From: Mark   Nunes <mnunes-AT-dekalb.dc.peachnet.edu>
Subject: Re: apocalyptic object
Date: Fri, 2 Aug 1996 11:26:33 -0400 (EDT)


I sometimes feel like it's cheating to quote Baudrillard in interview, 
but here's what he has to say about "the object":


	"The analysis of the system of objects (_The Object System_, 1968) 
was in any case a detour to approach from behind the problematic of the 
subject-object dialectic. There is a system here but there is also 
something else. There is something more than the logics of the alterity 
of the subject. These are already weakened problematics. To consider 
therefore objects as a system was already a way to break from traditional 
approaches. But in the end it has been developed into something different.

	"[The object] isn't passive and yet it isn't a subject. It isn't a 
subject in the sense that, unlike the subject, it has no imaginary. It is 
without imaginary but that is precisely its power, its sovereignty. It is not 
caught in a system of production, identification, mirror stage...desire. 
The object is without desire, it is that which escapes desire and belongs 
to the oder of destiny. In my opinion, there are only two things: there 
is desire, or there is destiny.

	"It is without negativity [and it is always in the superlative]. 
But that returns even so to many current interest developing elsewhere today,
not the search for the positivist position but instead for the positivity of 
things, the immanence of things. In Deleuze's work, for example, even if 
we are perhaps a long way from one another, it is a question of the same 
quest, namely of going beyond all subjectivity, even the most radical, to 
ask what there is there, what the object has to say, what the world, such 
as it is, has to say to us. Has it no immanent porcesses? Is there no 
emotivity in it? Yet something happens. It's not a passivity. On the 
contrary it's a game."


--mark