God forbade...must reading!

Jean Baudrillard






   Baudrillard unleashes his full bag of rhetorical tricks and philosophical analysis to attempt to maintain hypotheses in the face of the dramatic events of 1989-1991, which he claims are in fact “weak events,” that events are still on strike, that history has indeed disappeared. He continues to argue that modernity as a historical epoch is over, with its political conflicts and upheavals, its innovations and revolutions, its autonomous and creative subject, its myths of progress, democracy, enlightenment, and so on. These myths, these strong ideas, are exhausted, he claims, and so describes a postmodern era of banal eclecticism, inertial implosion, and eternal recycling of the same become defining features.




  Baudrillard argues that there are three levels of simulation, where the first level is an obvious copy of reality and the second level is a copy so good that it blurs the boundaries between reality and representation. The third level is one which produces a reality of its own without being based upon any particular bit of the real world. The best example is probably “virtual reality”, which is a world generated by computer languages or code. Virtual reality is a world generated by mathematical models, abstract entities. It is this third level of simulation, where the model anticipates the constructed world, that Baudrillard calls the hyperreal, concerned for its growing prevalence in our world.







   The principle of reversibility, which is also the one of magic and seduction, requires that all that has been produced must be reconfigured, all that appears must disappear… It could almost be the sign of an original reversibility of things. One could say that before the world was produced,  it exists by virtue of having been seduced. A strange precession, that hangs over reality to this day: the world has been refuted and led astray from the beginning... This original deviation is truly demonic. The giddiness of simulation, the satanic ravishing of the eccentricity of the beginning and the end opposes itself to the utopia of the Last Judgement. Our entire moral anthropology, spanning from Christianity to Rousseau, original sin to original innocence, is false. Original sin must be replaced, not by final salvation, nor innocence, but by original seduction… To evoke seduction is to further our destiny as an object. To touch upon the object. To rouse the principle of Evil. Seduction is, therefore, inescapable, and appearance always victorious. Of course we are witnessing a proliferation of systems of meaning and interpretation which seek to clear the path for a rational operation of the world... At the same time it is evident that all these systems are prevented from producing anything based on truth or objectivity. Deep down everything is already there, in this evil reversal – the impossibility for all systems to be founded on truth, to break open the secret and reveal whatever it may be. The discourse of truth is quite simply impossible. It eludes itself. Everything eludes itself, everything scoffs at its own truth, seduction renders everything elusive. The fury to unveil the truth, to get at the naked truth, the one which haunts all discourses of interpretation, the obscene rage to uncover the secret, is proportionate to the impossibility of ever achieving this. The more one nears truth, the more it retreats towards the omega point, and the greater becomes the rage to get at it. But this rage, this fury, only bears witness to the eternity of seduction and to the impossibility of mastering it.



  “the only genuine function of the intellect is to embrace contradictions, to exercise irony, to take the opposite tack, to exploit rifts and reversibility – even to fly in the face of the lawful and the factual”.



Jean Baudrillard

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