Re: [-empyre-] a little Baudrillard memory

[Aliette <aliette@criticalsecret.org>]

Tobias, 

May be what follows can make sense observing the dates just before or after:

In July 1999 Jean resented a very serious infarct which made him
hospitalized during three weeks; then they proposed him a transplant but he
refused. One evening od the following autumn during a dinner where I was a
guest, he said that he did not want to steal the heart of a young man or of
a young girl as can being still alive themselves if the banks of organs
would not call more and more grain, and that from his hand he preferred to
save his old heart until it will release and naturally finished.

He would thus pay attention for alcoholic consummation, the tobacco, and so
on.

What made irritated one of his friends present at the table as having
received a heart transplant himself. He never more talked to Jean --
refusing to see him another time.

In fact, what happened was very indelicate and unlovable because they were
both seducing a woman (precisely being a surgeon).

He had just symbolically killed his challenger at the view of the woman,
even can being a friend, by having confirmed he was old, all the contrary of
the current way to approach women from the part of mature men who are not
specially rich;-)

Right now you can know that he would not die from his heart...

That was Jean, a sort of vital killer, whatever he would be very tired and
almost can being indelicate, but a winner. But totally irrespectuous of the
power whatever the power, can be academics or politic.

The day the university asked him to respect a protocol that he would not
agree so he left the university (and being very poor for a year;-)

Three times Mitterrand made him invited at the presidential house for a
dinner: three times he refused to go. Because he wanted to keep his freedom
of thinking. Mitterrand's staff of philosophers has never excused him and
founding pretexts (that was very easy by abstracting the context of his
defies) of deliver several campaigns of boycott against him.

What did not impeached him to be a guest of very rich and powerful persons
at the moment they just made it as a gift. He was elegant but savage and
anyway tired can becoming impolite, rude.

When he said ok the game is finished it was really finished on the proper
moment. No - it was no really.

So the last nineties were not a good moment for him.




On 10/03/07 6:01, "tobias c. van Veen" <tobias@techno.ca> probably wrote:

> 
> I ever tell you about the time I met Baudrillard ?
> 
> Baudrillard came and lectured at Emily Carr in Vancouver, I believe it was
> 1999 or so. The hall was full and the administration refused to open these
> massive doors which would have allowed the hundreds of students outside in
> the concourse to listen and see. But they wouldn't do it. So they began
> pounding on the walls. Baudrillard encouraged them, but the administration
> wouldn't relent. He talked for two hours about the image, photography (he
> was there for an exhibition of his photographs), the real and the
> simulacrum, and the way the image is the measure of the distance -- it was
> unclear how close this was to a decline -- from tribal society. I have it on
> minidisc somewhere. At the end, he struggled through a few English questions
> -- mainly reiterating what he had said, as most of the questions were poor,
> of the "I don't get it" variety -- and eventually just translated each
> question into French and responded in French. This being Vancouver, an
> audience of about one thousand was ignorant of his far more fascinating
> answers voiced in his native tongue.
> 
> At the end, I went up to get his signature on a library copy of _The Gulf
> War Did Not Take Place_ (I still have it -- I ripped the page out, which I
> thought was appropriate -- check the pic:
> 
> http://www.quadrantcrossing.org/blog/C1078271594/E20070308144224/index.html
> 
> ).
> 
> While I was doing this, an impish professor from SFU was trying to get
> Baudrillard to come and talk to his seminar. He said something like, "Are
> you saying that it is becoming too late? I really feel that you're really
> saying something about the whole state of things, where we are...."
> 
> It was kind of embarrassing, this posturing, this pleading. Baudrillard
> turned to the prof and said, perfunctorily and with an air of resignation,
> "It is too late."
> 
> The circle of administrators ready to cater to his every need and gloating
> Emily Carr professors that had been filling the air with laudatory chit-chat
> paused to listen. Was this the Meaning of his Talk?
> 
> "It is too late!" said the prof, eyes wide, taken back, leaning toward
> Baudrillard with alarm sketched across his face. The Answer had arrived. "Do
> you really mean it is too late?!?"
> 
> "It is too late," says Baudrillard, casually, eyes downward, and in a way
> only the French can manage, he pulls back the sleeve of his brown jacket and
> glances at his watch.
> 
> -- tV
> 
> tobias c. van Veen -----------++++
> http://www.quadrantcrossing.org --
> McGill Communication & Philosophy
> 
> 
> 
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