File spoon-archives/baudrillard.archive/baudrillard_1997/97-04-26.234, message 32


Date: Tue, 17 Dec 1996 20:23:26 -0800
From: Bill Bogard (remote) <bogard-AT-WPOFFICE.WHITMAN.EDU>
Subject: Re: baudrillard and death -Reply


mark o., i guess i can't eleborate too much more on what baudrillard says
about death in the passage from _symbolic exchange and death_.  for me, it
is a critique of 'naturalizing' and 'biologizing' death, something which
for baudrillard lies outside signification (representation, language, even
'symbolic exchange,' which at this period of his writing baudrillard
opposed to 'sign exchange').  it is a force of absolute disorder/chaos,
that is not comprehended by assimiliating it to biological functions or
subsuming it under a principle of "reality."  that doesn't make death
exactly an "illusion" either, though, as someone else suggested.  The
reality-illusion duality is a product of our civilization--in fact, it is
the duality upon which the modern technical forces of simulation are based
(let's make the illusion as good as the real! - virtual reality).  as for
de-socializing death, even marx knew how death could be commodified,
marketed and stripped of its social, even human, context.  finally, by
"repetition in advance," i only mean simulation itself.  a simulation
repeats the event before it actually happens (like the soldiers that
trained on virtual reality devices before they were sent to the gulf war).
bb 



   

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