From: Mark   Nunes <mnunes-AT-dekalb.dc.peachnet.edu>
Subject: Re: objet darts
Date: Wed, 24 Jul 1996 09:55:45 -0400 (EDT)


> Perhaps we can regard him, at least, as "Apocalyptic" in the sense 
> that the apocalypse can be seen as always disrupting the "work" of 
> teleology, history and negativity. And even more interesting is the
>  seductiveness of apocalypse.? Of course if he is apocalyptic, then he
>  is alway already within that discourse (because its end is evasive ie 
> always already implied),even in announcing the end of the apocalypse
> --as he seems to in "Radical Thought". 


For me, seduction is always an important word when talking about B., but 
seduction in that root sense (or perhaps more accurately, in that 
Derridean sense). Se-duce: to lead astray, to pull off our familiar 
paths. In a search for a fitting analogy I struck upon Horkeimer and 
Adorno of all people, and the "dialectic of enlightenment." For H & A, 
"culture" amounts to a massive appropriation of all forms into the 
embrace of dominant thought. This dialectic is ultimately tyrrantical 
and totalitarian (certainly totalizing), and in it they hear the 
march of nazi jackboots. It's a teleology that, *by its own accord* is 
heading toward its own ends, its own apocalypse. That is the catastrophe. 
Seduction has nothing to do with this catastrophe, and we have no way of 
"resisting" this fatal drive.

As subjects, we can never seduce; we can only be seduced by the Object, 
the other, "the locus of what escapes us, whereby we escape from ourselves."
If there is "hope" of some sort in Baudrilllard's writing, it is 
in the object's ability to seduce the march of totalization, of 
enlightenment, leading it to another "catastrophe," but not, perhaps its 
own fatal end (the fractal's derailment of totality, for example).

Earlier I described Baudrillard's writing as a challenge, as a placing of 
stakes. I think it's also an attempt to capture these phenomena, these 
objects of seduction: "All we can do is train our searchlight...in the 
hope that some of those events will be obliging enought to allow 
themselves to be captured. Theory can be no more than this: a trap set in 
the hope that reality will be naive enough to fall into it."

--mark