Re: [-empyre-] Baudrillard's énoncé...

["McKenzie Wark" <mckenzie.wark@gmail.com>]

Sylvere Lotringer asked some US-based writers for comments for a piece
in Le Nouvel Observateur. This is what I sent him this morning:


"For Baudrillard, our faith in the real is one of the elementary forms
of religious life. While there are plenty of 'realist' philosophers,
particularly in America, none bother to question the reality of the
real itself. Baudrillard's thought was not an unmasking of the unreal
but rather took place outside of the procedure of falsification. For
him theory was closer to poetry, an operation that made nothingness
out of the power of the sign. Everything he wrote was marked by a
radical sadness and yet invariably expressed in the happiest of forms.
After the foreclosure of so many seemingly 'radical' projects, he
pursued the last one left to him, a symbolic exchange outside of the
endless proliferation of indeterminate signs. He returned the world to
itself exactly as it was given, as an enigma. But always at least as a
far more elegant and astonishing one."

It seems to me that would now be the challenge for theory.

McKenzie Wark