Althouse: The Iraq war “put the rest of the world into simulation, so all the world becomes total artifice and then we are all-powerful."

March 7, 2007

The Iraq war “put the rest of the world into simulation, so all the world becomes total artifice and then we are all-powerful."

Ah, the mind that could think such thoughts. Post-modernism. Now post-post-modernism. And I mean really post, not just post in some theoretical way, but post, really post, kaput.

Jean Baudrillard, dead at 77.

9 comments:

Kirby Olson said...: I saw him as a crypto-communist at best who had taken way too much LSD.; 3/7/07, 9:12 AM
Palladian said...: Reminds me of the great Onion front page item a few years ago when another post-modernist went post:

Jacques Derrida "dies"; 3/7/07, 9:14 AM
Tim said...: Wow. Hyperreality (hyper seems a prefix favored by french Intellectuals. I wonder why?). Games. Also, although he was wrong, of course, about "America is the original version of modernity," he was right that france is "a copy with subtitles."

Anyway, RIP. As long as they don't make "The Matrix IV," (unless the Cornel West character somehow gets it from Agent Smith...) I think we'll all survive the passing of Jean Baudrillard.; 3/7/07, 9:21 AM
hdhouse said...: I remain clueless but, I gather from the obit, that's my problem.; 3/7/07, 9:37 AM
Richard Dolan said...: Perhaps it reads better -- no doubt, it sounds better -- in the original French. Whatever. As Wittgenstein liked to say, those continentals were bewitched by langauge to the point where they got lost in swirls of words that they were simply misusing because they had forgotten the contexts that gave them meaning in the first place.; 3/7/07, 9:41 AM
David L. said...: Perhaps the best monument to M. Baudrillard would be an exhaustive investigation as to whether his life really took place. Then again, we could learn the outcome of this investigation only through the media, which merely create a simulation of reality, so ...; 3/7/07, 9:47 AM
Meade said...: Read it again, hdhouse. Baudrillard said the increasing chance of your cluelessness is his problem.

Well, was his problem.

So I suppose you're right -- now it's your problem, which, come to think of it, makes it our problem.; 3/7/07, 10:01 AM
Anonymous said...: Jacques Derrida "dies"

Wonderful. You made my day!; 3/7/07, 11:21 AM
Free Lunch said...: Sometimes, professors can be as witty as The Onion and get in ahead of them. Professor Alan Sokal did quite well with "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" which Social Text which does not want to be confused with The Onion published in 1996.; 3/7/07, 2:04 PM