Is theory to be found today? At best, we are mostly,
embattled with instrumental texts, texts about texts;
but critique seems...lost and losing.
Especially now.
To borrow from Baudrillard, criticism today is mostly
'operational,' like living. Our era is where the
cloning of life dessicates thought, succeeds thought,
and innoculates against thought like a vaccine.
Cloning let the genie out of the bottle, destroyed
thought's fascination with itself. Cornered, thought
finds itself like Ryan Gosling in the film
'Stay'...unable to vanish, yet knowing that in its
current form--it must. Philosophy is a zombie,
seeking sanctuary in Ethics. Art is lost, seeking
substance in Biology (formerly Nature). Theory should
be smarter--it should disappear. Only then, might it
reappear again. Baudrillard:
"Le destin de la pensée est celui de l’espèce. Et il
est dans sa limite singulière, c’est-à-dire que la
pensée ne doit jamais dévorer la distance qui la
sépare d’elle-même."
NRIII
--- Aliette <aliette@criticalsecret.org> wrote:
existential divide --that he quoted very often
between friends:- in this
meaning yes,
Radical sadness:
Nietzsche
Can be the tentative of exceeding Nietzsche as defy
And now the challenge for theory beyond
It's great
On 9/03/07 14:55, "McKenzie Wark"
<mckenzie.wark@gmail.com> probably wrote:
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
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Dr. Nicholas Ruiz III
Editor, Kritikos
http://intertheory.org
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