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ISSN: 1705-6411
Volume 4, Number 3 (October, 2007).
Special Issue: Remembering Baudrillard
“It
will happen to me soon”: Death Sentence, Baudrillard, Aphorisms
Jon Baldwin
(Senior
Lecturer in Communications, London Metropolitan University, UK)
Aphorisms and proper names are characterised by their
capacity for surviving the deaths of those who employ them or are designated by
them, and are therefore structured by the possibility of death.1
Reflection upon Jean Baudrillard and
death, sooner or later, leads to the discussion of death in Symbolic
Exchange and Death. Upon looking back at this and marking the margin it
seemed to me that many of his comments could “work” and be quoted in the
aphoristic or fragmented style that marked much of his late work. The fact that
the aphorism becomes an essential element and medium of Baudrillard’s later
writings might be seen to be a reflection of one of the core aphorisms of our
age, Marshall McLuhan’s notion that “the medium is the message”. By way of an
offering, which in principle is experimental and could easily be added to or
subtracted from, here is a selection taken out of Symbolic Exchange and
Death, interspersed with aphorisms from the most recent Cool Memories
collection in which death is an occasional back-drop. I also include pertinent
aphorisms that have caught my eye in the past on both death and the aphorism
itself. It becomes apparent that death and the aphorism, “death sentences”, are
intimately linked.
The
pieces speak for themselves but some context of Baudrillard’s concern with
death in Symbolic Exchange and Death might be necessary. Baudrillard’s
focus is thoroughly anthropological and sociological. One vital context of
Baudrillard, the religious sociology of Émile
Durkheim2
and Marcel Mauss, is very much apparent. This is in lieu of the strictly
philosophical regard for death as is the case with, for instance, Martin Heidegger’s
definition of man (or Dasein) as “being toward death”.
This latter sentiment is particularly prominent in Jacques Derrida’s
reflections on death3.
At the heart of Baudrillard’s consideration is the contrast of death as lived
and experienced under the aegis of symbolic exchange by the “primitives”, and death
in modern societies. One of the tasks of Symbolic Exchange and Death is
the thinking through and consideration of two notions presented here in
concision: “[w]e have de-socialised death”4
and “[w]e must get rid of the idea of progress in religions”5. Mauss also makes these points
apparent in his study on prayer6.
Prayer, however we may consider it, has become de-socialised: the practice is
not fully collective anymore, prayer has “progressed” to the practice of the
isolated individual. Mourning7
also has become “an individual labour”8
rather than collective. Likewise modern death has become abstract and removed
from society, modern death is lonely and isolated, asocial and profane. It is simply
not productive to die. Death is an affront to political economy. It is in this very
exclusion from the system, like symbolic exchange is excluded, that the
possible radicalism and haunting of death lies.
In a system where life is ruled by value and utility,
death becomes a useless luxury, and the only alternative (Baudrillard).9
Death orders matters well, since the very fact of your
absence makes the world distinctly less worthy of being lived in (Baudrillard).10
The absolute aphorism: a proper name (Derrida).11
Our true necropolises are no longer the cemeteries,
hospitals, wars, hecatombs; death is no longer where we think it is, it is no
longer biological, psychological, metaphysical, it is no longer even murder:
our societies’ true necropolises are the computer banks or the foyers, blank
spaces from which all human noise has been expunged, glass coffins where the
world’s sterilised memories are frozen (Baudrillard).12
The aphorism says the truth in the form of the last
judgement, and this truth carries death (Derrida).13
[D]eath is not an end, it is a rival, a strange rival and
one that has its weaknesses. This is what ‘death throes’ properly are: the
rivalry between life and death (Baudrillard).14
Something said briefly can be the fruit of much long
thought: but the reader who is a novice in this field, and has as yet reflected
on it not at all, sees in everything said briefly something embryonic, not
without censuring the author for having served him up such immature and
unripened fruit (Nietzsche).15
We have de-socialised death (Baudrillard).16
As its name indicates, aphorism separates, it marks
dissociation, it terminates, delimits, arrests (horizō). It brings
to an end by separating, it separates in order to end – and to define (Derrida).17
[The primitives] have never ‘naturalised’ death, they
know that death (like the body, like the natural event) is a social relation,
that its definition is social (Baudrillard).18
Neither the sun nor death can be looked at steadily (La
Rochefoucauld).19
‘By dint of washing, soaping, furbishing, brushing,
painting, sponging, polishing, cleaning and scouring, the grime from the things
washed rubs off onto living things’ (Victor Hugo). The same goes for death: by
dint of being washed and sponged, cleaned and scoured, denied and warded off,
death rubs onto every aspect of life. Our whole culture is hygienic, and aims
to expurgate life from death (Baudrillard).20
Today, it is not normal to be dead, and this is
new (Baudrillard).21
The aphorism, the apophthegm, are the forms of
‘eternity’; my ambition is to say in ten sentences what everyone else says in a
book – what everyone else does not say in a book (Nietzsche).22
The property system is so absurd that it leads people to
demand their death as their own good – the private appropriation of death… A
comfortable, personalised, ‘designer’ death, a ‘natural’ death: this is the
inalienable right constituting the perfected form of bourgeois individual law (Baudrillard).23
It is aphorisms that best do justice to that cerebral
electricity, those myriad microscopic ideas that ascend from the nerves to the
brain and are constantly passing across it. They bear witness to that Brownian,
corpuscular activity ‘beyond the lenses, beyond the frosted glass’, as
Lichtenberg would say (Baudrillard).24
As the stamp of great minds is to suggest much in few
words, so, contrariwise, little minds have the gift of talking a great deal and
saying nothing (La Rochefoucauld).25
Ours is a culture of death (Baudrillard).26
Despite appearances, an aphorism never arrives by itself,
it doesn’t come all alone. It is part of a serial logic (Derrida).27
Our whole culture is just one huge effort to dissociate
life and death, to ward off the ambivalence of death in the interests of life
as value, and time as the general equivalent. The elimination of death is our
phantasm, and ramifies in every direction: for religion, the afterlife and
immortality; for science, truth; and for economics, productivity and
accumulation (Baudrillard).28
To integrate the end into the process: the only way of
escaping mourning. To enjoy the end as a mirror magnifying the pleasure. One
may even, in this sense, envisage integrating death as a magical factor (Baudrillard).29
Funereal pomp has more to do with the vanity of the
living than the honouring of the dead (La Rochefoucauld).30
‘Aphorizein’ (from which we get the word ‘aphorism’)
means to retreat to such a distance that a horizon of though is formed which
never again closes on itself (Baudrillard).31
We no longer have the experience that others had of
death… In any other type of society, this is something unthinkable. The
hospital and medicine take charge of you; the technical Extreme Unction has
replaced every other sacrament. Man disappears from his nearest and dearest
before being dead. He dies somewhere else (Baudrillard).32
He who writes in blood and aphorisms does not want to be
read, he wants to be learned by heart (Nietzsche).33
At the very core of the ‘rationality’ of our culture…is
an exclusion that precedes every other, more radical than the exclusion of
madmen, children or inferior races, an exclusion preceding all these and
serving as their model: the exclusion of the dead and of death (Baudrillard).34
Exactly like the shaft of wit, the character trait or
facial features, the fragment is made up of contradictory lineaments of meaning
and their happy coincidence. The aphorism is like the starry sky, the blanks in
it being the intersidereal void (Baudrillard).35
Death does not gnaw at those who gamble (Bataille).
36
To us, the dead have just passed away and no longer have
anything to exchange. The dead are residual even before dying. At the end of a
lifetime of accumulation, the dead are subtracted from the total in an economic
operation. They do not become effigies: they serve entirely as alibis for the
living and to their obvious superiority over the dead. This is a flat,
one-dimensional death, the end of the biological journey, settling a credit:
‘giving in one’s soul’, like a tyre, a container emptied of its contents. What
banality! (Baudrillard).37
Aphorism: separation in language and, in it, through the
name which closes the horizon. Aphorism is at once necessary and impossible (Derrida).38
Speaking of death makes us laugh in a strained and
obscene manner. Speaking of sex no longer provokes the same reaction: sex is
legal, only death is pornographic (Baudrillard).39
In the mountains the shortest route is from peak to peak,
but for that you must have long legs. Aphorisms should be peaks, and those to
whom they are spoken should be big and tall of stature (Nietzsche).40
Death itself demands to be experienced immediately, in
total blindness and total ambivalence (Baudrillard).41
In the capitalist mode, everyone is alone before the
general equivalent. It is no coincidence that, in the same way, everyone finds
themselves alone before death, since death is general equivalence (Baudrillard).42
The aphoristic form creates difficulty: it arises from
the fact that today this form is not taken sufficiently seriously. An aphorism,
properly stamped and moulded, has not been ‘deciphered’ when it has simply been
read; one has then rather to begin its exegesis, for which is required an art
of exegesis (Nietzsche).43
Never had any imagining of death: it should remain a
surprise (Baudrillard).44
There is an irreversible evolution from savage societies
to our own: little by little, the dead cease to exist (Baudrillard).45
It is illusory to suppose that death will look the same
near at hand as we thought it did at a distance, and that our emotions, which
are the very stuff of weakness, will be strong enough
not to be daunted by the toughest of all ordeals (La Rochefoucauld).46
Death ceases to be the Grim Reaper, and becomes an
anguish concerning death (Baudrillard).47
Aphorism can, of course, turn out to be a device of
rhetoric, a sly calculation aiming at the greatest authority, an economy or
strategy of mastery which knows very well how to potentialize meaning (‘See how
I formalise, in so few words I always say more than would appear’) (Derrida).48
The planet Earth is so congested with death, with wealth:
a piercing scream is raised: on Earth, wealth and death urge only an enormous
scream; it is solitude that screams (Bataille).49
Memento mori: Not: remember that you must die, but: don’t
forget to die, remember to die (before it’s too late) (Baudrillard).50
This aphoristic series crosses over another one. Because
it traces, aphorism lives on, it lives much longer than its present and it
lives longer than life. Death sentence. It gives and carries death, but in
order to make a decision thus on a sentence of death, it suspends death, it stops
it once more (Derrida).51
Few men know death: we do not usually undergo it
deliberately, but unthinkingly and out of habit, and most men die because men
cannot help dying (La Rochefoucauld).52
‘It will happen to me soon’ (Derrida).53
Does the final truth resemble the most painful death? Or
is this prosaic world, ordered by knowledge founded on a lasting experience,
its limit? Delivered from ridiculous beliefs, are we happy before death and
torture? Is this pure happiness? At the basis of a world from which the only
escape is failure? (Bataille)54
What is this time? There is no place for a question in
aphorism (Derrida).55
If the death drive is a myth, then this is how we will
interpret it. We will interpret the death drive, and the concept of the unconscious
itself, as myths, and no longer take account of their effects or their efforts
at ‘truth’ (Baudrillard).56
In ‘each death’ there is an end of the world (Derrida).57
Originally the distinctive emblem of power, the
immortality of the soul acts, throughout Christianity, as an egalitarian myth,
as a democratic beyond as opposed to worldly inequality before death (Baudrillard).58
We are extremely suspicious of those who triumph over
death! (Baudrillard).59
Life is only a benefit in itself within the calculable
order of value. In the symbolic order, life, like everything else, is a crime
if it survives unilaterally, if it is not seized and destroyed, given and
returned, ‘returned’ to death (Baudrillard).60
The reason for so much outcry against maxims that lay
bare the human heart is that people are afraid of having their own laid bare (La
Rochefoucauld).61
Every death and all violence that escapes the State
monopoly is subversive; it is a prefiguration of the abolition of power. Hence
the fascination wielded by great murders, bandits or outlaws, which is in fact
closely akin to that associated with works of art: a piece of death and
violence is snatched from the State monopoly in order to be put back into the
savage, direct and symbolic reciprocity of death, just as something in feasting
and expenditure is retrieved from the economic in order to be put back into
useless and sacrificial exchange, and just as something in the poem or the
artwork is retrieved from the terrorist economy of signification in order to be
put back into the consumption of signs. This alone is what is fascinating in
our system (Baudrillard).62
Death, like mourning, has become obscene and awkward, and
it is good taste to hide it, since it can offend the well-being of others (Baudrillard).63
The last act is bloody, however fine the rest of the
play. They throw earth over your head and it is finished for ever (Pascal).64
That your death may not be a blasphemy against man and
the earth, my friends: that is what I beg from the honey of your soul. In your
death, your spirit and your virtue should still glow like a sunset glow around
the earth: otherwise yours is a bad death. Thus I want to die myself, that you
friends may love the earth more for my sake; and I want to become earth again,
that I may have peace in her who bore me (Nietzsche).65
One aphorism in the series can come before or after the
other, before and after the other, each can survive the other (Derrida).66
May we not say of death that in it, in a sense, we
discover the negative analogue of a miracle (Bataille).67
©
Jon Baldwin
In Memoriam: Dave Charlton, 1967-2007
Endnotes
1 Derek Attridge. “Introduction:
Aphorism Countertime” in Derek Attridge (Editor) Jacques Derrida Acts of
Literature. New York and London: Routledge 1992:415.
2 For
Durkheim religious sociology was to be considered the “corner stone” of social
theory. This is typified in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (Émile Durkheim.
The
Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Oxford University Press, 2001). From
the sociological perspective there is no such thing or essence called Religion,
but only religious phenomena incorporated into systems called religions.
Durkheim emphasised the difference between the sacred and the profane (Ibid.:36).
Religion is characterised by this classification and distinction. Religion is
further considered as the “administration of the scared”.
The rituals and
symbolism of religion, for Durkheim, should be thought of as social not
spiritual:
“this
reality – which mythologies have represented in so many different forms but
which is the objective, universal, and eternal cause of those sui generis
sensations that make up the religious experience – is society” (Ibid.:313). Put
simply “the idea of society is the soul of religion” (Ibid.:314).
Durkheim’s
“radical” sociology and use of religion include the etymological sense of
religion as religare, re-ligature, re-bounding, re-connecting,
re-bonding, as well as relegere, from legere, harvest, gather . A
characteristic feature of modernity is disenchantment, a growth of secularity,
and the eradication of the social bond. Given that religion is social it can
possibly be seen to be a bringing of the social together. Fredric Jameson notes
that Durkheim views religion “as a symbolic affirmation of human relationships”
(Fredric Jameson. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially
Symbolic Act. New York: Cornell University Press, 1981: 293). Religion can
be a social bond insofar as it can be a disciplinary and moral force, a form of
‘collective effervescence’, a revitalising factor, and a cause of euphoria.
Durkheim asserts that in modernity society finds itself in a position whereby
“the old ancient gods grow old or die, and others are not yet born” (Émile Durkheim.
The
Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Oxford University Press, 2001: 322).
This diminishing of religion as a traditional cohesive social bond, and lack of
an entity constituting a new cohesiveness necessarily has a detrimental effect
on the social bond. Religion as a bond might find itself replaced (albeit with
essential ingredients missing) with phenomena such as individualism,
nationalism or fascism, or cultural activity (the carnival, or certain social,
sporting, musical or aesthetic events). Marcel Mauss contributes to this broad
scheme as is evident in his comment from the study of sacrifice:
In our view, everything that
characterises society for the group and its members is conceived as sacred. If
the gods are leaving the temple and becoming profane, each at their appointed
hour, by contrast we now see human but social things – the nation, property,
work, the human person – enter it one after another. (Henri Hubert and Marcel
Mauss. Sacrifice: Its Nature and Function. London: Cohen and West, 1964:
76)
Daniel
Bell, following this notion of a decline of religion, writes that, “[t]o say,
then, that ‘God is dead’ is, in effect, to say that the social bonds have
snapped and that society is dead” (Bell in John O’Neill. ‘Religion and
Postmodernism: The Durkheimian Bond in Bell and Jameson’. Theory, Culture
and Society, 5 (2-3): 1988: 495). The response of Bell, as well as others
such as Fredric Jameson and Baudrillard, O’Neill writes, is to “resort to a
Durkheimian lament over the dissolution of the social bond” (Ibid.:498).
The subsequent strategy, for Bell at least, is “to call for a renewal of
religious symbolism to restore the social bond against postmodern values” (Ibid.:
493). In essence, this is one import of Durkheim’s sociology. This Durkheimian
context of Baudrillard is emphasised by Gane (Mike Gane. Baudrillard:
Critical and Fatal Theory. London: Routledge, 1991) and Merrin (William
Merrin. ‘Television is killing the art of symbolic exchange: Baudrillard’s
theory of communication’. Theory, Culture and Society, 16 (3) (1999):
119-140), and it should be noted that for Wernick religion
should be considered the “missing transcendental” in Baudrillard (Andrew
Wernick. “Post-Marx: theological themes in Baudrillard’s America”. Shadow of
Spirit: Postmodernism and Religion. Philippa Berry and Andrew Wernick (Editors).
London: Routledge, 1992: 69).
3 In an
essay in a collection of philosophical eulogies for Jacques Derrida, Adieu
Derrida,
Hillis Miller, former Yale School colleague of Derrida, reveals that the last
seminars given by Derrida before his death concerned a passage from Daniel
Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Crusoe discovers “the Print of a Man’s naked
Foot on the Shore” (Defoe) and is frightened, apprehensive, but also briefly
calmed down by the idea that it might have been his own forgotten print.
However the unlikelihood of this only spooks him more. Crusoe is haunted by
what will prove to be Friday’s trace; a mark which he had thought was his very
own. Derridean themes abound here: iterability, repetition, trace, specter, and
so on. Hillis Miller provides an apposite description of Derrida’s method of
discussion and analysis here as being “like a great Charlie Parker riff” (J.
Hillis Miller “The Late Derrida” in
Costas Douzinas (Editor) Adieu
Derrida. Hampshire and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007: 136),
“repetition with variation” (Ibid.:139), “digression or deviation” (Ibid.:140),
as regaling a “story about a story about a story” (Ibid.:135), with
“word play, exuberant hyperbole, and constantly self-topping inventiveness” (Ibid.:136).
The reason for this, Hillis Miller opines, is that “talking, writing
philosophy, writing criticism, writing poetry, are different forms of the
postponement of death” (Ibid.:148). This is the consideration of death
under the aegis of
différance. Hillis Miller can,
“without hesitation” (Ibid.:144), assert that the late seminars are
Derrida’s unique reflection upon and expression of Heidegger’s definition of
man (or Dasein) as “Being toward death”.
Hillis
Miller notes that Derrida’s reading of Robinson Crusoe has “one
important peculiarity” (Ibid.:140) in that it focuses primarily upon
Crusoe’s solitary experiences: Crusoe’s relation to himself. Derrida’s Crusoe
exemplifies “the solitude of Dasein in the world” (Ibid.:140).
This orientation of Derrida’s reading of Crusoe omits themes such as the
enslavement of Friday, European racism, colonial exploitation, ethnocentrism,
Puritan morality, the role of Crusoe as exemplary Protestant capitalist and homo
economicus, J.M. Coetzee’s inversion in Foe (1986), or even Giles
Deleuze’s reading of the “boring” novel in which one desires Friday’s
cannibalistic consumption of Crusoe. Derrida’s selection, reworking and
emphasis upon Heideggerian solitude, anguish, and the isolated individual
rather than, for instance, the social, cultural, or political is somewhat
typical of his oeuvre. Baudrillard suggests that these “modern philosophies of
‘being-towards-death’” (Jean Baudrillard. Symbolic Exchange and Death.
New York: Sage, 1993: 149), this type of “anguish of death as a test of truth”
(Ibid.:190) is actually a result of the system, integrated and
complicit. It offers little that is radical, it is “in relation to a system
that is itself mortifying, a vertiginous escalation, a challenge which is in
fact a profound obedience” (Ibid.:190). The collection Adieu Derrida
looks
at the possible fate(s) of Derrida’s thought. As with Baudrillard’s fate(s), I
hope that the singularity of their thought be pronounced, that we say of them
what promoter Bill Graham said of the Grateful Dead: “They’re not the best
at what they do, they’re the only ones that do what they do”. Worse case
scenario would be the reification of their thought.
4
Jean Baudrillard. Symbolic Exchange
and Death. New York: Sage, 1993:131.
5
Jean Baudrillard. Symbolic Exchange
and Death. New York: Sage, 1993:128.
6 Mauss
asserts the following of prayer:
Indefinitely supple, it has taken the
most varied forms, by turns adoring and coercive, humble and threatening, dry
and full of imagery, immutable and variable, mechanical and mental. It has filled
the most varied roles: here it is a brusque demand, there an order, elsewhere a
contract, an act of faith, a confession, a supplication, an act of praise, a
hosanna. (Marcel Mauss. On Prayer. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books,
2003:21)
One
of Mauss’s suggestions in his study is that there is a necessary connection
between a given practice of prayer and a given society and religion. Cultural
phenomena necessarily reflect the society in which it takes place. Mauss charts
the movement from the primitive to the modern in the practice of prayer. “In
the beginning, only prayers that are communal or have strictly communal form
are to be found” (Ibid.:35). Indeed originally and for the primitives
“the idea of individual prayer simply did not even exist” (Ibid.:35). On
the one hand there were the elementary forms of prayer exemplified by the
Indigenous Australians. In many cases these consisted of a melodic and rhythmic
formula, which was often reduced to an indefinitely repeated collective social
chant occasionally accompanied with dancing. In contrast is the private,
individualised, internal, singular, solemn prayer of today. Mauss writes that
prayer is “[a]t first strictly collective, said in common or at least according
to forms rigidly fixed by the religious group”, it then develops and “becomes
the domain of the individual’s free converse with God.” (Ibid.: 24) This
change and so-called ‘progress’ or ‘evolution’ of religion, prayer and society
reveals a move towards increasing individualisation: “the inner god of the most
advanced religions is also the god of individuals” (Ibid.:155). Mauss
wishes to reverse the received evolutionary analysis of prayer: “Instead of
seeing in individual prayer the principle behind collective prayer, we are
making the latter the principle behind the former” (Ibid.:36). Broadly
speaking, as in Durkheim’s study of religion, a social and communal practice is
eroding and the individual is emerging.
In
modernity, prayer can also become simply a thing, an empty ritual. The sacred
can turn profane. In Mauss’s great study of exchange the sacred gift is
supplanted by the profane commodity. Prayer can become reified: “Very often,
prayers which were once wholly spiritual become simple recitations without any
kind of personal content. They sink to the level of a manual rite. One simply
moves the lips rather than moving the limbs.” (Ibid.:26) This is also
the case with constantly repeated prayers in a language not understood, or in
formulae which has lost all meaning, where the words are so dated as to be
incomprehensible. These are all “striking examples” of the “regression” of
prayer (Ibid.:26). Further, claims Mauss, is the possible reification
and degeneration of ‘spiritual’ prayer to the fetish of “mere material object”.
The rosary, the prayer-tree, the prayer-wheel, the amulet, phylacteries,
miraculous medals, scapulars, ex-votos, and so forth, are examples of
‘materialised prayer’: “Prayer in religions whose dogmas have become detached
from all fetishism, becomes itself a fetish.” (Ibid.:26) The distance
prayer has travelled is marked by Žižek’s note on Derrida’s reflections on
prayer: “not only [do] atheists also pray, but today, it is perhaps only
atheists who truly pray. By refusing to address God as a positive entity, they
silently address the pure Messianic Otherness.” (Slavoj Žižek. “A Plea for a
Return to Différance (with a Minor Pro Domo Sua)” in Costas
Douzinas (Editor) Adieu Derrida. Hampshire and New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2007:114)
7 Derrida’s aporia of mourning is
somewhat apt here: “success fails” and “failure succeeds” (Jacques Derrida. The
Work of Mourning. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press,
2003:34-35). Successful mourning would be an affront to the dead, a forgetting
of the dead, therefore failure to complete mourning, is in this way, somewhat
of a tribute to and remembrance of the dead. However this aporia should not be
regarded or presented as ahistorical. It is not how mourning has always been
experienced. Baudrillard notes that an aporia such as this is specific only to
our culture today (Jean Baudrillard. Fragments: Cool Memories III.
London: Verso, 1997:128). Individual mourning and its internal complexities
have supplanted collective mourning as a social practice. Does one, as
Derrida’s discussion indicates, decide to mourn or not? Does one decide or even
question the success or failure of mourning? Does this aporia ever enter into
the empirical practice of mourning? Or instead, should one say of mourning that
it “goes without saying”? These are the type of critical questions Pierre
Bourdieu asks of the paradoxes Derrida offers. These aporias are artificial,
Bourdieu opines, because they rely “on the logic of
consciousness and the free choice of an isolated individual” (Pierre Bourdieu.
Practical Reason: On the Theory of
Action. Cambridge:
Polity Press, 1994:95).
The
problem for Bourdieu is that this individual is abstracted from their social
habitus.
8
Jean Baudrillard. Symbolic Exchange
and Death. New York: Sage, 1993:134.
9
Jean Baudrillard. Symbolic Exchange
and Death. New York: Sage, 1993:156.
10 Jean Baudrillard. Cool Memories V:
2000-2004. Cambridge and Massachusetts: Polity Press, 2006:10.
11 Aphorism 39. Jacques Derrida. “Aphorism
Countertime” in Derek Attridge (Editor) Jacques Derrida Acts of Literature.
New York and London: Routledge 1992: 433.
12
Jean Baudrillard. Symbolic Exchange
and Death. New York: Sage, 1993:185.
13 Aphorism 10. Jacques Derrida. “Aphorism
Countertime” in Derek Attridge (Editor) Jacques Derrida Acts of Literature.
New York and London: Routledge 1992:418.
14 Jean Baudrillard. Cool Memories V:
2000-2004. Cambridge and Massachusetts: Polity Press, 2006:103.
15 Maxim 2.
Friedrich Nietzsche. A Nietzsche Reader. Harmondsworth, Middlesex:
Penguin Books, 1977:15.
16
Jean Baudrillard. Symbolic Exchange
and Death. New York: Sage, 1993:131.
17 Aphorism 2. Jacques Derrida. “Aphorism
Countertime” in Derek Attridge (Editor) Jacques Derrida Acts of Literature.
New York and London: Routledge 1992:416.
18
Jean Baudrillard. Symbolic Exchange
and Death. New York: Sage, 1993:131.
19 Maxim 26.
La Rochefoucauld. Maxims. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1981:
40. La Rochefoucauld’s ‘Reflections or Aphorisms and Moral Maxims’ published in
1665, are exemplary pieces. Pierre Bourdieu suggests they express “an extreme
lucidity about the subtleties of symbolic exchange” (Pierre Bourdieu.
‘Marginalia – Some Additional Notes on the Gift’ in Alan Schrift (Editor) The
Logic of the Gift – Toward an Ethic of Generosity. London: Routledge, 1997:
237). The collection is prefaced by La Rochefoucauld’s core aphorism ‘Our
virtues are usually only vices in disguise’. Later we find Maxim 517: ‘We are
often prevented from appreciating aphorisms proving the falseness of the
virtues by our excessive readiness to believe that in our case these are
genuine.’ (La Rochefoucauld. Maxims. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin
Books, 1981:106.)
20
Jean Baudrillard. Symbolic Exchange
and Death. New York: Sage, 1993:180.
21
Jean Baudrillard. Symbolic Exchange
and Death. New York: Sage, 1993:126.
22 Maxim 9.
Friedrich Nietzsche. A Nietzsche Reader. Harmondsworth, Middlesex:
Penguin Books, 1977:20.
23
Jean Baudrillard. Symbolic Exchange
and Death. New York: Sage, 1993:176.
24 Jean Baudrillard. Cool Memories V:
2000-2004. Cambridge and Massachusetts: Polity Press, 2006:8.
25 Maxim 142. La Rochefoucauld. Maxims.
Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1981:55.
26
Jean Baudrillard. Symbolic Exchange
and Death. New York: Sage, 1993:127. With the modern eradication and hiding of death, it
appears everywhere. “But we know what these hidden places signify: the factory
no longer exists because labour is everywhere; the prison no longer exists
because arrests and confinements pervade social space-time; the asylum no
longer exists because psychological control and therapy have been generalised
and become banal; the school no longer exists because every strand of social
progress is shot through with discipline and pedagogical training…The cemetery
no longer exists because modern cities have entirely taken over their function:
they are ghost towns, cities of death.” (Ibid.:127) Benjamin Noys has
recently written a book with the title The Culture of Death. Here Noys
explores our exposure to death in contemporary culture: War, genocide, famine,
the ‘death of God’, AIDS, environmental disaster, Auschwitz, Hiroshima,
televised public autopsies, life-support systems, residential and nursing
homes. Banal death, zombie-films of the 1960s and 1970s, television
pathologists ‘reading’ the corpse, death that is ‘unknown, unhonoured, and
unremarked’ (Norman Mailer), the threat of terrorism, death as spectacle, the
transport crash, celebrity suicide and rock-star drug overdose. Death as ‘brute
fact’, the political economy of death, and most significantly, the increasing
union of death and power given developments in techno-medical and political
control over our bodies. Given a century of the political organisation of mass
extermination, we are subjected to “the reality and visibility of the threat of
death on an industrial scale” (Benjamin Noys. The Culture of Death.
London and New York: Berg, 2005: 3). Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg has noted
that ‘Never before in history had people been killed on an assembly-line basis’
and Paul Virilio suggests that the Twentieth century was the century of the
‘mass production of corpses’. What is increasingly apparent today, Noys
suggests, is the political dimension of death.
Noys
states that “[s]ome of us are more exposed to death than others, and even the
new forms of our exposure to death often tend to follow the usual vectors of
power: class, ‘race’, gender and sexuality.” (Ibid.:150) Death then, is
perhaps not the great equaliser after all. And of course, one should not just
interpret death; the point is to change (our exposure to) it.
27 Aphorism 6. Jacques Derrida. “Aphorism
Countertime” in Derek Attridge (Editor) Jacques Derrida Acts of Literature.
New York and London: Routledge 1992:416.
28
Jean Baudrillard. Symbolic Exchange
and Death. New York: Sage, 1993:147.
29 Jean Baudrillard. Cool Memories V:
2000-2004. Cambridge and Massachusetts: Polity Press, 2006:7.
30 Maxim 612. La Rochefoucauld. Maxims.
Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1981:121.
31 Jean Baudrillard. Cool Memories V:
2000-2004. Cambridge and Massachusetts: Polity Press, 2006:31.
32
Jean Baudrillard. Symbolic Exchange
and Death. New York: Sage, 1993:
82.
33 Friedrich Nietzsche. Thus Spoke
Zarathustra. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1969:67.
34
Jean Baudrillard. Symbolic Exchange
and Death. New York: Sage, 1993:126.
35 Jean Baudrillard. Cool Memories V:
2000-2004. Cambridge and Massachusetts: Polity Press, 2006:10.
36 Georges Bataille. The Unfinished
System of Nonknowledge. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001:254.
37
Jean Baudrillard. Symbolic Exchange
and Death. New York: Sage, 1993:164.
38 Aphorism 22. Jacques Derrida. “Aphorism
Countertime” in Derek Attridge (Editor) Jacques Derrida Acts of Literature.
New York and London: Routledge 1992:426.
39
Jean Baudrillard. Symbolic Exchange
and Death. New York: Sage, 1993:184.
40 Friedrich Nietzsche. Thus Spoke
Zarathustra. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books , 1969:67.
41
Jean Baudrillard. Symbolic Exchange
and Death. New York: Sage, 1993:186.
42
Jean Baudrillard. Symbolic Exchange
and Death. New York: Sage, 1993:146.
43 Maxim 8.
Friedrich Nietzsche. A Nietzsche Reader. Harmondsworth, Middlesex:
Penguin Books, 1977:20.
44 Jean Baudrillard. Cool Memories V:
2000-2004. Cambridge and Massachusetts: Polity Press, 2006:1.
45
Jean Baudrillard. Symbolic Exchange
and Death. New York: Sage, 1993:126.
46 From Maxim 504. La Rochefoucauld. Maxims.
Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1981:102.
47
Jean Baudrillard. Symbolic Exchange
and Death. New York: Sage, 1993:146.
48 Aphorism 8. Jacques Derrida. “Aphorism
Countertime” in Derek Attridge (Editor) Jacques Derrida Acts of Literature.
New York and London: Routledge 1992:417.
49 Georges Bataille. The Unfinished
System of Nonknowledge. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001:
245.
50 Jean Baudrillard. Cool Memories V:
2000-2004. Cambridge and Massachusetts: Polity Press, 2006:27.
51 Aphorism 14. Jacques Derrida. “Aphorism
Countertime” in Derek Attridge (Editor) Jacques Derrida Acts of Literature.
New York and London: Routledge 1992:421.
52 Maxim 23. La Rochefoucauld. Maxims.
Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1981:40.
53 This was the content of a note found
inside a book given to Jacques Derrida. The context is a discussion regarding
the mourning of Roland Barthes. Derrida remarks upon the coincidence of finding
this note found, by chance, twenty-four years after it was given. The donor
said of death “It will happen to me soon.” (Jacques Derrida. The Work of
Mourning. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2003: 64)
and Derrida recalls, it did. With regard to an aphorism, a death sentence, a
truth on the horizon for us all, it is exemplary.
54 Georges Bataille. The Unfinished
System of Nonknowledge. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001:223.
55 Aphorism 11. Jacques Derrida.
‘Aphorism Countertime’ in Derek Attridge (Editor) Jacques Derrida Acts of
Literature. New York and London: Routledge 1992:419.
56
Jean Baudrillard. Symbolic Exchange
and Death. New York: Sage, 1993:151. Baudrillard had just quoted Freud: “The theory of
the drives is so to say our mythology. Drives are mythical entities,
magnificent in their indefiniteness.”
57 Jacques Derrida. The Work of
Mourning. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2003:15.
58
Jean Baudrillard. Symbolic Exchange
and Death. New York: Sage, 1993:129.
59
Jean Baudrillard. Symbolic Exchange
and Death. New York: Sage, 1993:132.
60
Jean Baudrillard. Symbolic Exchange
and Death. New York: Sage, 1993:132.
61 Maxim 524. La Rochefoucauld. Maxims.
Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1981:107.
62
Jean Baudrillard. Symbolic Exchange
and Death. New York: Sage, 1993:175.
63
Jean Baudrillard. Symbolic Exchange
and Death. New York: Sage, 1993:182.
64 Blaise Pascal. Pensées.
Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books 1975:82.
65 Friedrich Nietzsche. Thus Spoke
Zarathustra. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books , 1969:99.
66 Aphorism 9. Jacques Derrida. “Aphorism
Countertime” in Derek Attridge (Editor) Jacques Derrida Acts of Literature.
New York and London: Routledge 1992:417.
67 Georges Bataille. The Unfinished
System of Nonknowledge. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001:273.
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