Arendt's "life of the
mind" thought  could once again rise to a greater fealty, namely to make
of the  referential illusion at the disappearing centre of everything --
sex,  consciousness, culture, economy, bodies, terror -- a sure and
certain  sign of the indeterminacy that haunts life itself.

 If we now mourn the death of Jean Baudrillard, it is also with the 
knowledge that his intellectual presence in the world always was in  the
way of an early announcement that the twenty-first century will  surely
unwind precisely in the way he envisioned -- a political  conflagration
of mutually antagonistic, equally fascinating,  reality-principles. When
reality is exposed as simulation, theory as  artifice, the sign as
terror, and bodies as only apparent  perspectives, then we can finally
know that Baudrillard's thought had  about it that certain pataphysical
quality of always descending to  the heights of the void, always, as
Virilio would say, "falling  upwards" into the desert of the real.

 In thought as in life, it is only the slow passage of great  historical
events which permits the spectacle of fiction which is  social reality to
be fully experienced. Our likely fate is to live  out the premises of
Baudrillard's _Seduction_ and _Symbolic Exchange  and Death_ with all
their abiding melancholy and brilliant  fascination less as literature
than as the theoretical storm-centers  of twenty-first century politics,
society, and culture.

 An intellectual friend, a pathway, a theorist who made of thought  itself
a faithful illusion of the sorcery of hyperreality, I mourn  his death on
this sad day by honoring the spirit of Jean Baudrillard."


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