Date: Wed, 24 Jul 1996 12:21:17 -0400 (EDT)
From: Joshua LaBare <joshbear-AT-acpub.duke.edu>
Subject: apocalyptic objects


> 
> > 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". 
> 
> 
>
> 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
> 


Hi, I'm new here so forgive me if I repeat the obvious or any other such 
blunder.  I've got two things to say about B. and the above comments, one 
on apocalypse and one on the "object", specifically as it appears in 
Les Strategies fatales.  The first is that I'm more than a little 
confused about B.'s standing vis-a-vis apocalypse.  To say that B. is in 
fact "apocalyptic" aligns him, as far as I can tell, with a teleological 
view, specifically with an eschatological one.  How to reconcile this 
with Derrida's point about the absence of archaeologies and eschatologies 
(in l'ecriture et la difference)?: indeed, isn't B.'s whole point about 
objects being "fatal" (i.e. linked not only with death/destruction 
(apocalypse?) but also with fate) a kind of eschatology?  But then, of 
course, as Nietzsche points out, to say that something has a "goal" (an 
"end") is not really to say that this end is the essence of the thing, 
although that essence cannot be apparent until the end has been 
reached/revealed.  I'd _like_ to believe that B. is actually more  
"post-apocalyptic", denying apocalypse, as it were, but nothing springs 
to mind to support this view: any ideas?

Secondly, although I'm all for the more ecstatic aspects of theory -- the 
philosophy of a Nietzsche or a Baudrillard is the only kind of philosophy I 
can muster much interest for -- I would like to try to bring it down to 
earth a little and point out that, from a feminist perspective, B.'s 
idea that the object "seduces" the subject, that the subject is actually  
helpless before the object (despite the illusory power he (and I mean 
"he") thinks he wields) and is "lead astray" by it, if you will, is 
hardly anything new.  Of course the object seduces the subject.  Of 
course she, uh, I mean "it", is in a position of power.  How is this 
statement any different from the perpetual claims by men that they are 
totally powerless before the seductive wiles of the female, figured as she 
is, in our society, as "object" (of male gaze or whatever)?

ciao, joshua