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A review by casparb
America by Jean Baudrillard
4.0
People don't talk so much about this one but it's absolutely gorgeous. Baudrillard really shows off as a writer here, and so much talent comes through even in translation that it's a tragedy he's not better known in this regard. This text isn't explicitly philosophical in the mode of his other writings. But I think I prefer it this way - beautiful, reflective, and just enough to glimpse at his ideas articulated elsewhere.
'The marathon is a form of demonstrative suicide, suicide as advertising: it is running to show you are capable of getting every last drop of energy out of yourself, to prove it . . . to prove what? That you are capable of finishing. Graffiti carry the same message. They simply say: I’m so-and-so and I exist! They are free publicity for existence. Do we continually have to prove to ourselves that we exist? A strange sign of weakness, harbinger of a new fanaticism for a faceless performance, endlessly self-evident.'
It's not travel writing so much as sensation writing. I don't think I've ever encountered descriptions of the desert quite like this:
'But to understand it, you have to take to the road, to that travelling which achieves what Virilio calls the aesthetics of disappearance. For the mental desert form expands before your very eyes, and this is the purified form of social desertification. Disaffection finds its pure form in the barrenness of speed. All that is cold and dead in desertification or social enucleation rediscovers its contemplative form here in the heat of the desert. Here in the transversality of the desert and the irony of geology, the transpolitical finds its generic, mental space. The inhumanity of our ulterior, asocial, superficial world immediately finds its aesthetic form here, its ecstatic form. For the desert is simply that: an ecstatic critique of culture, an ecstatic form of disappearance.'
Would be an excellent introduction to B's work also.
'The marathon is a form of demonstrative suicide, suicide as advertising: it is running to show you are capable of getting every last drop of energy out of yourself, to prove it . . . to prove what? That you are capable of finishing. Graffiti carry the same message. They simply say: I’m so-and-so and I exist! They are free publicity for existence. Do we continually have to prove to ourselves that we exist? A strange sign of weakness, harbinger of a new fanaticism for a faceless performance, endlessly self-evident.'
It's not travel writing so much as sensation writing. I don't think I've ever encountered descriptions of the desert quite like this:
'But to understand it, you have to take to the road, to that travelling which achieves what Virilio calls the aesthetics of disappearance. For the mental desert form expands before your very eyes, and this is the purified form of social desertification. Disaffection finds its pure form in the barrenness of speed. All that is cold and dead in desertification or social enucleation rediscovers its contemplative form here in the heat of the desert. Here in the transversality of the desert and the irony of geology, the transpolitical finds its generic, mental space. The inhumanity of our ulterior, asocial, superficial world immediately finds its aesthetic form here, its ecstatic form. For the desert is simply that: an ecstatic critique of culture, an ecstatic form of disappearance.'
Would be an excellent introduction to B's work also.