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Baudrillard and Heidegger

[Cross-posted from Ghost in the Wire]

I think that one of the fundamental points of confusion in Heidegger's Being and Time comes when, in analyzing why it is that human beings so often ignore their being or Dasein, choosing the crowd over resolute and authentic existence, thereby voiding the Eigen in Eigentlichkeit.  Heidegger characterizes it this way: Dasein is "dispersed into the 'they' and must find itself."  This dispersal is, for Heidegger, part of the existential structure of Dasein, and as a consequence Heidegger offers no substantive discussion of the means or methods of this dispersal, at least not back in 1927 (arguably the "turn" towards historicity and the forgetting of Being may offer an explanation for it, but that comes some years later).

I think that one productive way to address this question is to consider the overall project of Being and Time, which is really an analytic of the subjectivity of Dasein, even if it distances itself from subjectivity as understood in Western metaphysics.  What I mean is that the investigation of Dasein starts by investigating Dasein itself as the subject of the analysis, and so there remains a bit of an emphasis on the subjectal determination of the world, which I think you can see in the discussion of "thrownness" and the "call of conscience."  Again this changes later, as Heidegger explicitly admits this as a limitation of his early work, altering his analytical emphasis away from Dasein in his On Time and Being, and elsewhere segues from the "call of conscience" to the "call of being."  Still, without necessarily following Heidegger's turn, we can look at this "error" as a productive one.

To do so, we can begin to think a brief bit about Walter Benjamin, whose work had a considerable emphasis on Baudrillard's thought.

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Baudrillard Dies

He was 77.  That particular generation of thinkers gets thinner every month, it seems.  French announcement can be found here, with an write-up or two below the picture, though it will likely be a day or two before the really interesting obits start appearing. Of course, that won't stop the sea of idiotic and malicious sentiment reminding us just how stupid Baudrillard was; that sentiment ends up being rather quick in its delivery, at least judging from the recent reaction to Derrida's death.

Screw Your Mother

Baudrillard has an interesting piece in the latest New Left Review.  What struck me is how it seems to share a theme that Jodi just pointed out regarding Bartleby's "I prefer not to."   Both point to a fundamental refusal:

But France, or Europe, no longer has the initiative. It no longer controls events, as it did for centuries, but is at the mercy of a succession of unforeseeable blow-backs. Those who deplore the ideological bankruptcy of the West should recall that ‘God smiles at those he sees denouncing evils of which they are the cause’. If the explosion of the banlieues is thus directly linked to the world situation, it is also—a fact which is strangely never discussed—connected to another recent episode, solicitously occluded and misrepresented in just the same way: the No in the eu Constitutional referendum. Those who voted No without really knowing why—perhaps simply because they did not wish to play the game into which they had so often been trapped; because they too refused to be integrated into the wondrous Yes of a ‘ready for occupancy’ Europe—their No was the voice of those jettisoned by the system of representation: exiles too, like the immigrants themselves, from the process of socialization. There was the same recklessness, the same irresponsibility in the act of scuppering the eu as in the young immigrants’ burning of their own neighbourhoods, their own schools; like the blacks in Watts and Detroit in the 1960s. Many now live, culturally and politically, as immigrants in a country which can no longer offer them a definition of national belonging. They are disaffiliated...

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the stakes of simulation

At the risk of drawing overly simplistic lines between the ritual or pagan and the modern world, one might say that Shakespeare scholar, controversial thinker and Catholic philosopher René Girard* identifies a crucial lack in our contemporary relation to an apocalyptic horizon. There has arguably always been such a relation, and perhaps necessarily so, but whereas before entire social groups participated in organized ritual re-enactments of 'the worst', today we are left with, well, CNN and FOX, or an endlessly thematized and sensationalized, yet ultimately hollow and unsatisfying, disembodied simulation of such stakes.

Yet simulation of any kind is never without its concomitant dangers, specifically the danger to inspire real violence. This would seem a precarious line. And although the lines separating the ritual from the real have never been pure, today in this age increasingly permeated by the so-called hyperreal, and combined with an unsustainable market which is forever (and with some serious help) in denial of its own mounting internal fragility, the stakes of such danger is arguably unprecedented. As marketably successful as his theory may be, one wishes that Baudrillard (though others would defend him) sometimes took more pains to emphasize the severity of these risks. In any case, I think Girard is an important thinker, and so I have reproduced in part an intriguing interview–more revealing perhaps than the LeMonde one on"9/11"–below.

* Significantly perhaps, Girard is one of those philosophers who claims that philosophy is over, to be replaced by a new science and a return to religion.

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