[-empyre-] A/Rose for Baudrillard

[Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>]

A/Rose for Baudrillard

I have troubled sleep; nightmares become me. Recently I traded in for a
copy of Sartre, Troubled Sleep, signed by him, scrawled signature to a
friend. Barthes was hit by a van I think, all these men and some women but
less women - Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari, Lyotard, Baudrillard,
Althusser, Lacan, bounded by what seems the cold war iron of Badiou.
Kristeva, Cixous, Irigaray, Wittig, perhaps are still alive. I raised
myself on all of them and now they're divided among the militants, the
academics, the pieces of 'deconstruction' applicable to any analysis where
something or other falls apart, 'simulacrum' following DeBord's 'specta-
cle' where 'revolution' became synonymous with natural skin care and
something everyone did against the name of 'freedom.' I don't mean to say
anything here, I wonder about the doubting that once swayed the world,
Jabes, Blanchot, or what I read as doubting, never say anything unless
said to oneself, withdrawn, proffered as kind of a peripheral speech. This
wasn't them, my reading, what I garnered, that excitement, Merleau-Ponty,
at the birth of the world, its bearing, re-borning. Vietnam is now mute,
May 68 almost forty years ago and most of us humans have never thought of
burning monks. Tibet is a foregone conclusion; can one imagine the Dalai
Lama back at the Potala? Bohm kept on moving; he was close to insane with
the stress of homelessness. I wait for my first stroke, but none of the
others, none of them, none of you, will speak to me. I'll go to heaven or
hell with stitches in my mouth. I'll try to say something about the world.
My eyes grow wider and wider.